Journalism & the Connection with Drink, Depression, & Dissipation--CJR

"Should we care about a reporter's personal problems?

• Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin answer with a burped, "Hell, yes." For over a decade, the two ex-hard drinkers and legendary newsmen have been saying that print owes its readership woes to a dead corporate air in the newsroom. "Everything's more restrained and we've lost a certain edge," Hamill told the Denver Post in 1995. Meanwhile, Breslin knows what's missing: "It's the drinking."

Psychologists have shown that neurotics can make good journalists when they project their inner doubts and dissatisfactions onto the world. This is the energy behind investigative reporting and the source of journalism's vaunted distrust of power, the argument goes.

• "Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers," Breslin says.

For good or ill, journalism and neurosis may be inextricably caught up together, tangled in the timeless conundrum of what comes first. Does the profession break talented people with steady pressure, severe constraints, and public censure for missteps?

• Or does it attract broken talent who seek unstable schedules, extreme experiences, and the megalomaniacal pleasure of their name in print? At a glance, today's journalists may appear to be clean and industrious. After all, it's no longer acceptable, let alone glorious, to self-destruct quite so publicly. But that doesn't mean the dissipated journalist is on the road to extinction.
• More likely, he's simply taken a private path, the whiskey bottle in the top drawer replaced by a pill bottle behind the family photo."

From the Columbia Journalism Review, 3/29/07, by Tony Dokoupil

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