The Worst People in the World - by Hunter S. Thompson

The Worst People in the World

Memo to my editor: It was the morning after Election Day when I finally made the decision to apply for the journalist-in-space program. I stayed up all night and drove down to the post office at dawn to pick up the official application form. There was only one press seat, according to the people at NASA, and the competition would definitely be fierce.

Walter Cronkite was the natural choice, they said, but he was far too old for the weight training and his objectivity was suspect.

Ten years ago, or more, Walter had taken a profoundly personal interest in whatever he perceived at the time to be the "U.S. space program," and the boys at NASA had long since adopted him as a very valuable ally and in fact sort of a team mascot. Walter was a true believer: He was "on the team," as they say in places like Lynchburg, Va., and he was also the most trusted man in America.

I'm waiting for the phone call from the politicians of NASA. I know it will come at night. Most nights are slow in the politics business, but only lawyers complain. Never answer your phone after midnight, they say. Other people's nightmares are not billable time, and morning will come soon enough. Leave it alone, if you can; the slow nights are the good ones — because you know in your nerves that every once in a while a fast one will come along, and it will jerk you up by the roots.

There are many rooms in the mansion, and weirdness governs in most of them. Politics is not just elections, and telephones are not just for reaching out and touching someone.

If the telephone call doesn't come from NASA and they send Cronkite instead of me into space, then it will be time to deal with my notion of taking Vanessa Williams to Johannesburg for a casual Saturday night of dinner and dancing, which the Examiner contemptuously rejected for what I took to be blind-dumb reasons with roots in a classic psycho-expenso syndrome.

Which is not bad thinking, for a comptroller, but it is going to get in the way if we ever plan to start justifying the Examiner's "next generation" format and the oft-implied promise of "a thinking man's newspaper" for the '80s.

That would be a major move in any decade, but in this one it makes a certain amount of at least theoretical sense because we have what looks to me Hke a genuine Power Vacuum on our side.

The Washington Post jumped The New York Times in the '70s, mainly on Watergate, but the chaos of success and the natural human weirdness of life at the Post (Janet Cooke, Bob Woodward, etc.) led to a kind of dysfunctional stalemate that is still a big factor in contemporary journalism, where the prime movers now are in television.

"Sixty Minutes" can rock your boat worse than the Times and the Post combined, and minute-to-minute judgments made at the CNN news desk in Atlanta have more effect on morning newspaper headlines all over the country than anything else in the industry except maybe a five-bell emergency bulletin on the AP wire.

The only other newspapers that have caused any functional excitement in the business are the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe, and I think we should pay attention to both of them. They are nothing alike, on the surface, but in some ways they share the same giddy instincts that we are just beginning to flirt with.

They are both stockpiling talent at top-dollar rates, and planning to amortize their investment by reselling their talent — and the leverage that supposedly comes with it — via national or even international syndication arrangements, which in theory is not bad business. It harks back to the basic difference between "vertical" and "horizontal" corporations: i.e.. Ford and General Motors.


Jesus! And all I wanted to do here was make a pitch for going to South Africa, where TV cameras have suddenly become useless and print journalism has been elevated, by default, to a bizarre and critical level.

I assume you've been following these ominous developments on TV — (as I have, thanks to my recently installed TVRO "Earth Station") — which have effectively shut down all coverage of public violence in South Africa by our colleagues in the video press. The South African government has made it punishable by up to 19 years in prison (that's PRISON, in SOUTH AFRICA) for using a TV camera or even a sound recorder at any scene of violence.

It is an impossible situation for the kinds of people charged with TV coverage in what amounts, now, to a war zone. They are the storm troopers of journalism, for good or ill. And in the main, they are very tough-minded neo-dimensional people whose only Hnk to the mandates of traditional journalism is to get the story and get the story out.

That is going to cause them trouble in South Africa. It is like telling fish to stay out of water, and the Afrikaners are serious. They are universally recognized — even among non-political travelers — to be 

The Worst People in the World.

November 11, 1985