By Tom Kelly
Editor and Publisher

The sound and fury of the collective American "press corps" throwing a self-righteous hissy fit about being made to wait 24 hours for the news of Vice President Dick Cheney's bad aim on a Texas quail hunt was about as educational as a bad-diaper drill at the local day nursery.

It's part of the reason I have all but stopped watching televison "news" of any kind--whether of the Unbiased Left or the Unbiased Right variety--and just one more proof that I am hopelessly out of touch with the modern scene, trapped in a long-since forgotten dimension of journalism wherein the First Commandment was Thou Shalt Go Out and Dig Up the Story. My heart bleeds to see those hard-working Washington-based slugs sitting en masse in The Briefing Room waiting to be spoon-fed the day's dose of B.S. from this or that official government "spokesman", so that they may preen their exquisite biliousness competing to ask the most unanswerable "Gotcha" question of the day. Or, worse yet, answering the call to a Press Conference, where a politician or a corporate shill dishes out a canned spiel about his/her/its latest gee-whiz banality.

My idea of torture would be to be kidnaped by a cabal of Swift Boat Veterans and John Kerry delegates, and forced, bound and gagged, to listen and watch 24 consecutive hours of The Beltway Boys, Chris Matthews "Hardball," Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Anderson Cooper, and any U.S. State Department press secretary, intermingled with recordings of The Rolling Stones, and chants by an Amazonian Achuar medicine man channeling aliens from the Pleiades. Right straight up the wall. I'd give up my grandchildren's birthright in a flash.

Am I in a cranky mood? Moi?

Where to find thoroughly written news these days? Little as you might think about it, The Wall Street Journal is probably tops, best researched and edited, and for what I know, pretty "straight," except for the editorial pages which obviously tilt conservative. In Louisiana, The Times Picayune in New Orleans, and the last remaining family-owned major daily that I know of in the world, The Advocate in Baton Rouge. Commercial televison? Gimme a break . . . Cable? Satellite? A vaster wasteland than Newton Minow ever dreamed. And even the "local" community weeklies are grouped up like little Gannetts, and with few exceptions, about as dry. One of the few venues for what remains of personal journalism is in the independently owned "little" papers, each seeking a niche in a special "market," some making bales of money, some hanging on by their eyelids.) I'll let you guess where the PWJ stands on that continuum.) Of course the internet is awash in a sea of "information," from ratty little 'blogs, to an infinity of commercial business sites, and many print media outlets which are of various quality. And there are too many really good magazines and books out there to spend time channel hopping among the confounding busy-ness of 900 channels of televised bilge.

I never thought I'd live to be nostalgic about the maddening journalistic exploits of a brassy investigative writer named John M. Hays, who needled me and a lot of my friends unmercifully in the "old days" up in Ruston, Louisiana. John Hays in his prime would have made the likes of Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer look like the stuffed shirts I sincerely believe them to be, and I hate to admit it even now. I haven't seen him in years, and I hear he has slowed some, but even now, he continues to produce a variety of the plain unvarnished writing that is more informative than some that I could name, but won't.

Shoot, I even miss old Dan Rather, clenched teeth, white knuckles, and all. As prickly as he was, and often melodramatic, he was serious about news, if nothing else.

I also call to mind my early experiences with a the late Mary Riser at the old Winn Parish Enterprise, who could coax a news story out of a turnip--and pushed me to do exactly that more times than I Would like to remember. And of my apprenticeship under George Larson who would wear you out sending you back for the detail you tried to fudge. I haven't always lived up to their standards in my own personal reporting ...but I have aggravated several young apprentices similarly. At least I learned that much.

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