Moreover, it seems inevitable. If the network evening news had an opinion, perhaps it would have an audience. Instead, that audience has strayed to a comedy fake news programs and outlets who have allowed the views of its spokesmen be front and center. It has also strayed to the internet, with its proliferation of blogs, newsgroups and whatnot. Bean counters will eventually order this news universe.
Occasionally all of this innovation strays into ugly areas. The audience can be counted on the wean itself off of celebrity vulgarities at any time something real takes place. That the trivial can overwhelm the public square in the absence of someone bleeding or something blowing up is nothing new. Ditto people pulling whacky stunts. Even during the heyday of controlled journalism, half of the copy rolling off the AP wire was advertising material contrived by public relations firms.
That said, however, some innovations should be stomped flat when sighted. Greatly deserving of a red card, as far as any type of writing is concerned, is the recent proliferation of Pulp Science. This is a stunt perpetrated as a form of investigative journalism. No harm to the public is being looked into. It is simply there to draw attention to the supposed journalist. That it should even be labeled as news is solely caused by the perpetrator designating himself as a journalist. When hierarchies are destroyed, credentials become pretense and the charlatans march in.
Pulp Science originated as a term in the pages of the ironic Spy magazine. The set up of the initial feature had the journalist posing a person who had been in an altercation with a cab driver. He had cut the driver off and caused an accident. The cabbie in turn had threatened the journalist’s life and had even sent him a goat’s head in the mail.
None of this was true. It was a ‘pretext’, a story one tells in order to gain information from the unsuspecting. In this case, our journalist was acting as if he had been scared witless by the fictional event. He then proceeds to go to a kung fu school in order to obtain “hands of death” as quickly as he can. The unscrupulous school operator bites, offering our journalist a pricey intensive crash course. The journalist then towed his line over to a gun store operator, fully expecting somewhat similar treatment. Maybe the guy would offer to sell him a flamethrower? Instead, the gun shop owner wisely deemphasized weapon choice and sagely advised our journalist to just practice his shooting.
As far as it went, it was amusing—something akin to the old Candid Camera. But even when labeled as strictly entertainment, as the recent movie with the supposedly foreign journalist was, there is something unseemly about running a sting on the general public.
It certainly has a very dark side. I recently ran across the journalism of a young lady who had set off to stalk a man at random. She picked out a bar full of people she didn’t like, found a man she would never be attracted to and made advances on him. After spending some time hearing how hot the target makes our journalist feel, this idiot guy agrees to do her. First she gives us a nice detail about her target’s inadequacies as the lover to a woman he has just met. After this splendid and scientifically meaningful encounter, our journalist then starts stalking him--as if it is her due for being such a mean spirited skank. This would qualify as journalism only if our reporter were a Nazi from another planet.
In some light, this can be said to be an outgrowth of Gonzo Journalism. In that form, a lot of sensual details are used in the description of the event being covered. In reality, except for the self-centered presentation, it’s little different from what Edward R. Morrow did during his on the scene reports of the WWII London Blitz. Should a Gonzo Journalist cover a sniper shooting at passersby from a water tower, it would be quite in form to for the reporter to describe his own sweat beading or the palpitations of his heart during the proceedings . Only in Pulp Science is it ok for the reporter to be the shooter on the water tower.
(Will Eisner once covered this idea in his Spirit series of comic books.)
When a person is in any way the catalyst of an event, whatever they are doing ceases to be reporting at all. That much of the information conveyed by such reporters has turned out to be less than accurate or completely fabricated should come as no surprise. I strongly suspect that the majority of what has been presented in the guise of Pulp Science has simply been written and not actually experienced. It’s not quite Big Lie Newsfiction, but it’s close. At least in Big Lie Newsfiction, there is a real event to be blown out of proportion, as the Steeger’s did with their invention of the Bermuda Triangle.
A recent fad in fiction has the Pulp Science mechanism trotted out to lend credence either to the author or his subject. Unfortunately, it is hard to be totally honest and interesting at the same time. Coming first to mind is the case of the man who wrote a novel about his experiences recovering from addiction, only to be exposed on Oprah for having a few telling details wrong. As a whole, the form tends to dress up subjective experiences with scientific trappings, as did the movie about the man who became unhealthy by eating only food from one specific restaurant chain. When you dig into it, his methods were hardly scientific. He had no control group and an experiment group of one. From what he presented, an equally valid contention could be made that simply the act of ruminating on the subject of food intake will make you fat, no matter whose food you eat.
This parade of dressed up self-abuse seems to have no end. Besides the above, people who eat garbage, people who spend no money, people who live Biblically and people who live only online have paraded before us in the guise of accomplished journalists. Other than making a spectacle of themselves, one wonders what it is that they have accomplished. In the whole, Pulp Science is a hack’s travelogue, plot-less as fiction and pointless as reporting.
Although I am all for knocking journalists off their high horses, the appropriation of the title needs to end somewhere. As for the Pulp Science method, it could not be any more of a dead end than it is: a lazy man’s excuse for the claiming of contrived authority. Even obscure subjects deserve better treatment. I can only hope the trend fades soon. Most of the talent-less proprietors of Pulp Science are scarcely writers, much less reporters. Even marking the trend as either journalism or fiction is giving it too much credit. Rather it is just another flavor of crap in the variety of crackpotism.
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