Absurdism and Post Structuralism as the News

I made the title as boring as possible so it would only appeal to English majors, which journalist Matt Taibbi happens to be. "One of the bold new voices in journalism," the whole of him (not just his voice) spoke Monday at Ithaca College.

To keep you interested, I'll intersperse random interesting facts throughout this entry.

What initially struck me about Taibbi was his openness. He didn't sugarcoat anything. He admitted to having a drug problem in Russia, said there were no profound moral reasons behind a lot of his life choices, and declared his favorite Johnny Depp movie was Edward Scissorhands. It's geting journalists to translate this honesty off the job to their writing that is the problem.

The majority of Taibbi's presentation focused on one independent media operation, The eXile, published for the American expatriate community in Russia. The rest was about his life and why Mainstream American media, which "is sometimes only tangentially [focused on] telling the truth" fails in the truth it does attempt to tell.

Fact: It is all subjective reality. The only truth is there there is none. Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

From Taibbi's account, The eXile was a perfectly absurd, post-modern publication. It examined the rules of traditional journalism and produced writing that did the opposite. Rather than putting a b.s. story on the front page, it would be left blank with no headline and no top story. Rather than relying on a consistent style so the audience would buy a brand, the paper changed styles based on what the publishers thought looked good. The paper even put out an issue in French, which annoyed the advertisers because the expatriate community could not understand the ads.

Fact: Matt Taibbi played in the MBA, the Mongolian Basketball Association.

Most of all, the writing was open, free. Taibbi described it as the way journalists talked about their stories, versus what they would actually write, more on that later. It got bold. The paper even put out an issue with a picture of then-(living)-president Boris Yeltsin with the headline, "DIE ALREADY!" (It might be a good thing the authorities were not reading the paper. Russia is notorious for journalists being murdered, with 91 deaths between 1996 and 2006.)

Lucky as he may be, the point is that Taibbi practiced a sort of political absurdism that seems like the dream of Tom Stoppard. And it thrived because it had a captive audience - American expatriates in Russia. Well, actually it thrived because it had captive advertisers - Russian club owners wishing to cater to well-off American expatriates. But it's fun to pretend journalism works the other way around.

Fact: Matt Taibbi did a lot of drugs. So did Hunter S. Thompson.

The style Taibbi began to develop at The eXile was one he would pursue for the rest of his life. The way he sees it, it's a more personal, engaging form of journalism. That's where the post structuralism comes in. In traditional American journalism, you have to deconstruct the news if you truly want to understand the story. A journalist for the New York Times is writing through the mouthpiece of an "objective tone," when in reality (hopefully) the journalist experienced the events described in the article and had feelings about what happened. Writers must keep their opinions to themselves and often write euphemistically. Instead of "John Kerry can't make up his mind," Taibbi said, it becomes "John Kerry has nuanced opinions." All you get is a false reality.

Fact: "John Kerry has nuanced opinions" as a text string yields no google results...Until now!

For Taibbi, writing is supposed to be as clear as possible so you don't have to cut through extra b.s. Rather than creating a story and looking for a way to write it, Taibbi looked for a story and created it by experiencing it and writing about his experience. When a journalist is personal and open, at least you know that the news is being delivered with a point of view. If a new station claims to be "Fair and Balanced" while reporting unfair and skewed news, how different is it from a propaganda machine?

The direction Taibbi pursued is one growing now in alternative media. A point of view is a thing to be celebrated, not hidden behind the columns of a newspaper. What I would like to see more, though, is Taibbi's sense of absurdism. The eXile presented news that could be funny one day, serious the next. That's how life is, though, as Taibbi pointed out. One day you're celebrating Christmas with your family, the next your girlfriend breaks up with you over text message.

Fact: True story.

Because this newer model of news presentation more closely imitates life, I would argue it's in many ways a higher form of truth. Too much journalism does not speak the truth. The journalist instead puts a story through a strainer that too often removes the aspects that make it what is is.

For example, when i was just beginning my studies in journalism, I used to hate my home state journalist Bob Braun. Somehow he would find some way to inject himself into everything he wrote. I wasn't reading the news, but the experiences he went through. When I came home this summer I began to actually like him, recognizing that he was not removing things from the story. He would be as honest as possible about the people he met. Braun is a bit of a crusader, but every time you read his stories you know where he is coming from.

Same with Matt Taibbi. He's done drugs. He's made up a story for a Russian newspaper. He's written a scathing review of his own book.

Journalism, it seems, is becoming whatever a person wants it to be and will be read by whatever reader needs it that way. For Taibbi, it's iconoclasm written in hilarious prose in an attempt to capture the absurdity of it all.

Fact: It's all absurd.