This is the first part of a two-part interview. The second part will be published in one week.
For years I have referred to myself as a news junkie, by which I meant that if I don’t read The Washington Post and The New York Times daily, I’ll feel like I’ve missed something almost as essential as food or sleep. It’s almost like having a daily habit. I guess you could call it my daily fix - sort of like a drug habit, but then I’m getting ahead of myself.
Imagine the passion most people have for sports teams and attach that to news and you’ll start to get an idea of how important I consider it to be on top of the news, as written about in the newspaper (as opposed to the awful, simplified pablum that is too often the fare on cable news programs.) But I have recently decided to stop calling myself a “news junkie.”
What has sparked this change? Is it because I no longer feel that everyone should try to read at least one newspaper a day? No, although I have relaxed my self-discipline on this issue, otherwise I’d be taping C-Span debates and reading the internet all night. Is it because I agree with many in society that the quality of journalism is in decline? No, although that is an issue that fascinates me and I like to ponder from time to time.
Is it because I’m no longer a journalist? No, that’s not it. If anything I find it more relaxing now to read the newspaper because I’m not constantly thinking, “Ok, what can be the local angle I can write about for this issue?”
Is it because I’ve found lately that the best place to read the newspaper is at a bar, since with that atmosphere and the consumption of alcohol some of the stories and issues—especially those regarding the war and the President—start to make sense? No, but we’re getting warmer now.
No, it is because of this book I am introducing, News Junkie.
The book is by a guy named Jason Leopold, who I never heard of before this book. I’ll wait until I introduce the second part of the interview to speak of some eerie, “It’s a Small World” parallels and intersections between his life and mine.
For now let me just say that this book is fascinating in several different ways at once. If you like memoirs and stories of personal journals, you will find them in this book. If you want to know about the ugly side of this beast we call journalism, you will find that here, too. If you are interested in stories about dysfunctional families, that is also here.
I mentioned this book a few weeks ago amid my reviews of documentaries about Enron, the electric car, and another topic.
Leopold, while working for the Dow Jones Newswire, wrote stories about Enron Corporation’s infamous fake trading floor and how it helped cause the energy crisis in California. As an aggressive reporter regularly making questionable ethics decisions—as we discuss at length in both parts of this interview—Leopold was also hiding his own past from almost everyone around him. While exposing the truth about Enron he—and, by extension, the readers of this book—had his own secrets that could be exposed, and it is those secrets of his past that really made this book, for me at least, gripping reading.
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