Christopher Hitchens and the lie of objectivity
In 1997 Hitchens came to Pittsburgh to teach college kids about American literature and journalism. This is the first encounter I had with him.
Christopher Hitchens, the 48-year-old bad boy of Anglo-American journalism, is straight from central casting:
Johnnie Walker Black scotch by the doubles. Rothman cigarettes by the pack. Rumpled gray suits and scuffed shoes. Unruly hair. No driver's license. British accent unadulterated after 20 years in America. A socialist's hostility to capitalism. A libertarian's distrust of authority. An atheist's hatred of dogma and irrationality. The Oxford graduate has the credentials of a real intellectual, but without the snobbery or pretense. He's also a well-traveled journalist who's made it his mission to seek out trouble or stir it up:
BBC reports/commentaries by the dozens from hot spots like Nicaragua and Burma and Bosnia. Hundreds of columns on politics and culture for The Nation and Vanity Fair. An infamously blasphemous book and documentary attack on sainted Mother Teresa.
In the spring of 1997 Hitchens had just completed a semester as the visiting Mellon professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught a graduate course in Anglo-American literature and an undergraduate course in journalism.
I and my colleague Bob Hoover talked to Hitchens about American journalism, a profession he thought had become too dull and insufficiently troublesome to the established order.
Q: You've seen the British and American press. Is the British press better?
A: In the British press, there's no pretense of objectivity. No one in England is ever marked down by his professional colleagues for being an advocacy journalist. That's considered to be a mark of achievement.
Q: That's the problem we have in America covering people like convicted Philadelphia cop killer and death-row resident Mumia Abu-Jamal. We have to play him down the middle.
A: That's not so surprising. Because if he isn't really guilty, he's been really, really framed. Now get down the middle between those popular things. It's quite hard to find the middle point. See, people confuse the idea of objectivity, evenhandedness, fair-mindedness, impartiality — these words all mean different things. Everyone thinks they mean the same.
Impartiality or disinterest means you don't care and or it doesn't matter. Fair-minded is open-minded, which means all opinions are equally useful. Objectivity means the search for the truth no matter what. It's a very, very great responsibility to say that's what you're seeking or that's what you're practicing.
People (in journalism) say we are objective as if we have nothing really more to prove. Well, they're making a huge claim for themselves. That means they would have had to have printed all opinions, investigated them all and thought about it in advance that the one opinion they least wanted to be true might be the one.
Q: A paper like The New York Times, can it be more objective, more fairminded, more impartial?
A: You should look up the column Russell Baker wrote on Groundhog Day in '83, I think. It's so wonderful, about why he gave up being a Washington correspondent. He said it was like being used as a megaphone for frauds, because your job was to go to a press conference and write down and transmit what they said.
Q: But we journalists are supposed to select what's important or not important.
A: In news stories I read many times that Ronald Reagan was, no matter what people might think of him, "The Great Communicator." But you never saw in print the statement, "Ronald Reagan was a liar." Now the statement “Ronald Reagan is a liar” can be objectively verified, but could not appear because it would be thought to be opinion. But the statement "Ronald Reagan is a Great Communicator," which is a statement purely of opinion that can not be verified, could be made casually and in the hard news section. So that's what the theory of objectivity means to me, as practiced now.
Q: You say on your passport that you are a journalist by trade, and that you're proud to be one. What's your definition of a journalist?
A: Writer, critic, author, broadcaster, bon vivant....
Q: Is there an element of trouble-making?
A: Oh yes. No one who wasn't skeptical of the official story or the conventional wisdom would want to be a journalist in principle. ... Journalist means being interested in everything. Someone who wants to continue his own education while claiming at any rate to improve other people's. I've been teaching my students, Look, journalism is not just the newspapers. The history of the First Amendment and the struggle for free expression in America includes literature — it's Thomas Paine. It's Mark Twain. It's Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Frederick Douglas. They were real writers, but they were journalists. Zola was a journalist. Marx was a journalist.
Q: Yet not one those people you mentioned was objective or distanced from the subjects they wrote about.
A: Or ever felt they had to be or ever felt anyone else expected them to be. Objectivity is a wholly new, denatured idea. It's like decaf coffee or beer for pregnant women.
Q: It was Walter Lippmann who institutionalized the idea of objectivity in the 1920s. He said the journalist is an expert who will give you the facts. That's our job. Do you buy that?
A: No. It's not buyable. I don't say I wouldn't like to buy it, because it's a noble aspiration. But Lippmann talks as if he'd accomplished it. The facts are not like nuggets lying around for you to pick up — or if they are, it's like Aladdin's Cave: You won't be able to pick up all the nuggets. You have to make your selection and your selection will tell a lot about you.
Q: What are your politics how do you define them?
A: Well, whenever I go on Brian Lamb's wonderful C-SPAN show — that is as near to objectivity as you get on TV — he always opens with the question, "Are you still a socialist?" I don't want to deny it. The day may come when I say, "No, not really anymore." I resist it, for historical reasons. We were right about a lot of things. Still are. It's a great tradition and I want to defend it.
Actually I find it much easier to say I'm a Marxist. Socialist is prescriptive and moral. It's a point of view that says what you think should happen. The Marxist method — historical materialism, analyzing history and society — I don't think has been transcended, hasn't been overthrown, hasn't been bettered. I think like one. I can't not do it. If also asked if I was a libertarian I would say yes without hesitation as well.
When I had this debate on capital punishment for C-SPAN last week with two people from National Review, I said my case against capital punishment is simply this: The state does not have the right to decide life and death questions. We give it a certain number of rights because we know society is so complex that certain administrative compromises are probably necessary.
I was with (California Governor) Jerry Brown about the flat tax. I liked the Brown campaign. I wish it had done better. I don't think that what you do or whom you do it with or what you insert in any way into your own body is anyone's business but your own or can be.
Q: Let's talk about your famous attack on Mother Teresa for being a fraud.
A: It should have been done by someone who said I'll just look at the facts on Mother Teresa and see if they match up. That would have been more powerful. But probably that would never have happened.
Q: Why?
A: Well, again, because of the laws of objectivity. This is a credentialed society. Generally speaking, if a serious Catholic with doubts or anyone with Catholic credentials like Garry Wills had written "A Second Look at Mother Teresa," in essence saying, "Wow. I never knew this and neither did you!" then it very likely would have been better.
Q: What got you on to Mother Teresa in the first place?
A: I went to Calcutta to do a documentary for the BBC on another subject. I won't pretend that I went to see Mother Teresa openmindedly, but I went objectively. Generally speaking, I don't like the missionary culture. But I was astounded by how trite and second-rate her whole operation was — openly propagandists, testifying to the worst kind of Catholic fundamentalism and vamping on the poor ... and flattering the rich.
I said one day I must do something about this. Then I noticed later that year that she had gone to Haiti to praise the Duvalier family. After a bit I wrote an article for The Nation, just a column. Then someone said in England that it would make a good documentary. Then we found an enormous number of her crimes against humanity were on film.
Q: Her crimes against humanity? Like what?
A: Like accepting a declaration from the Duvaliers saying they loved the poor and the poor loved them back. Or preaching population increase in Bengal. Or campaigning against divorce in Ireland. Just the thing the Irish need — more reinforcement for clerical government.
It's not just that she's not as good as people think, she's a nut. ... I've been in Kurdistan and Bosnia and Zaire and Ethopia — I've done my share of the toilet bowls of the world. I've met a lot of people who really do give of themselves and risk their lives every day and who've made a measurable difference. And I've never heard any of them called a secular or any other kind of saint They just do it. You know why? Because they claim to do it for its own sake.
She does very little of this and she does it in the name of an extreme fundamentalist view of humanity and morality and society, and all the money comes her way. It's an outrage, it really is an outrage. I think more people would be alive if the equation were reversed. I won't say she's killed anyone, but she's prolonged the misery.
Q: Are there any real saints? South African President Nelson Mandela? Czech President Vaclav Havel?
A: It can be true that the genuine article can win through. But we've got to a dangerous stage: which is, their actions are judged by their reputations, instead of the other way around. Mother Teresa broke through that barrier a long time ago. How can you do that, except by the grace of our profession? Journalists are the only ones who can make this happen.
She's an impersonator. We can look through 25 years of coverage of Mother Teresa. It is a Niagara of free publicity dictated by her own staff. No one asked her a single question.
Nelson Mandela could now get away with pretty much anything he wanted, so could Vaclav Havel. But I don't think people should be judged by their reputations. We are not in the reputation business. We're in the news business, in information. Then everyone goes around saying the press is too cynical — it's unbelievable! Where that idea comes from, I don't know.
In 2004 I hung out with Hitchens when he came to Pittsburgh to introduce a documentary film based on his book “The Trials of Henry Kissinger.” As I tagged along, and as I later wrote, he ended up running around the corner and trying to crash a Kissinger public lecture.
My 2017 history book 30 Days a Black Man retells the amazing, forgotten and true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. My 2013 true nonfiction book Dogging Steinbeck exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people.
His stance on God and religion has gone a long way in distracting us from his more damaging work ...
Hitchens sold out with his decision to become a guest expert on FOX to push the the "evil Saddam" narrative ... but Hitchens was at his best in a 2001 interview on C-SPAN, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger" ... and in '87 he broke a story while writing for THE NATION that now stands as my very first shocking political revelation ... in the midst of the IRAN-CONTRA scandal, he identified Oliver North as THE key figure in a covert "GIDO" arrangement with the Contras ... G-I-D-O: "Guns in Drugs out" ... Sen. John Kerry's report later documented an entry in North's diary on July 12, 1985 in which Gen Richard Secord told him "14m to finance arms came from drugs" ... and if not a FOX commentator in the strict sense, he was a regular contributor ... I was not a fly on the wall during his backroom negotiations with FOX but his decision to push the story that Saddam actually posed a material threat to the U.S. was so contrary to his reason-based perspectives, that money had to be an incentive ... it was during this period that he also pushed a false story that tended to minimize the Abu Ghraid abuses, suggesting they were not related to interrogations ... I believe he was corrupted and in this regard, was a real pioneer and ground-breaker ... arguably the first far-left intellectual to sell his thoughts for consumption by TV viewers who preferred to be spoon-fed news and opinion rather than read books and newspapers ... I now tend to compare Hitchens to his modern-day counterpart, Chris Hedges ... Hitchens took the money to push a theory that was eventually discredited ... and by furthering the "evil Saddam" narrative, he essentially did the bidding of the DS by bolstering the case for endless war in the middle east ... and once the lockdowns were declared in 2020, Hedges broke his many implicit promises to be there for the working class and allowed himself to be coerced into selective silence ... he has still not publicly commented on the vax mandates, vax passports or the Canadian and U.S. trucker convoys ... all of which severely impacted or sought redress for the working class ... I have more on Hedges' duplicity, much more ... but I'll spare you.