Scoop and Anti-Scoop
By: Weston Lindemann
Tags: Local Government, Literature, Literary Criticism, Books, Journalism

Maybe it’s the irony of William Boot, a mistakenly placed columnist as the foreign correspondent sent to cover a war that hasn’t quite begun, or the sycophancy-inducing figure in Lord Copper — proprietor of the Daily Beast — whose self assuredness readily makes way for mishap after mishap: at any rate, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop remains an enduring “novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done”, as the late Christopher Hitchens wrote in the introduction to the 2000 Penguin’s Classic edition of the great newspaper adventure.

The depiction of foreign correspondents, determined to satiate Editor’s back home, as having to create stories where there are none is slightly less ironic in an age where the term “Fake News” is a favorite jibe used by everyone from the President of the Unites States to the arm chair politicos and combative relatives around the Thanksgiving Day table. This irony, seemingly too real to still be deemed satire, is summarily portrayed in the following excerpt:

“Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the street, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway before his window — you know.”

The book aims to inform, however comically, on the habits of the press. The story’s protagonist, William Boot, author of the lackluster half-column Lush Places, in endeavoring to produce a story where there doesn’t appear to be one, accidentally gets the scoop on the war in Ishmaelia he was sent to cover. But this satire “hits different”, as the kids these days say, due to the present situation of the local press.

Consider as you read the absurdities of William Boot’s mistaken journey, that while the fictional journalist stumbles upon a scoop where there was most likely none to be found, locally we’re plagued by a newspaper unable to find any scoop despite having bountiful variety from which to choose. A recent history of my own relations with the Meridian Star offers a perfect example in the December 2018 Top Story “City Rental Policies Defended.”

The slant of the article, beginning with the headline and continuing with an inaccurate portrayal of events all the way to its concluding sentence, was written despite the initiative I demonstrated by having a meeting with the Editor and reporter well in advance of the City Council meeting in which they were provided stacks of receipts from the city’s rental facilities that demonstrated the very same discrepancies a local citizen had recently brought to the attention of the City Council. Rather than report on the facts that indicated at worst embezzlement, and at least cronyism, the article was written in a way that portrays the opposite: a vindication of the administration, no disputation of the facts as they were, and a follow up weekend editorial to admonish me for “crying wolf.”

Such has been the journalistic dispensations of Meridian’s default newspaper of record — an anti-scoop if ever there was one. Perhaps the publishers and editors of the Star’s recent past aren’t that different from Waugh’s Lord Copper, the newspaper’s proprietor, who has a “chryselephantine effigy”, in his honor, wherein he’s depicted “in coronation robes, rising above the throng, on a polygonal malachite pedestal.” You would expect nothing less from a boss who belies responsibility while making it impossible for his reporters to hold opinions counter to his own. But aren’t we to expect that the Star’s administration should be bereft of such megalomania? Why, then, the insistence on reporting the scoop’s opposite — as if such a thing were possible within the confines of reality? This was precisely the case when the Star failed to give a sliver of its word count to the story of a Meridian Police Officer seeking to retaliate against an outspoken council member. The anti-scoop in this case, swiftly following the absence of very obviously needed news coverage, came in the form of a deplorably written weekend editorial whereby the editorial board thought it better to lambast my use of social media than to rise to the very low bar that’s set for a reporter to cover a situation as shocking as this.

Perhaps therein lies the real scoop — the setting for the next great newspaper adventure novel: not on Fleet Street, but on 22nd Avenue. Not a story of an accidental scoop uncovered by a journalist only hired as a result of mistaken identity, no, this would be the story of an accidental journalist — mistakenly reporting the opposite of the scoop, or anti-scoop, if you will.