Gonzo Journalist - Also Blog's Godfather

The following is the editorial in today’s Tri-City Herald from Washington.State.

Hunter S. Thompson was famous for inventing what he called “gonzo journalism.”

But in a sense, he might have claimed even more — that he was the spiritual godfather of the blog, if so ephemeral a characteristic as spiritual could be applied to so robust a personality.

Thompson’s death was announced by his son, Juan:

“On Feb. 20, Hunter Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado,” his son said in a statement quoted by The Associated Press. “Hunter prized his privacy, and we ask his friends and admirers to respect that privacy as well as that of his family.”

Thompson was 67 when he died. Just 33 years earlier, his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, brought him an immensely larger audience than he had obtained in the then-new counterculture magazines, especially Rolling Stone.For daily newspaper readers, Thompson will live on. “Uncle Duke,” the cynical and shadowy operative in the Doonesbury comic strip, was based on Thompson and was almost an homage to the man.

Gonzo journalism was a semi-fictitious, grotesquely exaggerated form of communication. Thompson placed himself at the center of the activities upon which he reported. The reader (if he or she cared) was left to sort out what was fact from what was imagination.The connection with today’s bloggers is an imperfect one. But it has a certain attraction.Particularly in the zest — even fury — with which both Thompson and some bloggers go after their quarry.

“There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you’ve followed him around for a while,” Thompson wrote.

Humphrey was former vice president and a Democratic presidential candidate at the time.He said of Republican candidate Richard Nixon that he had a “Barbie doll” family and was himself “America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us.”

These sentiments are reflected in the relish with which bloggers went after CBS TV’s Dan Rather after he was caught relying on forged documents in an election eve attempt to prove George W. Bush failed to perform his duties when a member of the Air National Guard.More recently, bloggers exposed “reporter” James Guckert a k a Jeff Gannon as party hack who used his White House access to lob friendly questions during President Bush’s press conferences.

In a bizarre twist, the blogosphere linked Guckert to Web sites advertising gay male escorts, complete with nude photos. It’s an angle to the story reminiscent of Thompson’s most feverish fantasies.

A great deal of Thompson can be seen in the Saturday Night Live and Daily Show mix of real events, parody and phony interviews to reveal what’s behind the sometimes pious-sounding stuff in mainstream media.

As we said, the parallel isn’t exact, but there’s something there.

© 2005 Tri-City Herald