‘Advocacy’

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The Gonzo Hammer

“There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it ‘vengeful’ and ‘primitive’ and ‘perverse’ regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. ‘That kind of stuff is opinion,’ they say, ‘and the reader is cheated if it’s not labeled as opinion.’

“Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H.L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal ‘objective journalism.’ . . .

In my case, using what politely might be called ‘advocacy journalism,’ I’ve used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.”

—Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), journalistic and counterculture icon,
Better than Sex (1994)
Image: Thompson with 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern/Annie Leibowitz, Rolling Stone

• Editorial Comment: That’s more like guerilla journalism, Dr. T.

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