I finished my complimentary copy of Jason Leopold’s News Junkie a couple of days ago. Writing book reviews is not my forte, so I’ll go with Publishing Weekly for the preliminaries.
Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a “news junkie.” While residential rehab programs and an incredibly committed wife were key to his turnaround, what saved his life was his discovery of the adrenaline high of news scooping. After a few small successes, Leopold got lucky when he began investigating insider trading by aides to California’s Gov. Grey Davis and stumbled onto the extraordinary scandal of Enron’s manipulation of utility deregulation in California. By the time Leopold was pressured into resigning from Dow Jones in 2002, he was one of the few reporters who’d actually interviewed Enron president Jeff Skilling. He then rushed to publish a flawed exposé of the secretary of the army’s Enron connections, seriously damaging his journalistic credibility.
More than anything, I saw News Junkie to be a cautionary tale. Leopold and I have a lot in common, we both are very much mid-Atlantic personality types with large appetites for things that are not necessarily healthy. We both had uneasy upbringings, although mine wasn’t abusive. And maybe it was the vicious beatings Leopold took from his father that explain how he went off the rails. Well, that, and a dangerous mix of ambition and insecurity. Leopold weaves an amazing story of deceit, wherein he feeds a cocaine addiction by selling up to $500,000 of record company demos to local retailers, while getting mixed up with the mob.
Valerie Plame
Addiction presented the biggest problem for Leopold, but once he conquered his addiction to cocaine he found a new rush in breaking news stories. He was an extraordinarily aggressive reporter, but with his ambition and drive came his need to fit in. At one point Jason asks:
Why do I always worry about what other people think? I measure success on where I work and live and the car I drive.
At another point he says:
I naively thought that breaking stories in the energy crisis would impress working journalists to look up to me as the new Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. But instead of following up my scoops and going after bad guys, the press corp attacked my credibility…When the press corp rejected me I convinced myself that the whole goddamn world was conspiring against me. All I wanted was to be accepted as a member of their club.
A long time ago, when I was in my early twenties, I internalized the basic lesson of Buddhism. That message is essentially that the origin of suffering is desire, and that it is futile to try to quench your suffering by fulfilling your desires. It’s is far easier to give up on impressing people with your clothes, your car, your house, and your job, than it is to find any happiness in attaining the best of those things. For me, wisdom and happiness come with limiting what you need to get by and finding self-worth, not in the external, but in the internal. Leopold took a longer path to discovering this life lesson. And, in the process, he did great damage to himself and to those that love him.
I think Leopold would be the first to admit that he is a damaged individual, and that he is in some ways untrustworthy. In detailing his moral failings he pulls no punches. He even faults his wife for falling for his bullshit (at the same time that he credits her for saving his life). But, that being said, Leopold clearly wants, desperately, to be given a third or a fourth chance. It’s his very need to fit in and be accepted that makes his recent difficulties with the Plame Affair so disturbing. It’s easy to see him crawling up in his bed for a month and chewing his nails bloody. Or worse, going back to substance abuse. If anything shines through in Leopold’s autobiography it is his vulnerability and neediness. And despite his relative self-awareness about these character traits, he clearly is prone to sustained periods of denial. This can be seen in an episode from the book where his wife, Lisa, tells him in front of their marriage counselor:
“You’re self-destructive and constantly test my unconditional love for you. I walk on eggshells around you.”
“I never know what is going to set him off,” Lisa says to the therapist.
Lisa is the rock of News Junkie. No matter how exasperated she gets with her husband, as when he began waking her up and complaining of imaginary rats in the bed, she finds a way to abide. It’s clear that Leopold would have been ruined irrevocably a long time ago without the love and support of his wife.
But what is really interesting about the book is the insight it provides into what it takes to be a successful print journalist. It reaffirms my decision not to try to work myself up from the bottom of some local sports desk to get a job at a major news daily. It raises a lot of issues about what is ethical in print journalism, and how hard it is to get a story right.
Anyone that is contemplating a career in print journalism should read News Junkie. It’s educational, and it is a page turner. Leopold
bent the rules of journalism in order to outscoop his competitors. It ultimately cost him his job at the LA Times, at Dow Jones Wire Service, and at Salon. His haste and recklessness in the Plame Affair may yet cost him whatever credibility he had left. I hope not. Leopold is a troubled person but he is a talented reporter. I hope he finds a way to conquer his demons and I hope he is ultimately proven right about the Rove indictment.
