Monday, June 16, 2003 4:23 PM
By Michael Collins
News that our dear friend, the wicked, wonderful and gorgeous Marnye Oppenheim had died, devastated us at the Press Club. I could barely function after hearing this terrible information.
My writing partner, the former editor of the Ventura County Reporter, Sharon McKenna, and I, were planning to see Marnye and Rick Barrs, editor of Phoenix New Times and the love of
Marnye’s life, along with syndicated columnist Jill Stewart and others, during Marnye’s planned trip here recently. The trip didn’t happen, unfortunately. Marnye had suffered a seizure in her Phoenix New Times office and her trip was put off. Then this lovely lady died, apparently from another seizure, a few weeks later. It was horrible. I’ll never stop loving Marnye.
But her death got me thinking.
Marnye, who wrote the hilarious “Bite Me” column for New Times, was an example of the best in
journalism. But others have tarnished our profession. The New York Times’ Jayson Blair committed plagiarism and fraud and had errors in 36 of 73 recent articles. He was canned. The Los Angeles media have had a field day reporting on Blair Affair. Then on May 28th, Pulitzer Prize- winning New York Times reporter Rick Bragg resigned after editors discovered a feature article he wrote on oyster farm- ing had been almost entirely reported and researched by a freelancer secretly working for Bragg.
But is Los Angeles immune from journalism controver- sies? Luckily, we haven’t had any reporters lying about what city they are reporting from, creating characters, or secretly hiring others to do their work. But we do have our controversies.
Take Corey Levitan, a columnist for the Daily Breeze.
This gent has worked for the Breeze since 1997 as its pop
music writer. Hardly a slacker, Corey has contributed, in
the past, to the New York Post, Playboy, Us, Los Angeles
Times and Entertainment Weekly. He won two first-place New York Press Club awards last year for his work in the Post. He is also up for a Los Angeles Press Club award this year as best
columnist at a paper under 100,000 circulation.
Corey is an energetic and handsome 37-year-old who is not
afraid to speak his mind. “The thing I’d like to be known for the most these days is my ‘Adventure’ column for the Breeze where I go out and do crazy things,” said Corey. “I’m willing to do anything — the more embarrassing and dangerous the better for a good read.”
Corey has jumped to great lengths to make his Daily Breeze column fly. Literally. He dove out of an airplane with the Flying Elvi, (plural for ‘Elvis’ for the uninitiated), hung out with ‘rapstas’ to record a ‘Hard Corey’ rap single and went undercover as a Bulgarian folk singer named “Corinne” to yodel with an all-female group.
Yet Corey tells me, “I believe that most journalism is B.S. because of the nature of the guise of being objective. Just by what facts you choose to report, you’re being completely biased.” He adds, “When I started at the Breeze, I started doing objective entertainment reporting. And slowly I started inserting myself into my stories and, strangely enough, the more subjective I became, I felt closer to the truth. I really believe that all of
us, not just journalists, but all of us as just people, (that) the only thing that all of us can really be an expert in is in what’s inside our head, our own opinions and our own reactions to what’s been told to us.
“As for objective realities, it’s the ruse of journalism and that’s the lie of it. I understand that it has to be perpetrated, and there are people who do a great job of perpetrating of it. But to me, it’s all a lie.”
Sure, objective journal- ism may be posited to be a lie. But I don’t think so. Corey’s adventures and ruminations, how- ever provoking and controversial, don’t prove that what we do as
journalists is bunk.
