Hours After Death, Gawker Publishes Hit Piece On Mike Wallace: ‘He Was As Much A Journalist As Ryan Seacrest’

Little more than 24-hours after the death of legendary CBS journalist Mike Wallace, Gawker has published a gratuitous, contrarian attempt to demystify the deceased. It feels like a troubling trend for Gawker to publish pieces like these upon the death of a public figure. Maybe they think it makes them appear nonconformist, but I think it just makes them look small.

In Gawker columnist John Cook’s latest piece, “Mike Wallace Was an Icon of Television, Not Journalism,” the long knives are out for Wallace.

“CBS News’ Mike Wallace, who died over the weekend at 93, is being hailed as an icon of broadcast journalism for his foundational role as 60 Minutes’ investigative bulldog. This is bullshit. He was a failed soap actor and vaudeville hack named Myron who just wanted to be on television. He was as much a journalist as Ryan Seacrest.”

Cook’s piece absorbs needed bandwidth litigating Wallace’s career as an entertainer before he became a full-time journalist at CBS and helped found the iconic “60 Minutes” program – which has survived him and serves part of a broad and expansive legacy (a notable feat in itself).

Glossed over in most of Wallace’s obituaries is the fact that his pre-60 Minutes career—he didn’t join the show until he was 50 years old and on his third wife—was a little more than a desperate and sustained attempt at achieving celebrity. Not journalistic celebrity, or reportorial renown, but the sort of tawdry, famous-for-being-famous notoriety currently reserved for cable reality show cast members.

Cook seems to view entertaining an audience and informing an audience as distinct occupations or, perhaps, a novel innovation of the modern era. In fact, many who have been drawn to providing news content for a mass audience are instinctively driven by their love of the dynamic of entertaining an audience through other mediums at first. Many respected journalists began their careers as performers. Entertainment has been a facet of news and information purveyance since Roman-era news readers gesticulated on raised platforms in the Forum. Cook’s piece lacks any perspective in a reaching attempt to indict Wallace as an “entertainer.”

Cook also repeatedly refers to Mike Wallace as “Myron,” as was his real name, in the same way opponents of Mitt Romney call him “Willard” or Jon Stewart “Jon Leibowitz.” Since they are not using their real names with regularity, their entire modus operandi must be suspect – didn’t you know?

Myron Wallace was a newsreader and paid actor who played a part—very, very well—on your television screens. His producers, who reported out and prepared his broadcasts, were journalists.

This really isn’t clever or informative or witty or counter-intuitive; the only thing illuminating about this piece is the light it sheds on the author and maybe even the editorial culture at Gawker. I am guessing that was not his or their intention.

In a similar sacrifice at the altar of contrarian sentiment, Gawker published an equally vicious piece about the late Steve Jobs just two days after his passing. In “What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs,” columnist Ryan Tate accuses Jobs of supporting sweat-shop labor abroad, enforcing censorship and policing materials he viewed as “morally suspect.”

Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees—the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements—have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple’s success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.

While it easy to succumb to the instinct to counter-eulogize the recently deceased and paint them as fallible human beings rather than deified paragons of their chosen profession – in fact, it can sometimes be laudable – it is often not advisable. Mike Wallace was no saint, but he was a journalist. To suggest otherwise is beyond a stretch.

The conspicuous time frame in which this and other hit pieces are published does not leave the reader with new and unanswered questions about the subject but there are certainly new questions today about the intentions of the author. In the debate over who was or is a journalist, some may have questions about Wallace, but I think its also safe to say that Wallace (and others) would have some choice words about Cook’s brand of “journalism.” But out of respect, Wallace probably would have kept it to himself.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.