Among the Thugs, Redux

Bill Buford's book, Among the Thugs, has quickly gone from hilarious to horrific. The scenes of crowd violence he describes are quite graphic. I still highly recommend the book but wanted to clarify that it's not simply a laugh riot.

One interesting aspect of Buford's tale: He participates. He gets wasted, he does drugs, he gets high on the violence. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about his own inebriation, but he does write about urges he has, when caught up in the crowd, to hurt people. These are admissions many of us would not want to make.

It's a common debate in journalism: How much do we, as reporters, get involved? With newspapers, the general understanding is that you don't participate with something you write about. So I wouldn't carry a banner at a protest, then write about it. Even if I BELIEVED I could write a balanced story about the hypothetical march, having been in it (e.g. if I talked to people about both sides and presented an "objective" story), there could still be the APPEARANCE of impropriety. That's to be avoided at all costs.
 
If I were an editorial columnist, I think (don't quote me on this) the rules would be different. My biases would be clear from the get-go so I could write and believe what I wanted.

Magazine journalists, or book authors, tend to have more flexibility. Take George Plimpton, for example. Plimpton was famous for competing in sporting events, then writing about it from the point of view of an amatuer. The idea being that you can't really write about something until you experience it. Anyway, it's an interesting question. In my opinion, some of the most interesting journalism comes from this approach.

Always important to remember, though, even reporters who take this approach, like Buford, rely on good, old-fashioned newspaper reporting to inform their stories and interest... At a certain point during Among the Thugs, Buford talks about subscribing to a clip service to track the football (soccer) violence. He gets envelopes full of these clips from about England. It's all part of the big picture, I guess.

Like Buford, former editor of Granta, Plimpton was involved in a literary journal, The Paris Review. What is it with these literary men and their sports fetishes, anyway??