this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Thompson was embedding himself in a community and reporting out through his own perspective. Guys like Brietbart and Bannon were absolute pieces of shit, but if you genuinely want to know what the far-right was thinking then he was the guy who delivered it to you. They regularly ran counter to their neoconservative peers in the Bush Administration and the surrounding corporately sanitized Rush-Limbaugh-sphere and said the quiet parts out loud.
Similarly, you had a bunch of the TDS crowd doing real, serious, long-form on-the-ground journalism comparable to what Thompson did at the Kentucky Derby or the National Chicano Moratorium March. During an era of consolidating papers and shrinking budgets, when sending a human with a camera to a place to talk to other people, it was a surreal instance of actual fucking journalism that you could only find on the Comedy Central channel. The "we're just a bunch of goofballs, don't take us seriously" was a premise they opened with to get attention-seeking politicians to let them in the door for interviews.
I think, in the modern moment, Brace Belden of TrueAnon and Andrew Callahan and Channel 5 would be a good equivalent. Although, again, the business model is totally different. Thompson wasn't trying to set himself up as a personal brand in order to get direct sponsorship in the 60s/70s. Now, you've got a plethora of indie journalists with a pickup truck full of equipment, effectively leveraging their celebrity as journalists to fund their own private investigative adventures.
Bourdain was a travel reporter and great at getting out into the world with a camera to shoot some B-roll of "Day in the Life" foreign culture that he put voice-clips over. But that's a far cry from Gonzo journalism. The work he did for CNN was very low key and basic.
I think this is a good and careful assessment, and I'm not pushing back out of disrespect, but I still don't agree that what Brietbart and Bannon or Colbert are doing is Gonzo. A core component of gonzo is the acknowledgement of the intentional dissolution between self and subject in their truth seeking. Gonzo is about dissolving breaking through the concept of objectivity by injecting yourself into the story in real time, intentionally, and not after the fact. And at its core, Gonzo is an approach to truth-seeking ; its an answer to the failed conundrum of post-modernism, a chaser to that shit after taste of "this can't really be all there is, can it?"
With Colbert, there is no dissolution of self or subject: Colbert is a character. They aren't doing Gonzo, because they don't believe themselves to be the character they play on TV. Its an act, a bit, even if its one that helps get at and elucidate what truth might be. When a Colbert is doing is what they are doing, while they are working to get at truth, they are not throwing their whole selves into the the thing to see how the thing changes them, then recording the results. Its a dummy, a prop, their character they throw in, and they see how what impressions the world makes on the prop, and this is the result. Sasha Baren Cohen is another good example of someone using this approach to trying to understand what truth is, but its fundamentally not Gonzo because its always happening to someone else: the character. Gonzo is when you do the same thing, but not as a character.
Brietbart and Bannon. That's an entirely separate can of worms because they, as much as they would pretend otherwise, they are fundamentally postmodernists because they truly do not believe in any kind of objective truth. Truth for these shits is whatever they need it to be, whenever they need it to be that way. And while in many ways their approach is maybe closer to Thompson, they aren't truth seeking, and so it can't be Gonzo. Brietbart and Bannon have a truth they intend to steer you towards and work to craft an experience and narrative to convince you of the truth they had already decided was true.
Gonzo is fundamentally about individual experience and what truth comes out from the impressions that experience makes on an individual. But it can't be fraudulent. Gonzo is only gonzo if the author is truly willing to be changed by their environment.
And if I can't convince you that Bourdain is closer to gonzo, maybe this article can.
I get the distinction you're making, although I'd argue "fraudulent" is a term doing a bit of heavy lifting. Journalism is always going to be about perspective. And even the OG Hunter Thompson piece on the Hell's Angels was a war between his preconceptions and his shifting perspective.
But I'll go back to Andrew Callahan and Channel 5 as a (admittedly more short-form) modern Gonzo journalist.
I will say that the early TDS (maybe Colbert isn't the best example - Jason Jones, Ed Helms, and Wyatt Cenac were more serious and less "in character") had people doing on-the-ground reporting and even longer form investigative pieces that had them living the lifestyle or event they were covering more authentically.
I guess, from the way I see it, Bourdain was more a chef who became a journalist than a journalist who reported on being a chef.
Idk if that makes a difference to you, but it seems like a distinction to me, at least as far as Bourdain isn't immersing himself so much as he is sort-of producing an extended autobiography.
Maybe you can say that about the right-wingers as well. They're not really going to the material so much as coming from it.