The Paul Wells Show - Buzz Bissinger and the American saga

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger joins Paul to talk about his storied career and his new book, The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II. He also discusses ghostwriting Caitlyn Jenner’s memoir, why he left Twitter, his time at Vanity Fair, and why he’s considering leaving the US.   Thank you to Perfect Books in Ottawa for hosting this conversation. 

The tales of our times are so big they need outsized talents to tell them. It's my honor to share this conversation with one of the great American storytellers. This week, Buzz Bissinger on his fascinating career and his extraordinary new book. This week, Buzz Bissinger on his fascinating career and his extraordinary new book. In many ways, this is an anti-war book because I was determined, for better or worse, to show the absolute relentless horror of what these men went through. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. I'm so excited to bring you today's conversation with the American journalist and author Buzz Bissinger. And I say that even though I know you may not be familiar with his work and his life. All I can say is stick around. You'll be glad you did. I needed to be educated about Buzz too. How he came to be my guest is a

story of its own. In September for this show's first episode, I brought you a conversation with David Cohen, Joe Biden's ambassador to Ottawa. I happened to know more about Cohen than a lot of people do because I'd read a book called Prayer for the City. It's about how a charismatic mayor and his genius sidekick started to turn Philadelphia around in the 1990s. The mayor was Ed Rendell. The sidekick was David Cohen, Rendell's chief of staff, now the ambassador. And the book's author was Buzz Bissinger. Now it said on the cover of that book that Bissinger was the author of Friday Night Lights, a classic book about high school football. So when the embassy called me a couple months ago and said, Buzz Bissinger is coming to Ottawa to promote his new book, and would I like to interview him at his

book launch? I thought, sure, why not? If nothing else, it'd be a nice favor to the ambassador. The book is called The Mosquito Bowl, about a football game between two marine divisions on Guadalcanal in 1945, in the last days of the Second World War. Well, I thought that's just great. I don't know anything about football, and I don't know much about the war in the Pacific. But I still owed the ambassador a favor, so I started reading. And then two things started to happen. First, I learned more about Buzz Bissinger. Not only did he write Friday Night Lights and the Philadelphia book, he wrote the Caitlyn Jenner cover story for Vanity Fair, and then he co-wrote her best-selling memoir. He was one of the most prominent contributors to Vanity Fair when Graydon Carter was making it arguably the most significant American magazine

of the last 40 years. And he's the subject of an HBO documentary, Buzz, about his own history of shopping addiction and sexual submissiveness. It's probably fair to say American culture produces wild, uncontrollable, outsized talents more often than Canadian culture does. It is definitely fair to say Buzz Bissinger is one of them. The other thing that happened is I fell in love with his new book. The Mosquito Bowl isn't really about football. The title game, between teams from two marine divisions with more college and professional football talent in them than most pickup teams could ever dream of, falls halfway through the book and lasts only a few pages. It's really about what happens next. All these young men we've been getting to know for hundreds of pages ship off to the Battle of Okinawa, the last grueling chapter of the war in the Pacific, and a quarter of them die in combat.

The Mosquito Bowl is about family and community the Pacific, and a quarter of them die in combat. The Mosquito Bowl is about family and community, loyalty, and the horror of war. It's a story maybe only Buzz Bissinger could tell. I interviewed him at Perfect Books, a really impressive Ottawa bookstore. As you'll hear, David Cohen was in the audience, and so was Bissinger's wife, Lisa Smith, whom he obviously counts on as a touchstone and a steadying influence. I began by asking him about that game. They built a regulation field. They built goalposts.

They had marching bands at halftime. It was wonderful and improbable. Marines who were stationed there came from all over the island. There were 1,500 who came. You were allowed to get drunk. You were allowed to gamble. There was a lot of gambling on the game, particularly by the officers. And everyone had a ball, and that was the point. They had been training for months. Morale was flagging. So they thought this football game would really, even if it was for three hours, would really improve morale, give the guys something to look forward to,

give them something to talk about. And it worked. And it was a way of bringing a little slice of home overseas, 6,000 miles to the Pacific. And it was really, I think, after that game, you could call them kids, but they were now men. They trained for a couple of weeks more and then they shipped off to Okinawa, by far the bloodiest battle of the Pacific. And the upshot was of the 65 who played in that game 15 were later killed at okinawa the difficulty of doing the book was of the 65 who had played in that game 64 were no longer with us they had died there was one who was alive a great guy named dave mears and i said i'll take a shot dave do you remember anything about the game? And he

looked at me, that was 75 years ago. I don't remember what I did yesterday. I mean, so you got to be kidding me. So could I do it? How can I get into the interior lives of these guys if pretty much everyone is dead? But bit by bit, I discovered that several families of the pivotal players that I was intrigued by had left a great paper trail with their families. So their families had kept everything, whether it was letters home, whether it was letters from mom, letters from girlfriends, report cards, camp letters home, pictures that they drew when they were five, and enough that I felt, all right, I think I can get at it, and let's do it.

Before we get into the detail of the story itself, what did you think about the war before you began this project? And what did this project teach you about the war? I'm anti-war, obviously, and I think in many ways this is an anti-war book because I was determined for better or worse to show the absolute relentless horror of what these men went through because people have to know and you know people say of Saving Private Ryan all that beginning was incredible and it was D-Day and that was amazing and that. Well, it wasn't so great for the people who were there. You know, they're in the middle of it, and they're getting killed, and they're terrified. My view of war after the book became darker, more pessimistic.

It's hard for me to watch anything that has combat in it, because first of all, I think it's sanitized, but it reminds me of what these guys went through 10 times over. What I can do about it, I don't know, but it did change my aspect of war and it also changed, I didn't know anyone in the military. I really did not know anybody. And in meeting these guys, these veterans and reading about these guys who were magnificent men who were cut down 23, 24 with so much of their lives ahead of them. I gained great respect for the military. These guys fought with such bravery, such sense of sacrifice, such duty, such willingness to serve, such willingness to live, and such willingness to die, which is something live, and such willingness to die, which is something I don't know if we'll ever see in this country again.

The Pacific campaign was astonishingly brutal. It was essentially a bunch of islands, way stations leading up to the Japanese home islands. And the Japanese were going to defend those to the last man every time on each island. And the Americans had to throw everything they had at each island. And that's what leads to this, what turned out to be the final confrontation on Okinawa. And it's a grinder. You talk about a quarter of a million people, Americans, Japanese, and civilians, bystanders, dying in 80 days. Did you have any sense of the scale of this thing? No. I mean, I knew about Okinawa.

My father was at Okinawa. He was a rifleman on the front lines. He was 19 years old. I knew he was at Okinawa. He never talked about it. He would a little bit. He'd joke about it. But if it ever got serious, he would not talk about it. And I didn't think it was my right to ask him. I felt that's your private zone and I need to respect that. But as I was doing research for the book or thinking about doing it, I'm looking up all these military records of all these guys. And I said, well, I might as well look up my father. I might as well see what he did or what battalion and regiment he was assigned to. And I get the muster rolls, which are easy to get. And we have the same name. I'm the third, he's the second. So there's my name, his name.

He's attached to the fourth regiment, which is one of the regiments that played in the football game to the second battalion. And there were several of the regiments that played in the football game, to the 2nd Battalion. And there were several from the 2nd Battalion. So he probably knew some of these players. And that blew me away, that connection. And although I didn't set out to do it, I said to myself, all right, well, now you got to do it. Like a lot of veterans, he would not talk about what he'd experienced. No.

When David Cohen told me about this book a few months ago, I thought it was a football book. There's a football game in the title. You recount the kind of illustrious exploits of all these kids as high school football stars, and then some of them going on to college and professional ball. And then the game itself is a bit of a black hole. People talked about the sort of festivities of the day, but the play-by-play is sort of not present. Well, I realize in hindsight, I just should have made it up. Everyone was dead. I mean, what the hell were they going to do, right? Seriously. I was thinking about it. What the

hell were they going to do? Were they going to complain or write a letter to the editor? They couldn't do anything because there was and i was surprised because the title mosquito ball refers to the whole spectacle of the game from who played in it uh to the spectacle of it to the planning of it and then to the denouement to the aftermath but some people were very upset he said i kept turning the page wanting to hear about the game and hear about the game and i couldn't game, and I couldn't hear anything about the game, and then I read about the game, and there was nothing about the game, and fuck you.

That's what I would write. I just got an email addressed to Buzz Loser Bissinger. Really a nasty email, actually. But I didn't write him back, because my wife won't let me do that anymore. That's what you stumble on when people are dead. There was no living record. Now, I was able to get, there was a reporter who had done some writing in the Mosquito Bowl,

and I was able to get his notes, which really weren't that revealing. But I was stuck. And obviously, I wasn't going to make it up. And you got to play the card that you were dealt. If there is a hole in the book, I think that's the hole. So in the paperback, there'll be several chapters on the game. This conversation never happened, but that was a hole, and there were other holes.

I mean, there were moments where I wish I could have talked to someone about some of these players and gained some more information. A couple times early in the book, very much in passing, you say things like, and then they went out to the sock hop and they had a great time and they talked about the victory of the party and they didn't even have smartphones or they weren't even tweeting. Do you think of this book to some extent as a critique of the way we're living our lives now? A little bit. I actually think, in hindsight, it was kind of snarky. I don't think it was necessary. I think it was kind of stupid to put that in.

You know, you're writing a book about history. Well, of course it wasn't fucking tweeting. I mean, who even knew what tweeting was, for God's sakes? And I thought that was unnecessary. And I did cut some of it out. But sometimes you just can't resist taking that type of shot. I did want to portray that this was a different time in life, much more innocent. There were no distractions that exist today. These guys read books. These guys read a lot of books because that's what you did.

And I don't know who it was, but the publishing published millions of books for these guys, millions. And you were bored and you would be sitting around waiting for the next combat and they read voraciously. How many athletes do you think have read a book in the past year? I'm the wrong guy to ask. Not many. Not many, much less how many have served in the military in the last year, the last 10 years. Not many. While we're on that, you used to be a bit of a terror on Twitter, to the extent that David Carr at the New York Times wrote a thing about Buzz Bissinger's tearing it up on Twitter. As far as I can tell, you left. Why? It was stupid. I wanted to prove something to myself. I mean, authors, every publisher says, you got to get on Twitter, you got to get on Twitter, and then you got to get on Facebook.

And I would say to myself, that's fucking ridiculous. Who's going to, you know, no one's going to follow me. I'm an author. They don't care. But I said, there is a way to do it. And that is to be as nasty as possible. And I did it. And I got 30,000 followers.

I was really nasty to everybody. Lisa wanted to divorce me. That was also my, there was a radio station called The Big Talker. I was a DJ on that, and it was conservative. That was a bad moment in my life as well. But I got fired after six months, so it all worked out. But I was a Twitter, a a terror on twitter and then i just realized it it was sophomoric and it was not nice but i did prove my point the meaner you are

the more cruelty you show the further you get there's no question about that i asked about this because i uh had a certain presence on twitter until a few years ago. And my wife, Lisa, here present, finally talked me out of it. Really? Yeah. Interesting. So we have that much in common. Yeah. Interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. And why'd you stop? Just because it was getting out of hand? The kids would say I quit for self-care. It was not making me happy. Really? That's interesting. Yeah. For those who don't know, and I didn't know until a few weeks ago, let me recite some elements of Buzz Bissinger's CV. He shared a Pulitzer Prize at the Philadelphia Inquirer early in your career for a story

about a plane that fell from the sky and didn't quite hit the earth. That was actually written before I got to the Inquirer. Okay. That was actually written before I got to the Enquirer. Okay. That was a finalist for the Pulitzer at the age of 26, which was remarkable only in the sense I was that young. And then I won the Pulitzer with two other reporters for a series on the Philadelphia court system.

Okay. And received that in 1987. That was a two-and-a-half-year project. The Philadelphia Enquirer at that point in time was the most unique paper in the country where spending that amount of time on a story was not unheard of. And the editor would basically say, I don't care. He had a big Southern draw. He says, I don't care if it takes a year, two years, three years, you're going to do this until you get it right. And we did that. We had to start from scratch. We had no deep throats.

It was arduous, but in the end, it worked out. You win a Pulitzer at that age, you probably worry, what the hell am I going to do for an encore? What you did was write Friday Night Lights. Yeah, that was a big mistake, actually. How come? I'm being half facetious. I wanted to write a book. I felt after I won the Pulitzer and then I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and I felt you have to do something with your life. You have to get out of your wheelhouse. And I wanted to write a book and then of course the issue is the subject. How do you find it? And after the fellowship was over, I had three weeks off from work and I drove cross country with a friend and we took the Southern route. So you went through

Alabama, you went through Mississippi, you went through Louisiana, you went through Texas, and you would go through a lot of little towns and they would be falling apart economically. They were dead. The suburban shopping centers had taken over. But you would drive, whether it was a couple blocks or a mile out of town, you would see these absolutely gorgeous high school stadiums that had been built in the 1930s, a lot of them during the WPA. And you would see the spindly Friday night lights rising to the heavens. And it was Texas football.

So there was a drought. They were still watering the field. And I said to myself, these are temples. These just aren't football stadiums. This is what keeps towns together. Because otherwise, what do they live for? Where are their hopes and dreams? But the problem is you're doing that off the backs of kids who are 17, 18 years old.

But I couldn't get the idea out of my head and ultimately found the town of Odessa, Texas, and went off and decided to do it with my two kids and then fiancé. I like to say the marriage didn't last, but the book did. And as my shrink said, well, which would you rather have? And I said, I guess I have the book. After the break, I'll talk to Buzz Bissinger about ghostwriting Caitlyn Jenner's memoir, going public with his addiction to shopping for leather, and why he's considering leaving the US. I want to take a moment to thank all of our partners, the University of Toronto's Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy,

the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, our title sponsor, Compass Rose, and our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. I want to bring one other person from your cast of characters in, which is one of the central characters of your book, Prayer for the City, which is a book about how Ed Rendell, then the mayor of Philadelphia, started to turn Philadelphia around in the 90s. And there's a figure in that book named David Cohen,

who is now Joe Biden's ambassador to Ottawa. So what did you make of him at the time? And what should we know about him now? I met David in 1987. I've never met anyone who has a stronger work ethic. It was remarkable to me, as it was remarkable to anyone in the city, how hard he worked, how relentlessly hard he worked. And he got everything right. I mean,

that was the most infuriating thing is that he was right almost all the time. And he got along well with people. He got along great with the mayor. And they really sort of divided it. David became in charge of the day-to-day running of the government because the mayor hated that. He got along great with the mayor and they really sort of divided it. David became in charge of the day-to-day running of the government because the mayor hated that. He had no interest in doing that. And Ed was about the bread and circuses. And he was very open about trying to inject canisters of oxygen into the city where people in Philadelphia would begin to believe in themselves and believe in the city again after it had become truly ravaged.

Dave and I spent a lot of time together because that was a four-year push. I spent a lot of time in his office. That's where I had my office, so that was pretty small, actually. But I would sit at his conference table, and then for fun, I would move to the couch, and then I would move to the conference table. That was my exercise for the day. But finally, I said, this is ridiculous. So I brought some pictures of my kids and he had a little wall unit and I put them in there and people would look at it and say, are those your kids? They don't look like you. And he said, no, they're Buzz's pictures. And

then people would say, who the hell is Buzz? But also the thing is, when you're a journalist, you have an immediate contempt for many things. You're very suspicious of many things, and you're particularly suspicious of government. And I came away that if you have the right players in there, they work really hard, they're dedicated. It's a very difficult place to run any city because you may be on top of the four things that are going on, but inevitably there are two emergencies that you

have to deal with. And I came away with a tremendous amount of respect for people who work in government. And David was an essential, enormous part of that. And we were friends before, but we really became close friends after that. Journalism, if you do it right, and if you're lucky in your choice of subjects, is to some extent about having to discard the cheap cynicism you walked in with. I like that. You walk and you go, yeah, they're a bunch of losers. And then you're stuck with the facts. And that gets really annoying because you can't say they're a bunch of losers anymore.

I'm going to jump forward a little bit because, with the facts. And that gets really annoying because you can't say they're a bunch of losers anymore. I'm going to jump forward a little bit because, although I was amazed to read that you had written Shattered Glass, which is about this young, bright young reporter, Stephen Glass, defrauding the New Republic with everything he wrote for years on end. Right. And it suggests that if you fish long enough

in the waters of the amazing American endless psychodrama, you pull up a lot of really interesting fish, I guess. Yeah. Now, there had been a lot written, but no one had really gotten inside what happened. And I was lucky in that the editor, Chuck Lane, said, I'm only talking to one person and it's going to be you. So he laid out everything in terms of how they found him, the investigation, how he kept lying, how he had this incredible capacity to look at a scene and make up all these scenarios immediately. He was the wunderkind of journalism. I was jealous of him. A lot of us were jealous of him. He was 25 years old. He's writing for the New Republic. The New York Times Magazine wanted him. NPR wanted

him. He was on Ira Glass, George, Rolling Stone. I mean, he was hotter than hot until a writer at Forbes Digital got onto him. He wrote an article about hacking and he covered that industry. And he said, this is bullshit. This did not happen. And he lied about it, and he lied about it, and he lied about it, and he was willing to take down anyone until finally he gave in and confessed. It was probably the worst journalistic sin in history. And it was made into a wonderful movie called Shattered Glass, which was really, really terrific. Jucked Micronics was the name of his film. Very good. Yeah. Wow. Terrific.

Juct Micronics was the name of his film. Very good. Yeah. Wow. Anyway, it's good to have a good relationship with a strong magazine because eventually you end up being the person who writes about Bruce Jenner discovering that she's Caitlyn Jenner. And then co-writing her book. And that seems to have been quite an adventure. The writing of the magazine piece was wonderful because this was a really, really, really big story. There have been rumors for years, basically, that she was veering in a direction towards at least cross-dressing or was a transgender woman.

Because understandably, she had to go out. She had to go out and express herself and be herself. So there would be sightings. She had to go out and express herself and be herself. So there would be sightings. Once in an airport parking lot, a car goes by and they're like, Jesus, that's fucking Bruce Jenner. And she's wearing a dress or she would go to downtown Malibu. So finally, her publicist said, Caitlin, you got to do something.

You got to address this because otherwise this is going to not only haunt you for the rest of your life, you're never ever going to be yourself. So you have to make that decision. And so they decided they were going to, two media outlets, one was Diane Sawyer and the other was Vanity Fair, which made sense because of Annie Leibovitz, who's the photographer there. And no one could take better pictures than she could. I was sort of the throwing. They thought I would hit it off with Caitlin because we like sports. And I was a little bit kinky. So they thought Caitlin would enjoy that as well. You're always worried in any story, are they going to talk to you? That gives me the most apprehension, picking up the phone and begging and coddling and seeing if you get someone to talk. I met with Caitlin at where she was living in Malibu. Her publicist was there. Someone else may have been there. She started talking immediately and I think was still talking

when I did the book a year later. So that was not a problem. She was incredibly open. She was incredibly honest. She held nothing back. And when the story came out, it was like a bomb. It exploded. It broke the record for Twitter. I think there were 11 million. It was a really heady moment in magazines.

And in many ways, the last hurrah, because it only could have been done in a magazine. You could not have done that online. It had to be done in print and it was really exciting the book not so exciting but it wasn't the first time that you had co-written a book you would write a book with lebron james right every journalist on any scale of story has to decide how much of me is going to be in the book is it harder when it's not even your name on the cover? Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not, you know, I was going to say I don't want to be J.R. Moyinger, who just ghost wrote a Prince Harry autobiography,

and he did, well, now I do want to be him because he's making a lot of money. He's at peace with himself, and he's really, really, really good at it. He really tunnels in and gives a great sense of the person. And interestingly, he takes no credit for it. You won't find his name on any book except a small line of acknowledgments. I was never comfortable with that.

I was never comfortable with the relationship because it's not my book. It's their book. They can do anything they want. And I felt in some way, I guess I'm being blunt, it was kind of whores work. I was doing it to make money, most of which I pissed away on leather because I had developed a terrible addiction, a really terrible addiction. So it wasn't until I started doing the mosquito belt that I feel I came back to my real self and came back to the wheelhouse

of what I had been really good at, which started with Friday Nights and I continued in other books. I felt I had gotten pretty far afield. I had done television work. I had worked for NYPD Blue. I had been on talk radio. I was foundering.

And this book got me back to my roots, so to speak. This anticipates a question, which is how should I consider Secrets of My Life and Mosquito Bull as a set? To some extent, they're about all American heroes and then what happens next, or is that too contrived? It's a little contrived because when Caitlin registered for the draft, they knew who she was and they said, all right, flat free, you're rejected. So I don't think she was particularly interested in serving in the military. I think they are different because she really had no interest in sports whatsoever, except in extreme sports. She was a gifted athlete in high school,

then became a gifted decathlete, obviously, in college. But she liked extreme sports. She was an acrobatic pilot, and she loved to take people up in the plane and see how long it took them before they vomited. But she wasn't into football or into any things that these guys were like. So I think there was really a difference. were like. So I think there was really a difference. You mentioned your extreme shopping habits and a lot of the personal trouble that you were going through as you worked on the book. It's not a secret because it was an HBO documentary called Buzz, which we can see on Crave here in Canada. Not my shining moment. I'll tell you, it was riveting TV. Well, it was riveting TV for the

sense that my mouth is too big and I often say things without censoring it was too personal the best thing about it was I realized the damage and hurt I'd done in particular to Lisa and so in that way it saved our marriage I felt embarrassed I felt shame for what I'd put you through

I'm amazed you're still here but you know there's a limit. It was just too personal. But at that point in time, I kind of liked doing stuff like that. I liked kind of raising a stink and I guess drawing attention to myself. But when it came out, I was really, really uncomfortable with it. Sometimes we have to hit bottom in one way or another before we can move on. So the mosquito bowl is to some extent about, it's about the story first of all,

but it's also to some extent about recentering yourself. Yes, yes. You know, I don't want to exaggerate that. It sounds like I'm on Oprah now, but yes, it did recenter myself. I got back to what I liked. This was mine. It wasn't Caitlyn Jenner's. It wasn't LeBron James. It was mine. And I could do anything I wanted with it. I can make it great. I can make it terrible, but I didn't have to look over my shoulder saying, oh God, I'm going to write it, and they're going to change it. Now, in the case of LeBron James, I think he read it. I'm not sure. And the only question and comment he had about it was, who's Attila the Hun?

That's the only thing he asked. That's the only thing he asked. But this did return me to research, to interviewing people, to putting words together, to trying to find a way to tell the story. As I say, things that I had done well and had really gotten way, way far away from. When did you realize you were good at telling stories and when did you realize it was going to be your life?

I think I learned that at my second newspaper, which was the St. Paul Pioneer Press. They had a great editor and they had another great editor who was hired for the Minneapolis Star. It was very small staff, but it was great. We were scrappy. We were tough. We were arrogant. We started kicking the Minneapolis Tribune's ass and they were really arrogant and they didn't like that. But the editor, Deborah Howell, really encouraged it. You know, encourage storytelling. How do you tell a story?

How do you put it together? And the upshot was, when I was there, it was my last story. I wrote a 30,000-word story. Now, this is in 1981. Today, forget it, you would not find a 30,000. It was seven full pages in the paper. And that was a pure narrative. But you learn plot development.

You learn stringing the reader along. You learn about drama. You learn about character development. You learn about pacing. You learn about momentum. And that's what I thought, you know, you're pretty good at this. Now, at that point, I couldn't imagine writing a book. You know, you would read a great book like Anthony Lucas read Common Ground,

which was an amazing book, but I said, I could never do that. But bit by bit, I gained more confidence and I think, as I said, after the fellowship at Harvard, I just felt, and the Pulitzer, I felt you got to take the shot. Because I was an editor, which I really didn't like. But I was going to go one of two ways. I was going to stay an editor and see if I could rise up the food chain of the Inquirer or some other paper or take the shot. And so I took the shot and told my editor I was leaving. And he thought I was crazy and thought it was a terrible idea.

But I did it anyway, and I took my two kids. They were five years old. And actually, we had a blast. What's the Philadelphia Inquirer like now? I think it's hanging in there. I actually think it's hanging in there or trying to hang in there. It's not the paper it once was because they've lost a lot of their talent. They had magnificent talent at that paper.

once was because they've lost a lot of their talent. They had magnificent talent at that paper. Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down, Richard Ben Kramer, who wrote What It Takes, Barletta and Steele, who's one of their books, was number one on the bestseller list. An amazing array of talent, and that's gone. The staff has gone through numerous layoffs, numerous sales of the paper, but I think they're hanging in and they still do some good stories. But morale is tough when you're faced with, we're going to lose our pension, there's going to be another round of buyouts because they ain't making any money. And it's just very hard, unless you're the New York Times, to monetize online. The New York Times has done it brilliantly, and they've turned the corner.

But how many papers are the New York Times? Not that many. I ask because, first of all, there's the path that we have each traveled who work in journalism, but also there was a wonderful documentary about Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin a few years ago and the amazing adventures they had

in the New York City tabloids. And then it puts a slide up and it says, 89% of the people who worked at the New York Daily News are no longer working there. Like, it's just, it's gone away. What do you tell young journalists? In that documentary, you're speaking to a class of young journalists. Do you tell them, get out while you can, or do you?

I like teaching the craft. I think there are elements of craft that do apply to nonfiction. I try to avoid as much as possible giving them any advice because I don't have anything good to say. And that disturbs me. Now, I will say my students, some of whom would have been terrific, have done pretty well. One works at Fortune. There are two who work at the New York Times. There's one who just became the Beijing bureau chief. One's at Gourmet Magazine. I'm really proud of them because it is a tough market, but they've been aggressive. They've been determined and they've gotten ahead. So some of them have made it. Some of them have made it. But I just don't, I, you know, I was so lucky to start when I did in 1976. It was the immediate aftermath of Watergate. And everyone wanted to be a journalist. Everyone wanted to

be Woodstein. You know, people didn't want to become doctors and lawyers. They wanted to become journalists. And papers, whether they were great or lousy, everyone wanted to do investigative reporting. Everyone wanted to do long form reporting. So as a rookie reporter, I'm running stories that are 50, 60, 70 inches, which is now very, very long. So even then, without knowing it, I'm learning sort of the rudimentary elements of how to tell a story. And then I elongated it into a book. That's the most difficult thing is that talented young journalists today don't have the opportunity and the pressure to deliver that you did, that to some extent I did back in the day.

They certainly don't have the opportunity to learn anything resembling narrative. Today, 20 inches is long. It's more 15. it's more 10 now i don't know what makes any editor think that you can tell anything in 10 or 15 inches you know there are obvious exceptions but that's the way the of the world shorter shorter shorter more screaming more outrage you, a lot of opinion, whether it's true or not. Everyone now wants to be first in with the opinion, whether it has any bearing or not. And I think that's also true of history. I mean, instant history is all over the place now. And that's problematic, obviously, as well. So the profession is really, really changing. I get some sense that it is plateaued

a little bit, that the print product is doing a little bit better. The problem is that papers can't make enough money right now off online advertising, and they're making no money off print. So they got to find a way to make money. And it's very hard to monetize. I mean, when I worked at Papers, their profit was 15, 20%. I mean, they were minting money, minting money. It didn't matter if you were the New York Times or the Norfolk Ledger Star, they were flush. And then you may remember, when did it start to hit? 2000s or was it before then? When did it start to hit? 2000s or was it before then? I mean, during the Bush recession of the early 90s, it was a little tight in a lot of newspapers, but then it just, the internet was like a buzzsaw for the business model.

And then Craigslist, Craigslist took away the classifieds. That was a killer. That was very, very lucrative. And when they lost that, I think people said it's the beginning of the end, because that's been a real stable moneymaker for us. I'll tell you what is a really good model, though, is subscription newsletters on Substack. And if you want to ask me afterwards about mine, you endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 when he ran against Obama. That was my dark period. You wrote in 2020 that if Trump was reelected, you'd leave the country. That we will do. Lisa is getting her Italian citizenship. She qualifies. It's extremely

arduous. How many documents do you have to fill out third um she's on the phone constantly negotiating it can take as long as six years but she'll do it and i'm assuming they'll let me go as her husband and we will you know whether we're there for six months whether there for a year would be an adventure and i can't deal with that guy being in office again. I simply can't. I cringe at every element of him, the way he looks, the way he talks, the way he sounds. And obviously, there's his politics. I just don't want to go through that again. I don't. What happened to America between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump?

Mitt Romney was 2012. Then there was kind of the blessed period of Obama. And, you know, it was in many ways a magnificent time for the country and in many ways it divided the country. Because obviously there's racism and a lot of people resented him and didn't like him and didn't like his politics. But the ability of this country to elect a black president was a wonderful, wonderful sign. But obviously, I think the resentment was such that in 2020, by some miracle, Donald Trump got back into office. And in the mosquito ball, I think one of the great things about the country then was the sense of unity. Women took over the workforce because the men were gone. Blacks served despite withering segregation and withering racism. They were not

allowed to participate in combat. They had segregated facilities. If you had any white in your unit, whether he was a private you were captain he took superiority over you you could not command any white officers but they served they wanted to serve the country and on the front lines you had people from every economic stripe in every region of the country so if you're rich or poor whether you're're from Brooklyn or Queens or North Carolina or Ohio, you had to learn to get along because that's essential. And that's essential in war because ultimately that's what's going to save you is the love and the brotherhood. I think that's the most powerful element that makes men fight and fight effectively. And we've lost that.

We've lost respect for other regions of the country, for other people who may be different. Now, it's happened once. Granted, it was wartime. But before Pearl Harbor, the country was also very, very divided. I mean, Roosevelt passed a draft bill, I think, by one vote. Nobody, nobody would have ever voted for war in Japan. Nobody until Pearl Harbor. And then they finally reserved themselves. But I think Roosevelt was relieved. He had wanted to get in that war because he felt he had a moral

obligation. And they say the happiest person in the room was Churchill, because he knew that finally America would enter the war, which is what he wanted. So we can be unified. We can put away differences, whether it has to be done in the atmosphere of crisis, that's a shame. But we are so ravaged, we are so divided. I mean, there are often times I don't really recognize the country. It's a magnificent country. It's a country of opportunity, but I don't recognize it. There's so much craziness. And, you know, look at this guy, Santos. How is he still kicking around? I mean, how is that possible? And he won't resign. I just

don't get it. I just don't get it. And so there are times I find the country unrecognizable and Trump was such a divisive force and loves that. He loves attention. He'll say anything. He's insulting. He's mean. He's cruel. I hate his tie because it goes really low. And I'm revolted by him. I really am. And so is Lisa. So you can all join us in Italy. We can all get a little, yeah, right. Well, I mean, it's a major factor in Canada-US relations is the sense among many Canadians, stronger than ever before, that we don't want any of that stuff to get on us. Really? Yeah, it's a driver of a lot of our politics. Well, he came here once, is that right?

Yeah. It was insulting, wasn't it? Yeah. Awful tweets. He came here long enough to have something to complain about as he left, yes. He really is a despicable human being. Now, he's probably listening to this

and I'll be dead tomorrow. So this will be my posthumous interview. Buzz Bissinger, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. Thank you to Perfect Books for hosting this conversation. Buzz Bissinger's fantastic book, The Mosquito Bowl, is on sale now.

The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Our associate producer is Haley Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Cox is the president of Antica.

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