What set apart the late Robert Novak from the rest?
Most Americans probably think of Novak as another talking-head pundit.
But he was much more – a different breed altogether.
Novak was a real, honest-to-goodness reporter.
He actually made calls, dug up facts, found stories that no one else reported.
In that sense, at least among today’s superstar media personalities, Robert Novak may have been the last real journalist.
I didn’t know Novak well. And I certainly did not always agree with him. He was a little on the brusque side. He was not easy to know.
But, in my limited experience with him, I found him to be a perfect gentleman driven in the pursuit of truth.
What more can one say about a journalist at the end of his life?
It’s the highest compliment one can give.
Americans will know even less about their government’s foibles, its wastefulness, its frauds, its abuses, its corruption without Novak around to expose them.
Novak was hardly a partisan hack, as some of his detractors would like to suggest. He reported on as many scandals by Republicans as he did Democrats. In fact, he was an active Democrat when he joined the national press corps, and I honestly have no idea if he ever embraced Republicanism. You simply couldn’t tell from his reporting.
Oh, to have a Washington press corps made up of hundreds of Robert Novaks. Government would be so much more accountable to the people if we ever did.
That’s the institutional problem we have in the news media. While Novak was ever vigilant in his skepticism of government, most of the press corps today simply worships at the government’s altar – especially when their favorite politicians are in power.
That is a sad and tragic state of affairs. It was not the way our founders envisioned the Fourth Estate when they enshrined special protections for the free press in the Constitution – as yet another shackle on government power.
Novak witnessed the degeneration of the free press during his career.
I witnessed it, too.
The proper role of a free press in a free society is to serve as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions – but especially on government.
The press in America has betrayed that mission. It has made a mockery of it. It has turned it on its head. It has gone from watchdog to lapdog. Even worse, it has effectively provided government with the biggest unpaid public relations effort in the history of the world.
Just look around. It’s the press laying the groundwork for the government’s power grab. The press loves to find “crises” at every turn – from the climate to health care to poverty. After manufacturing crises, the press then implies solutions that always involve empowering government at the expense of personal liberty.
That’s the way the overwhelming number of Novak’s colleagues operated through much of his life. It’s not likely to get any better after his death.
In his life, Novak provided something of a conscience in his craft. Almost everyone, even his detractors, respected his work ethic.
It was a work ethic seldom emulated among his colleagues, as more than one obituary noted.
And, as I have said previously, it was a work ethic motivated by a relentless pursuit of the truth.
I will miss Robert Novak’s contributions to preserving freedom in America. That’s the highest ideal of the free press. He understood it. Few of his living colleagues do.
May he rest in peace – and liberty.
It was a job well done – a life worth living.
