If muckraker, journalistic impresario and scoundrel Warren Hinckle, who died last week at 77, is not getting the media sendoff befitting someone of his accomplishment and influence, he has nobody to blame but himself. The New York Times filed a lengthy obituary, and Hinckle’s hometown newspaper in San Francisco saluted him, but most of the nation’s other leading dailies gave his death a bye, which is a shame. There were a handful of appreciations in the left corners of the Web, yet none of them conveyed the force he exerted on journalism in his prime. He embraced the role of attack dog, formulated like this for a 1981 Washington Post profile: “What journalism is all about is to attack everybody,” he said after downing his fifth screwdriver. “First you decide what’s wrong, then you go out to find the facts to support that view, and then you generate enough controversy to attract attention.” The people who believe that the journalist should never be the story never met Warren Hinckle.
Hinckle mostly added footnotes to the art of journalism during the past 40 years, but during his prime, which ran from 1965 to 1975, he practiced journalism like a political insurrectionist, rushing into combat with one eye patched (from a childhood injury) and even sporting a cape on occasion. In his prime, he changed American journalism for good by creating Ramparts, which served as a media crawlspace for investigative reporters and culture critics in the 1960s. The magazine’s influence was immense: Its spirit was evident when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, and in 1968, when 60 Minutes got up and running; and it permeated Rolling Stone, launched in 1967 (and which the always acerbic Hinckle denounced as “counterculture bullshit”). The Ramparts lineage goes on: Mother Jones, which used the collapsed Ramparts as a kind of parts car; the alt-weeklies, which got started about the time that Ramparts died in 1975; and more recently sites like Gawker and the Intercept.