Gay Talese wants to go to Iraq.  "It so happens there is someone that's working on such a thing right now for me," the 75-year-old legendary journalist and author told David Shankbone.  "Even if I was on Al-Jazeera with a gun to my head, I wouldn't be pleading with those bastards! I'd say, 'Go ahead. Make my day.'"
Few reporters will ever reach the stature of Talese.  His 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, was not only cited by The Economist as the greatest profile of Sinatra ever written, but is considered the greatest of any celebrity profile ever written.  In the 70th anniversary issue of Esquire in October 2003, the editors declared the piece the "Best Story Esquire Ever Published."
Talese helped create and define a new style of literary reporting called New Journalism.  Talese himself told National Public Radio he rejects this label ("The term new journalism became very fashionable on college campuses in the 1970s and some of its practitioners tended to be a little loose with the facts. And that's where I wanted to part company.")  
He is not bothered by the Bancrofts selling The Wall Street Journal—"It's not like we should lament the passing of some noble dynasty!"—to Rupert Murdoch, but he is bothered by how the press supported and sold the Iraq War to the American people.  "The press in Washington got us into this war as much as the people that are controlling it," said Talese.  "They took information that was second-hand information, and they went along with it."  He wants to see the Washington press corp disbanded and sent around the country to get back in touch with the people it covers; that the press should not be so focused on--and in bed with--the federal government.  
Augusten Burroughs once said that writers are experience junkies, and Talese fits the bill.  Talese--who has been married to Nan Talese (she edited James Frey's Million Little Piece) for fifty years--can be found at baseball games in Cuba or the gay bars of Beijing, wanting to see humanity in all its experience.
Below is Wikinews reporter David Shankbone's interview with Gay Talese.  
David Shankbone:  Does it bother you that your name has come to mean 'homosexual'?  
DS:  [Laughs]  "Sports Gay-zing"?
DS:  Is your ancestry Sicilian or Northern?
DS:  Southern, not Sicilian?
DS:  Do you ever pay any attention to Italian politics and the happenings with the Lega Nord?
DS:  They can't seem to do anything politically. They can't save Venice ....
DS:  Do you believe in a higher power?
DS:  What do you think happens when we die?
DS:  Do you have religion?
DS:  Do you pray?
DS:  In certain moments more than others?
DS:  When do you feel out of control?
DS:  What did the letter say?
DS:  How many times have you seen your own death?
DS:  You wouldn't want to be a Terri Schiavo.
DS:  You're quite sprite.
DS:  Doing what you love
DS:  What do you think is the reason there is this collective idea to give Americans a certain view of a place or a people that is not necessarily accurate? I think Iran is another good example, where we are consistently fed images and notions about a people and a culture that aren't really accurate.
DS:  Or fair minded. But the reality is far more interesting than the same stories we are consistently fed.
DS:  And Americans are the donkeys as well?
DS:  But people are still consuming what they're throwing out there though.
DS:  It's dangerous to actually go out there and hit the pavement. 
DS:  How could there not be?
DS:  Sure.
DS:  Have you been there?
DS:  Why haven't you?
DS:  That shouldn't be too hard for you.
DS:  Esquire?
DS:  Esquire does political reporting.
DS:  What would be the difficulties for you in achieving that? It seems like you would just have to make a phone call.
DS:  I think you're underrating your stature.
DS:  I always wanted to know what the cemeteries are like there. What the funerals are like there. Are they like town meetings in a place where there is so much death? 
DS:  It fits a template.
DS:  The press is often cited for it's laziness and for reporting any source without checking its accuracy.
DS:  Has the war affected you as a person?
DS:  It hasn't affected you then?  
DS:  It's affected me.
DS:  Every single person I interview I ask about the war because I think it's important and it has affected me.
DS:  That's what Charles Rangel says.
DS:  That's the only thing that does seem to motivate people to be against the war is to be paying more at the gas pump.
DS:  Does it bother you that there's a lack of outrage?
DS:  Or really much about anything.
DS:  It doesn't get better as you go higher
DS:  No, that was one of the things that stood out to me at Fordham Law.  It's a top 25 law school in a very vibrant city with a lot of thinkers.  I told this anecdote to Floyd Abrams: I was in a Constitutional Law class right after Alito was nominated to be on the Supreme Court.  The professor asked 120 law students on the first day of class how many of them thought he should be confirmed.  About five students raised their hands.  "New York," I thought.  Then he asked how many of them thought Alito should not be confirmed.  About ten students raised their hands.  Then he asked how many did not feel they had enough information to know.  about another five students raised their hands.  What is that?  100 students in a Constitutional Law class at a top school can't proffer an opinion on a Supreme Court nominee?  Is that apathy...confusion...fear...?  What is it?
DS:  After Hurricane Katrina there was a lot of debate on whether we would rebuild one of our own cities as we were over in Iraq demolishing their cities.  How did you feel about that?
DS:  Yeah, the high areas; the rich areas--
DS:  More than it used to be?
DS:  Every year you go to Selma?  Why?
DS:  There was a Times report, I think, about Selma and they say that it is very changed.
DS:  Recently Obama and Clinton were down there marching...
DS:  And that's going.
DS:  Did you see the election in Alabama when the Christian Coalition defeated the ballot measure to remove the segregation language from the Alabama Constitution that said nobody is guaranteed a right to an education?
DS:  Have you changed?
DS:  When you were 25 did you look at black people the same way as you look at them now?
DS:  Do you think Joel Klein has improved it?
DS:  What do you think about Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal?
DS:  It's painted that way.
DS:  Not any more?
DS:  Did you see Stephen Colbert roast the Washington Press Corp and Bush at the White House Press Correspondence dinner?  Nobody laughed, because they were all coming from the same place.
DS:  Because nobody reported about it, or they just said he bombed.  Then it went out on the internet and took on a life of its own and people said, "This isn't bombing, this a roasting of the entire power structure and the power structure decided they didn't like it."
DS:  A view of the federal government from the national scene?  "Here in Denver the reaction to Washington..."
DS:  Reporting?
DS:  The way it is now, they don't get an interview with so-and-so if they write something, or they don't get to go to someone's party!
DS:  Do you think Bob Woodward is still an intrepid Washington reporter?  He's often been accused of being too close to the people he covers.
DS:  When I was in my teens and early twenties my travels were very Europe-centric.  But as an adult I have been drawn to places either seemingly "dangerous" to me or places that I don't feel like I know because I've read so much about them or seen so often in books and magazines. So Europe is off my map now, though I did sneak into Cuba.
DS:  In 2002.
DS:  Through the Caymans Islands.
DS:  Just took a flight on Aero Caribbean.  Now they've stopped using the dollar. But back then, they were very much encouraging American tourists to come via Mexico.
DS:  2002.
DS:  They stopped using the dollar.
DS:  You have the Cuban pesos. 
DS:  I'm not really sure now because when I was there they had the system where you could actually just use dollars. That's what we used.  The local currency was called pesos convertibles that were convertible into dollars. Of course they have no value anywhere else in the world except in Cuba, but then they stopped doing that. Castro has kind of created Batista's society in some ways; not in every way. The poor are certainly a lot better off than they were under Batista. But with the embargo, the economy is now very tourist-based, which creates this tourist class. We didn't stay in the hotels. We wanted to stay in what they call casa particulars and I remember talking to a woman who made $30 a month as a doctor. But running this casa particular, she was making around $300, $500 a month, which made her very rich.
DS:  Like a rooming house. Exactly.
DS:  That's probably the best analogy. Staying at those the money goes more to the people. The other thing they tell you when you go to Cuba is to bring aspirin and all these things that are in short supply there. The people who run these Bed and Breakfasts, if you will, make out with all the stuff the tourists give them to be dispersed in their communities. I went to Ecuador. I went camping in the Amazon. These are the places that interest me now. Do you find it similar in your own travels to really seek out things underneath, to pull up rocks and try and find places off the beaten path. Going to Timbuktu or wherever. Do you have a travel philosophy?
DS:  And talk to the people.
DS:  And a happy society. At least I found a lot of people who were very content. They may not have an easy life, but they were quite content.
DS:  People dancing in the streets at night.
DS:  And friendly.
DS:  My friend I was with was Colombian from Miami, and he made the exact same observation. He had a prejudice against Cubans from his time in Miami and he said, "These people aren't anything like the Cubans in Miami."
David Shankbone:  Do you have a favorite country you have visited?
DS:  You talk about China a lot.
DS:  Is it interesting to you to watch China change?
DS:  Do you get tired of going to the same region and then you're like, ‘I need to go to Asia for a while?'
DS:  I haven't been to Asia. It doesn't particularly interest me all that much. There are countries I would like to see, Cambodia being one. South America is one of the areas that I am most interested to explore because I speak Spanish.
DS:  What are the gay bars like?
DS:  Are they flamboyant?
DS:  It's because they kill them.
DS:  How did you get introduced to a gay bar in Beijing?
DS:  Including the European ones, right? English is the international language.
DS:  And it's so basic.
DS:  I spoke with a young novelist named John Reed. He wrote a book called Snowball's Chance that was an attack on Orwell and we were talking about the literary canon that's taught in grade school and high school. He raised an interesting idea that I wanted to run by you. His point was that kids are not becoming readers. So much of what they learn with books and reading doesn't seem applicable to their lives. I read in Newsweek that your five favorite novels and there was a lot of classics – The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, things like that. Reed's point was that kids have a hard time bonding with these materials. What should be taught at those levels is modern literature. At the more senior levels, once they've developed acumen for reading and they relate to it on a personal level, then they'll go exploring the classics and it's almost more pertinent to them being able to understand it. An analogy would be as if you had children and they only watched Bette Davis and Joan Crawford movies and then the film genre would wither because young people found it difficult to relate to it. What do you think about that idea?
DS:  Not kids.
DS:  That's a phenomenon. It's not really that typical; I mean, it stands out because it's a billion dollar author.
DS:  And they can't say certain things.
DS:  Would you agree with the idea that children don't grow up reading much anymore, outside of what's required?
DS:  You're saying that there never was really a time when people read more unless they had cause to read a lot based upon their circumstances?
DS:  Is that who you were reading at that age?
DS:  I've read The Plot Against America.

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Gay Talese on the state of journalism, Iraq and his life