Gonzo journalism

Based on Wikipedia: Gonzo journalism

The Last Man Standing

In 1970, a journalist named Hunter S. Thompson went to the Kentucky Derby to write a magazine piece. What he produced instead became the founding document of an entirely new way of telling the truth—by making himself the story, getting drunk, insulting the locals, and turning the whole debacle into something that read like a fever dream crossed with a police report.

His editor at The Boston Globe, Bill Cardoso, read the finished article and sent Thompson a note. "This is pure Gonzo journalism," he wrote.

The word stuck. And journalism would never be quite the same.

What Gonzo Actually Means

Nobody is entirely sure where "gonzo" came from, which seems appropriate for a style built on controlled chaos. Cardoso claimed it was South Boston Irish slang for the last person still conscious after an all-night drinking marathon—the survivor who outlasted everyone else at the bar. He also suggested it might derive from a Canadian French word meaning "shining path," though linguists have disputed this.

In 2025, researcher David S. Wills uncovered what might be the real origin. Just one week before Cardoso used the term to describe Thompson's work, he had edited an article about Baba Ram Dass—the former Harvard professor turned spiritual teacher—for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. That article used "gonzo" to describe losing control on hallucinogenic drugs. The original text read that Dass "smoked pot and went gonzo on STP, the most powerful hallucinogenic ever concocted."

A third possibility involves a 1960 rhythm and blues instrumental called "Gonzo" by the New Orleans pianist James Booker. Thompson's literary executor later confirmed this song was indeed the source. The song title itself apparently came from a character in a movie called The Pusher.

All three explanations share something in common: losing control, going beyond normal limits, pushing past what's acceptable. Which captures the essence of what Thompson created better than any dictionary definition could.

The Opposite of Objectivity

Traditional journalism operates on a foundational premise: the reporter is invisible. A good journalist, according to this view, gathers facts, interviews sources, and presents information without inserting personal opinions or experiences. The reporter is a window through which readers see events, not a character in the drama.

Gonzo journalism demolishes this premise.

In gonzo, the reporter becomes the protagonist. The story isn't just about what happened—it's about what the journalist did, felt, saw, ingested, and survived while trying to witness what happened. First-person narrative isn't just allowed; it's mandatory. The personality of the writer matters as much as the events being described.

Thompson put it bluntly in an interview with The Atlantic: "I don't get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist's view: 'I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view.' Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon."

This wasn't just stylistic preference. Thompson believed objectivity in journalism was a myth—a polite fiction that allowed powerful people to get away with things because reporters felt obligated to present "both sides" even when one side was lying.

The Fiction That Tells the Truth

Thompson based his approach on something William Faulkner once wrote: that fiction is often the best fact. This sounds contradictory, almost irresponsible. How can making things up help you tell the truth?

The answer lies in how gonzo uses exaggeration, satire, and subjective experience not to replace facts but to illuminate them. Thompson wrote about real events. He really did go to Las Vegas with a trunk full of drugs. He really did cover the Kentucky Derby. The people he encountered existed. But he filtered everything through his own consciousness, using humor, profanity, and deliberate distortion to capture emotional truths that straight reporting might miss.

Consider the difference between these two approaches to the same story:

Traditional: "The Kentucky Derby attracted over 100,000 spectators to Churchill Downs on Saturday, with many dressed in formal attire despite temperatures reaching 85 degrees."

Gonzo: Thompson titled his piece "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" and spent most of it describing the grotesque behavior of the crowd, his own drunkenness, and his illustrator's increasingly unhinged sketches, concluding that the real story wasn't the horse race but the human ugliness surrounding it.

Both tell the truth. But they tell different kinds of truth.

Fear and Loathing as Failed Experiment

In 1971, Thompson published what became his most famous work: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book follows a character called Raoul Duke—clearly Thompson himself—and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas in a drug-fueled haze, ostensibly to cover a motorcycle race called the Mint 400.

The book featured defining illustrations by Ralph Steadman, whose grotesque, splattered drawings became inseparable from Thompson's prose. It's widely considered the definitive example of gonzo journalism.

Thompson himself disagreed.

He called it a failed experiment. His original intention had been to produce a completely unedited record of everything that happened as it happened—the purest possible expression of gonzo principles. Instead, he edited the manuscript five times before publication.

This reveals something important about the gap between gonzo's theory and practice. The style claims to value immediacy, first drafts, raw transcription. Historian Douglas Brinkley described gonzo as requiring "virtually no rewriting" and frequently incorporating transcribed interviews and verbatim telephone conversations.

But Thompson's best work was carefully crafted. The appearance of spontaneity was itself a kind of fiction.

How Gonzo Works

The Gonzo Studies Society—yes, this exists—has identified eleven features that characterize Thompson's journalism:

First, subjectivity. The writer's perspective isn't hidden; it's the entire point.

Second, immediacy. Notes, transcripts, and raw materials get incorporated directly into the finished piece, creating a sense of unfiltered access.

Third, a blend of fact and fiction. Real events get shaped into something that reads like a novel.

Fourth, dark comedy. Thompson found humor in terrible situations—often at his own expense.

Fifth, peculiar word choices. Thompson invented phrases and used language in unexpected ways.

Sixth, a sidekick figure. Dr. Gonzo in Las Vegas, or Oscar Zeta Acosta in real life. Someone for the narrator to play off.

Seventh, hyperbole and fantasy. Exaggeration as a tool for emphasis.

Eighth, drug use. Not incidental but central—altering perception as a journalistic technique.

Ninth, violence. Things get destroyed. People get hurt. Sometimes the journalist starts it.

Tenth, digressions. The story wanders where the writer's mind wanders.

Eleventh, a conspiratorial tone. The sense that something sinister lurks beneath the surface of official reality.

Not every gonzo piece includes all eleven. But the combination creates something unmistakable.

The New Journalism Connection

Gonzo didn't emerge from nothing. It grew out of a broader movement called New Journalism that transformed American nonfiction writing in the 1960s.

New Journalism's leading figure was Tom Wolfe, a reporter who wrote about culture and society using techniques borrowed from fiction: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, unusual punctuation, and immersion in his subjects' lives. Other practitioners included Gay Talese, who wrote legendary magazine profiles, and George Plimpton, who embedded himself in professional sports teams to write about the experience of being hopelessly outclassed.

Thompson admired these writers but saw himself as doing something different. When asked whether gonzo and New Journalism were the same thing, he answered: "Yeah, I think so. Unlike Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese, for instance, I almost never try to reconstruct a story. They're both much better reporters than I am, but then I don't really think of myself as a reporter."

This is a revealing distinction. Wolfe and Talese researched exhaustively, then recreated scenes with novelistic precision. Thompson participated in events, often causing them, then wrote about what he'd experienced. The New Journalists observed. The gonzo journalist instigates.

The Deadline Saboteur

Thompson became notorious for missing deadlines. His editors learned to expect articles submitted at the last possible moment—too late to be properly edited, yet still technically in time for the printer. This wasn't just disorganization. It was strategy.

Thompson wanted his work published as he wrote it, in what he called its "true Gonzo" form. The traditional editorial process—cutting, revising, smoothing rough edges—would have destroyed exactly what made his writing distinctive. By submitting late, he prevented interference.

He would also deliberately provoke situations, often in ways that were prankish or openly hostile, then document both his own behavior and other people's reactions. The journalist didn't just observe the story; the journalist created the story by being present and being difficult.

The Ethics Problem

Gonzo's rejection of objectivity creates obvious concerns for journalism as a profession. Traditional journalistic ethics rest on principles like accuracy, fairness, and independence. If the reporter becomes a character, if facts blur with fiction, if the writer deliberately provokes events rather than neutrally observing them—what remains of professional responsibility?

Critics argue that subjective journalism allows reporters to become "moral arbiters of the news," imposing their worldview rather than presenting information for readers to interpret. Others worry about fragmentation: if every journalist writes from a personal perspective, readers of different sources might end up with incompatible versions of reality, sharing no common factual foundation.

Defenders counter that traditional objectivity was always an illusion. Every choice a journalist makes—what to cover, whom to interview, which quotes to include, how to frame the story—reflects subjective judgment. Gonzo simply makes that subjectivity visible rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

Thompson himself was unapologetic about his approach. In 1973, he wrote in Rolling Stone: "If I'd written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."

This isn't a defense of lying. It's an acknowledgment that journalism involves choices about what truths to tell, and those choices are never neutral.

Gonzo Beyond Thompson

The style didn't stay confined to one writer or one country.

In Thailand, a writer named Rong Wongsawan developed a remarkably similar approach in the 1960s while reporting from San Francisco. Writing in Thai, he produced work with gonzo characteristics—subjective, immersive, personal—apparently without any knowledge of Thompson. His later books about American soldiers and Thai bar girls during the Vietnam War continued this style.

In Uzbekistan, a television news program called Millar has been described by scholars as fitting the gonzo category. The program uses subjective tone, includes perspectives of people involved in stories, and features internal coverage that places the journalists within the narrative. Critics note its use of sensationalism and occasionally staged footage, which raises the perennial question of where gonzo's boundary with manipulation lies.

Some observers have argued that gonzo's influence extends far beyond journalism. In 1998, writer Christopher Locke claimed that the webzine genre—the early ancestor of blogs—descended directly from gonzo principles. This connection has since been extended to social media, where first-person perspective and personality-driven content dominate.

The website Gonzo Today continues to publish in the tradition, featuring contributions from various writers and a banner illustrated by Ralph Steadman, who worked with Thompson for decades.

Contemporary Examples and Controversies

Applying the gonzo label to contemporary journalists proves contentious.

Some have pointed to James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, as practicing a form of gonzo journalism. His work involves journalists entering properties, often under false pretenses, and filming people to expose what he presents as corruption. The blurring between journalist and participant fits gonzo's definition. So does the openly subjective, adversarial tone.

But many critics reject this characterization, calling O'Keefe's work citizen journalism rather than gonzo, citing deceptive practices and political bias that cross ethical lines Thompson never approached.

Jim Acosta, the CNN correspondent known for confrontational exchanges during press briefings, has also been described as working in a gonzo mode. His book "Enemy of the People" employs the subjective, personality-driven approach that defines the style.

These examples illustrate how "gonzo" has become contested territory. When does subjective, participatory journalism constitute a legitimate approach, and when does it become propaganda or performance? Thompson broke rules to reveal truths. Others may break the same rules to obscure them.

The Art of Political Writing

Despite his wild reputation, Thompson took craft seriously. He reportedly shared an affinity with George Orwell's view that political writing could be art—not just polemic or reporting, but literature that mattered aesthetically as well as politically.

Critics have analyzed his prose technique: verb-driven syntax that emphasizes action, extensive use of metaphor and allusion, deliberate ellipsis that leaves things unsaid. The effect, according to literary scholars, creates feelings of despair, degradation, and desperation within his narrators.

This is sophisticated writing posing as chaos. The drugs and profanity and deadline-dodging obscure how carefully Thompson constructed his effects. The spontaneous feeling was manufactured, like jazz improvisations that actually require years of practice.

The Lasting Influence

Gonzo journalism matters because it asked a question that traditional journalism preferred to avoid: whose perspective shapes the news?

The answer, gonzo insisted, is always someone's. Every piece of journalism reflects a viewpoint. The choice isn't between objectivity and subjectivity but between acknowledging perspective and hiding it.

This argument has only grown more relevant as media has fragmented and trust in traditional journalism has declined. In a world of blogs, podcasts, social media, and personalized news feeds, the gonzo insight—that the person telling the story is part of the story—describes how most information actually reaches us now.

Thompson died in 2005, but his influence persists in how we think about truth, voice, and the impossible task of describing reality without distorting it. Every writer who puts themselves in the story, every reporter who admits their biases, every piece of journalism that reads like it was written by an actual human being rather than an institution—all of them owe something to a drunk journalist at the Kentucky Derby who decided the most honest thing he could do was stop pretending he wasn't there.

That's gonzo. The last man standing, still telling stories after everyone else has passed out or given up or agreed to play by the rules.