Book Reports
|
Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era Edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone |
Stone, provost at the University
of Chicago, and Bollinger, the incoming president of Columbia
University, offer here an intelligent and not unhopeful review
of the status of free-speech doctrine, primarily as shaped by
court decisions between 1919 — the title is taken from Oliver
Wendell Holmes's dissent in Abrams v. United States — and 1969.
Among the particularly illuminating contributions are "dialogues"
at the beginning and end between Stone and Bollinger; a challenging
essay by Lillian R. BeVier of Virginia raising and resolving the
question of why the press, almost alone among consumer products,
is excused from liability; and an engaging disquisition by Vincent
Blasi of Columbia that avoids rehashing old decisions in favor
of drawing on Milton and Brandeis to find the true spirit of free
speech in "good character" — that is, in a strong and
resilient society. He offers a list of character traits for preserving
free speech that might also well serve journalists: "inquisitiveness,
independence of judgment, distrust of authority, willingness to
take initiative, perseverance, courage to confront evil, aversion
to simplistic accounts and solutions, capacity to act on one's
convictions even in the face of doubt and criticism, self-awareness,
imagination, intellectual and cultural empathy, resilience, temperamental
receptivity to change, tendency to view problems and events in
a broad perspective, and respect for evidence."
|
The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage Compiled and edited by Paul R. Martin |
Although its title might suggest
that this is a manual on how to write business letters, this is
the public introduction of The Wall Street Journal's general stylebook,
the counterpart of the guides published by The Associated Press
and The New York Times. Martin, the Journal's assistant managing
editor, has been in charge of the newspaper's usages since 1972,
and has previously compiled internal versions of the stylebook.
His work is marked by concision and clarity; he scorns the kind
of elegant essay strewn through the Times's Manual of Style and
Usage (1999). The special emphases of the Journal can be seen
in extended no-nonsense entries on, among others: bankruptcy (no
doubt much-thumbed these days); listings for the international
economic groups G3, G7, G8, G10, G15, G22, and G24; loan terminology;
and profit terminology ("loss" gets only three lines).
The longest, curiously, is devoted to military titles.
|
Ralph Emerson McGill: Voice of the Southern Conscience By Leonard Ray Teel |
Ralph McGill (1898-1969) was the
most celebrated of the band of southern journalists who sought
to ease their region out of the old era of racial segregation
and disfranchisement. He wrote, almost daily, and as he pleased,
for forty years in The Atlanta Constitution. In the North, he
came to be regarded as a hero; southerners had mixed feelings
(some called him "Red Ralph" or "Rastus")
but they paid attention. Leonard Ray Teel, a professor at Georgia
State, makes clear that McGill was a man of complexity and contradictions,
and fully deserving of the full biography Teel has written. Born
in Tennessee, McGill quit Vanderbilt University to become a sports
writer, a trade he left for political writing not long after he
moved to Atlanta in 1929. Touring Europe on a fellowship in the
1930s, he met Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist, who was
just starting the project that became the classic analysis of
race, An American Dilemma (1944). Race and racial justice were
high on McGill's agenda thereafter. He was far from saintly. For
years he drank to excess; his behavior on a round-the-world tour
of American journalists in 1945 almost got him sent home. He longed
for honors, and feared that he would never win a Pulitzer Prize;
in the end he won not only a Pulitzer but almost every other honor
Columbia University had to offer. Although the FBI was considered
hostile to the civil-rights movement, he maintained a friendly,
confidential relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. Although he spoke
for the poor of both races, he was also a booster of "New
South" corporatism and a friend of Atlanta's corporate elite.
Teel lays all this out unblinkingly; he has more than done his
homework. If fault is to be found, it is that he is so intent
on enriching the background that he often drifts out of focus
and into trivia. Even so, he has produced a monumental life of
a monumental figure in twentieth-century journalism.
|
Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America By Larry Gross |
Gross, a professor at the Annenberg
School for Communication at Pennsylvania, provides a readable
account of the gradual emergence of a gay-lesbian presence in
news, entertainment, and advertising over the last fifty years.
Although much of the book is centered on prime-time television,
it also recounts the metamorphosis of The New York Times — from
portraying the gay presence in New York primarily as a social
threat, through outraged managerial embarrassment over a 1975
article on a gay cruise that slipped into the travel section,
through resistance by A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor, to using
the term "gay," to the paper's present state of receptivity
in news and editorial columns that Gross finds ideal, if a little
astonishing.
