BOOKS
In Praise of Passion
|
People's Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics By Fred Inglis |
Once the bombs stop falling and the political dust has settled, how might one go about evaluating American coverage of the war in Afghanistan? That is, putting aside the question of the U.S. government’s censorship of the press, a complicated subject in its own right, by what criteria might one begin to judge the press’s performance? And, just as important, to whom might one turn for guidance?
If you pick up Fred Inglis’s new book People’s Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics, you will find an argument that defiantly runs counter to conventional wisdom. Inglis, a professor of cultural studies at the University of Sheffield who writes frequently about journalism and politics, can’t be bothered with wringing his hands, furrowing his brow, or striking any other histrionic pose over the question of journalistic objectivity. For Inglis, the best journalists are those who have managed to create a climate of moral feeling about political events — wars mostly (World Wars I and II and Vietnam), but also social upheavals (the cold war, the 1968 Democratic convention, Watergate, the collapse of the Iron Curtain). Inglis doesn’t presume that his prize scribes have written flawless first drafts of history, or even supplied readers with a complete transcript of events. Rather, they have produced journalism that does “exactly what journalism should, is truthful, faithful to the facts, bearing witness of human actuality to those who could not actually be there, and then matching the story with adequate feelings and moral judgment.”
Inglis’s book is a riposte of sorts to Phillip Knightley’s seminal 1975 study The First Casualty — From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. Having pored over thousands of clippings and interviewed dozens of war correspondents, Knightly concluded that news about wars is almost always inaccurate. Truth gets compromised in many ways, he observed: by one writer’s pangs of conscience (how can I profit from reporting on someone’s misery?), another’s mercenary swashbuckling (how can you not profit from it — war is good for you), or an editor’s indifference (atrocity is old news — how about a piece on the general’s medals?). Yet Inglis thinks Knightley treats the notion of objectivity in a ham-handed, inflexible manner. Early on in his book, Inglis berates Knightley for being a “crazy priest of journalism” — Exhibit A being Knightley’s criticism of Martha Gellhorn for reporting only the Allies’ side of the story during World War II. Indeed, If Knightley’s The First Casualty is a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, a story of how war correspondents seeking the celestial city of Truth have routinely sunk into the Slough of Despond, been tempted by Vanity Fair, and been traduced by editors from the Doubting Castle, then Inglis’s People’s Witness is a Lives of the Saints, a series of parable-biographies about journalists who despite their human foibles have managed to cover politics with a passionate, if not pentecostal, intensity. Their mission is to observe and preach, their religion is humanism, their gospel most often the Constitution of the United States.
In principle, Inglis’s parables are intriguing; in practice, they are much less so. The book contains no original research but instead reconstellates a gallery of famous faces: Gellhorn, Halberstam, William Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Lippman, Neil Sheehan, Norman Mailer, Dorothy Thompson, Joan Didion, and I.F. Stone, among others. It’s worth noting that People’s Witness is being published simultaneously in Britain and the United States, which might explain why the book seems to have been written for a British audience, one which Inglis surmises is unschooled in the stock-in-trade of American journalism. “The contribution of what I call here the constitutionalists of American newspapers” — that is, writers who turn the constitution of the state against the state itself — “to making the world a better place is solid and unmistakable,” Inglis states. “There is no such redress available in Britain, or indeed in most states of the European Union.” Indeed, the book rarely strays beyond a cast of well-known American journalists, and its few Fleet Street episodes have a decidedly American hue, such as Harry Evans’s stint as editor of the London Times during the 1970s. Under Evans’s watch, Inglis contends, the Times went from being the genteel mouthpiece of Britain’s political and monied classes to a paper that rattled those classes by doing American-style investigative journalism.
Most of Inglis’s saints have two salient characteristics. First, they are moralists who write about politics while steering clear of political dogma. Though for the most part politically left of center, they refuse to abide by the heavy jargon of correct political thinking.
Second, Inglis’s saints are artists who report. Literature is news that stays news, the poet Ezra Pound famously said. For Inglis, good journalism is news that becomes literature. This is by far the most provocative and engaging premise of People’s Witness. “We live our lives by entering the stories open to us,” he declares, and so he places a premium on a journalist’s ability to tell a compelling factual story by respecting the essential principles of fiction, “the disciplined observation, [the] discussion and classification of human oddity.”
For the newspaper business in America and Britain Inglis has little regard; in his eyes, its low opinion of readers and even lower prostration before advertisers permits only the coarsest kinds of storytelling. Hence, Inglis’s high opinion of journalists like Gellhorn, Mailer, Didion, Sheehan, Orwell, Halberstam, Herr, and Hersey — writers who not only forged a distinct style but also managed to liberate their dispatches from the chancy map of the front page or the interim home of the glossy and then develop them into nonfiction books or novels, thereby enhancing both the art and shelf-life of their stories.
If only Inglis were an equally compelling storyteller. He rarely strikes the right balance between examining a journalist’s writing and evoking the atmosphere in which that journalist worked. At times a journalist’s tale seems to be little more than an opportunity for Inglis to rehash the history of various debates on the U.S. and European left during the twentieth century. At other times, a profile is little more than a close-up shot in soft focus.
On those occasions when Inglis does strike a good balance between journalist and atmosphere, the atmosphere could stand to be richer. In the book’s best chapter, “Adventurers and Constitutionalists: Vietnam and Watergate,” Inglis writes eloquently about the approaches of Herr, Sheehan, and Gloria Emerson to political issues, but he avoids discussing an equally compelling and relevant question: how newsroom politics shaped coverage of Vietnam. Such a discussion would demand putting aside questions of writerly passion and craft and focusing on institutional ideology. Had Inglis managed to accomplish that, the work of the writers he so admires would seem even more remarkable, if only for having been published.
If the style makes the man or woman, as Inglis is fond of suggesting, what are we to make of Inglis based on his own style? Generally, his prose is an eclectic blend of the archaic (nouns like “viziers” and “charivari”) and the waggish, the idiom of a professor eager to demonstrate that he is not pompous. The waggish Inglis is quick with a quip and adept at sketching a person’s character in a few sharp strokes. In his eyes, Dorothy Thompson, the columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, “was a great tank of overwhelming, often overwhelmed feeling, firing off her passionate certainties like a cloud of incandescent gasoline.” By 1968, Norman Mailer “had done everything a dust jacket could require.” As for Tom Wolfe, he combines a deadly knowingness with “a coarse preference for injuring those who won’t answer back, while hiding behind those who will. His is the politics, one might say, of the jeerer from a safe distance . . . .” For a reader who dislikes Wolfe’s work, this may be sufficient. But for someone who is unfamiliar with the work or who happens to like it, Inglis’s sketch might seem to be nothing more than an ad hominem attack. The sketch is the centerpiece of a mere 300-word treatment of Wolfe; one might even call it a jeer from a safe distance.
Despite this and other flaws, Inglis’s People’s Witness is worth reading. He may not be as artful as the journalists he discusses, but his enthusiasm for them can be infectious, and the importance of his central question is certain: How effectively can journalists cultivate a moral point of view about a political situation by drawing on the resources of fiction but without compromising the truthfulness of what they report?
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
