Book Reports
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The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo By Phillip Knightley |
Johns Hopkins’s latest reissue of a journalism classic offers American readers the 2000 English edition of Phillip Knightley’s durable and unblinking chronicle of the role of correspondents in covering, analyzing, and sometimes promoting wars. As in the original 1975 edition, the starting point is the Crimean War, but Knightley has added post-Vietnam chapters dealing with Britain’s Falkland Islands conflict, the American invasions of Grenada and Panama, the Persian Gulf war, and NATO’s Kosovo bombing campaign. There is no chapter on the 2001-2002 fighting in Afghanistan, but its character is unerringly foreshadowed in the ever more stringent policies enforced by Britain and the United States to exclude, control, and coerce correspondents — with bureaucrats acting in the knowledge that the public, and many editorial writers, would rather support a war than learn the truth about it. The freedom of correspondents to report in Vietnam, writes Knightley, was an aberration; there are new, simple rules: “control access to the fighting; exclude neutral correspondents; censor your own; and muster support, both on the field and at home, in the name of patriotism, labeling any dissidents as traitors.” He concludes that the heroic age of war correspondence has vanished.
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The Associated Press Stylebook |
The AP Stylebook claims cumulative
sales of 1.7 million copies, reaffirming its conversion from in-house
guide to a general reference book. This new edition contains many
of the expected new entries — jihad, mujahedeen, mullah,
Taliban (no al-Qaida); firewall, LAN, MP3, offline, virus, worm.
Others are revised, some to eliminate hyphens that have become
superfluous: crossfire, freelance, teenage. Overall, the new edition
is thirty pages shorter than its predecessor, two years ago, a
mystery until one realizes that two pages of bibliography and
the entire section encompassing photo captions and filing practices
— that is, the segments dealing with the AP’s internal
business — have been removed, and with them such fine old
terms as disregards, glances, NewsAlerts, urgents, and writethrus.
All that remains of the old times are two pages devoted to penciled
proofreaders’ marks.
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Precision Journalism: A Reporter's Introduction to Social Science Methods, Fourth Edition By Philip Meyer |
One reason that Philip Meyer’s
guidebook has lasted through four editions over twenty-nine years
is that he has worked both sides of the street. Now the occupant
of the Knight Chair in Journalism at North Carolina-Chapel Hill,
he had an earlier career as a reporter, and draws freely on examples
from his own experience. In his professorial mode, Meyer leads
readers into becoming as comfortable with numbers as with words
— data analysis, basic statistical procedures, constructing
and interpreting surveys, using databases, and much more. At the
same time, he warns working journalists not to get too comfortable
with numbers — the danger, he observes, so common among social
scientists, of “becoming so fluent with numbers that you
begin to lose your ability to put their meaning into words that
newspaper readers can understand and appreciate.” At the
end, he reveals, in a chapter called “The Politics of Precision
Journalism,” that the cause closest to his heart is the defense
of polls as a valid instrument of democratic consensus-building.
He concludes: “If precision journalism, in the form of preelection
and exit polls, helps the electorate communicate with itself and
bring about consensus, then there is hope for the brave new world
of direct democracy that mass communication technology is trying
to bring us.”
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Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and
Commentary Edited by Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey
D. Groves |
Although this reader is offered under the rubric of book history, in fact it encompasses the many forms of American print culture, including newspapers and magazines. The commentaries and bibliographies are engaging and/or useful, but the attractiveness of the collection lies in the abundant artifacts — a few, such as Benjamin Franklin’s “Apology for Printers” (1731) familiar, but many more little-known and worth finding. For example, in a section about the industrialization of American newspaper and magazine publishing in the late nineteenth century, there is an 1887 comment by Allan Forman, editor of the long-forgotten periodical called The Journalist, of the impact of “boiler-plate” material on the local press, an 1891 reader protest against newspaper syndicates, and Jack London’s depiction of life on Grub Street, which he knew so well. The collection concludes with a valuable section on newspapers since 1945 by Glenn Wallach, which contains excerpts from A.J. Liebling’s 1960 gem, “Do You Belong in Journalism?” in which he remarked: “A city with one newspaper . . . is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.” In his commentary, Wallach recalls the 1952 film classic Deadline U.S.A., about the closing of a newspaper, but concludes that despite changes in character and function, “The deadline for the newspaper as a medium has not arrived yet.”
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