Book Reports
Journalism After September 11 (Communication
and Society) War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 |
In Journalism After September 11, a transatlantic array of leading British and American academic writers on journalism assess whether and how the events of that day have changed journalism forever. There is no consensus: the sixteen contributors assert variously that journalism performed at its best, that it abandoned principle under pressure to be patriotic, that it helped to comfort and unify, that it failed to accommodate vital public debate.
Academics, like most other people, have preconceived opinions. Their difference from most other people, however, is that academics have opinions buttressed by their own research. In too many cases herein, these scholars look narrowly for elements in the September 11 cataclysms that buttress their previous work, and generously cite themselves in their references.
Fortunately, a few break with this pattern. Jay Rosen of New York University offers an acute quasi-personal essay. Michael Schudson, author of The Sociology of News, finds qualities he did not expect:
"Journalism after September 11 showed that it could not only inform but console, not only make us think but make us cry" — this of course before many of the news media turned to marketing tinny patriotism.
The most ambitious essay is that by James W. Carey of Columbia University, in which he attempts to appraise journalism after September 11 in the context of the history of the American press over the last century. He summarizes a period that saw the rise of an independent, vigorous press, which began to "unravel in excess" after Watergate and began to neglect its most basic obligations as it was absorbed into the information/entertainment industry. The crisis of September 11 demonstrated, however briefly, journalism's ability to rise to a high level of public responsibility.
But Carey believes that there has been, or will be, an inevitable relapse, a resumption of a journalism governed by market and entertainment norms. He responds with a startling proposal for reform — that journalism must be detached from the global conglomerates to enable it to carry out its legitimate purposes in a democratic society. He rightly expects "howls of protest" and, no doubt, incredulity. Nor does he say specifically how to perform the surgery, beyond implying that government must help.
The brief study, War of Words, by Sandra Silberstein, an "applied linguist," offers shrewd analysis of the language used to create patriotic consensus after September 11. She finds in the language of speeches by President Bush some of the effectiveness, and misrepresentation, of Franklin D. Roosevelt's addresses after Pearl Harbor. She shrewdly analyzes how the comments by Peter Jennings while broadcasting the service on September 14 at the National Cathedral helped define the event as one of the "great national occasions." Using transcripts, she finds that television reporters interviewing survivors tried to push entertainment values, cutting off dull interviewees or trying to extract lurid detail, to the point that one interviewee, asked if she had seen people bleeding, responded, "You want blood, here's blood . . . ," displayed her wounded leg, and walked away.
| Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting,
Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America By Joshua Brown University of California Press 361 pp. $49.95 |
Joshua Brown, executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York, examines here the half-century when engravings supplied the pictorial content of journalism. He focuses primarily on Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, the long-lived weekly founded in 1855 by an English immigrant engraver named Henry Carter, who signed his work "Frank Leslie." For decades, engravings, elaborated from on-the-scene sketches, captured scenes and violent action beyond the cumbersome photography of the era. Offering dozens of examples, Brown tracks the portrayal by Leslie's of American society through the Civil War almost to the end of the century, noting that the engravings often portrayed a nation more diverse than was conceded in the publication's editorials. In the end, half-tone illustrations and photographs took over, but Brown successfully demonstrates the richness and multiplicity of the engravers' heritage.
| First Job: A Memoir of Growing Up at Work By Rinker Buck Public Affairs 397 pp. $27.50 |
In 1973, Rinker Buck was a "book turd," freshly graduated from Bowdoin, motorcycling through New England in search of the rest of his life. With no previous thought of becoming a journalist, he stopped on a whim at The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and met the two staunch New Englanders who had made the Eagle by reputation one of the best small newspapers in the country. One was the publisher, Lawrence K. "Pete" Miller; the other was the Pulitzer-winning editorialist, Roger Bourne Linscott. They took an interest when Buck refused to cower and eventually offered him the traditional drudgery of writing obituaries. But this is no dreary chronicle of the making of a reporter. To be sure, there are journalistic episodes that stand out — Buck's interview with John Wayne, in Massachusetts to see Norman Rockwell; his coverage of the great Berkshires tornado; the deflation of his first exposé, of a fraud hired by the local hospital. But he offers even more a charming and funny tale of unfettered and randy youth, of sexual adventure, small-town bars, and the great outdoors. A couple of years later, he responded to the lure of New York. "But," he concludes, "the life I was racing toward would never be as intense as the one I was leaving behind."
