Book Reports
The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists,
and the Stories That Shape the Political World |
This is a back-to-basics book. Jamieson, dean at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, and Waldman, associate director of the school's think tank, didactically review press blundering on the most important political stories of recent years; they center on an extended and damning analysis of coverage of the 2000 election and postelection controversies. The central flaw they detect throughout is journalism that blurs into grander forms than mere reporting — amateur psychoanalyzing, hairtrigger prophesying, flagwaving, or event-shaping, as in the many stories prematurely treating George Bush as the president-elect. (The book twice quotes Dan Rather's embarrassingly over-conclusory statement in the late hours of election night: "Sip it, savor it, cup it, photostat it, underline it in red, press it in a book, put it in an album, hang it on the wall. George Bush is the next president of the United States.") Jamieson and Waldman find that journalists have lost sight of their obligation to serve as "custodians of fact." They call for greater self-consciousness in political coverage: "Reporters have to be cognizant not only of the methods that politicians and other political actors use to bend the truth, but of the lenses through which the reporters themselves see events and the frames that structure the stories they tell about them."
Newsworkers Unite: Labor, Convergence,
and North American Newspapers |
One is likely to read the title of this monograph as a slogan: "Newsworkers Unite!" Wrong. It is merely a declarative: "Newsworkers Unite," an account of how North American newspaper unions, long divided into traditional crafts, responded to changing technology and corporate consolidations by creating new alliances, often with unions outside the news field. McKercher, a professor at the school of journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, tells an intricate story, emphasizing its Canadian aspects. Necessarily — because such unions as The Newspaper Guild cross international boundaries — she describes what happened in the United States as well, notably the failed merger between the guild and the International Typographical Union and the guild's later absorption into the Communications Workers of America. McKercher is uncertain about the future, suggesting that mergers have helped the unions survive without necessarily making them more powerful.
War Torn: Stories of War from the Women
Reporters Who Covered Vietnam |
The effect of reading this collection — the testimony thirty-odd years later of nine women who worked as journalists in Vietnam — is cumulative and saddening. The nine were, by and large, latecomers to the war, many the same age as the soldiers whose ordeals they covered, and none elite enough to make it into the histories that celebrate Halberstam, Bigart, or Higgins. Only Kate Webb of UPI, who was captured by North Vietnamese, declared dead, and released, was widely known at the time. They were brought together by Christine Martin, dean of West Virginia University's journalism school, and this book grew out of that meeting. They revealed that Vietnam — the war, the country, love, turmoil — was still embedded in their hearts and minds. Of course, each of them faced difficulty in being accepted as women covering combat, but what has stuck with them most is less their role as pioneers than what they saw — the waste and tragedy imposed on a beautiful country and its people.
Reporting Civil Rights; Part One: American
Journalism 1941-1963; Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973 |
Over the last twenty years, the nonprofit Library of America
has performed an immense service in offering accurate, readable
editions of American literature. One of the tasks it has undertaken
is the preservation between covers of the literature of American
journalism. It issued two volumes each on coverage of World War
II and the Vietnam War. The two new volumes titled Reporting Civil
Rights offer a generous range of the reporting and comment on
three decades of that historic struggle — from A. Philip
Randolph's call in 1941 for a march on Washington for integration
of the armed forces and defense industries to Alice Walker's
rueful look backward in 1973. More than 150 writers are represented,
black and white, mainstream and dissident, eloquent and blunt;
one is tempted simply to list names. Some articles are exciting
surprises, such as Sterling A. Brown's "Out of Their
Mouths," drawn from the voices of blacks and whites in November
1942; others are familiar but still gripping, such as Relman Morin's
crisp AP story on school integration from Little Rock in 1957,
dictated from a telephone booth under attack by the white mob.
The volumes contain a detailed chronology and biographical information
on the writers.
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