Book Reports
The Brass Check: A Study of American
Journalism |
This unruly classic, originally published by the author in 1919 and last reprinted fifty-seven years ago by Haldeman-Julius, the old socialist publishing house, has now been trotted out into the light of the twenty-first century. In their introduction, Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott of the University of Illinois make The Brass Check — the title comes from a token given by a customer to a prostitute — sound a little solemn, going so far as to call it a “monograph.” In fact, no writer on the press has ever matched the old muckraker Sinclair (1878-1968) for exuberance and abundance. He is always personal, but always reaching beyond the personal; he did not fear to use his own divorce to illustrate newspaper malice and misfeasance. His portrait of the press of his era (and in particular The Associated Press) is thoroughly disheartening — an institution in thrall to corporate policy and publishers’ whims, using untruths, dirty tricks, and blackouts to serve political ends. McChesney and Scott concede that journalism has cleaned up its act since then, but contend, with good reason, that Sinclair’s thesis is still valid — that America lacks a press worthy of a democracy.
Democracy and the News |
Herbert J. Gans, the Columbia sociologist and author of the durable Deciding What’s News (1979), provides a contemporary view of many of the issues raised in The Brass Check. Where Sinclair was combative and exuberant, Gans is dour and realistic. He sees the health of the American polity and of American journalism as closely linked, and both as undergoing long-term disempowerment — the public unable to make government responsive, journalism unable to retain the public’s attention as news becomes lost in the swamp of entertainment media. At the end, he offers some possibly useful suggestions, such as changes in news formats and noncorporate ownership for news organizations, but at the same time one can almost visualize him keeping his finger on the patient’s fluttering pulse.
Breach Of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage
in The Age of Corporate Newspapering |
Roberts, late of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, and Kunkel, dean of journalism at the University of Maryland, have provided a valuable array of articles tracing what has become of coverage of statehouses, Washington, and international affairs, written by such solid journalists as, for example, John Herbers, James McCartney, and Peter Arnett. A recurring theme is the damage done by the pursuit in the 1970s and 1980s of the reader-friendly, undemanding journalism recommended by consultants, and the slowness of the repairs. These articles originally appeared in American Journalism Review in 1998 and 1999. Although they have been updated lightly, they suffer from having waited four years for republication.
The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign
Policy and Intervention |
A “CNN effect,” for those who have not encountered the term, is the idea that the impact of continuous coverage by major media of a humanitarian crisis can cause a shift in policy toward intervention. Piers Robinson, a scholar at the University of Liverpool, reinvestigates the crises of the 1990s — Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Serbia, and the all but forgotten American intervention in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. His study is complex and laced with skepticism, but he ultimately finds that only the air-power interventions in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995 revealed a “strong” CNN effect. In Somalia and Rwanda, on the other hand, he sees the news media in the more familiar role of clearing the way for pre-existing official policies. A further implication can be read into this book — that there will be no CNN effect in such crises as the current American confrontation with Iraq, that the news media will revert to their more familiar role of “manufacturing consent.”
Dispatches and Dictators: Ralph Barnes
for the Herald Tribune |
Thanks to his daughters, who provided not only access but a subsidy, the life of Ralph Barnes is now recorded by an industrious historian. Barnes was a member of the greatest generation of foreign correspondents, the Americans who covered the rise of totalitarianism. An Oregonian, Barnes made his way to Paris in 1926, joined the foreign staff of the New York Herald Tribune, and provided tough, analytical coverage from Rome, Moscow, and Berlin. He flew on an RAF bomber mission from Greece, and was killed, just past forty — no prizes, no memoirs, and forgotten until now.
The Associated Press Guide to Punctuation |
The Associated Press Stylebook devotes
about fifteen pages to punctuation and capitalization, and has
related entries scattered throughout. This spin-off by Rene J.
Cappon, identified as the AP’s “word guru,” consolidates
this material into one compact volume and offers ingratiating
introductory disquisitions on each subtopic. E.g.: “Quotation
marks are surely the most bland and colorless of punctuation signs.”
In Cappon’s reckoning, the most important mark is the comma,
to which he gives eighteen pages, with four pages devoted to showing
when commas should be omitted. He regards them as the “virtuosos,”
temperamental and likely to cause trouble. They, often, do.
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