Last week, I met Todd Gitlin in the studio at Inside Higher Ed’s world headquarters on K Street to record an interview about his new book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent. (The “studio” is actually the publisher’s office, since it has the best acoustics. Podcasting has become a routine if not a regular thing for us; here’s the backlist. I’m still getting used to the format itself and trying to think about its potential as a way to supplement my column, since merely duplicating content of a written piece in audio (or vice versa) isn’t very interesting or appealing.
At TPM Cafe, Gitlin expresses what seems like surprised appreciation to his interviewer “for actually having read the book.” Given journalistic norms, that probably means I’ll never get a steady gig again, and certainly not in radio or TV.
But in consequence of this peculiar tendency, I have notes indicating that Henry’s netroots essay is quoted on page 184 and then again on page 185.
{ 4 comments }
Michael Bérubé 10.05.07 at 5:10 am
That was really nasty of Gitlin to suggest you’d read his book. I mean, c’mon — he knows his way around American journamalism, he knows the drill — he knew perfectly well that this would be your death knell for Chris Matthews’ party circuit.
All the same, your ante-antepenultimate paragraph is a marvelous thing:
To get the full effect of this little graf, I think, you have to read it aloud — the first two and a half sentences in the voice of the late Richard Rorty, the rest (beginning with “the right to get drunk”) in the voice of Lewis Black. A cross between Richard Rorty and Lewis Black: I have no higher praise in my lexicon.
Doug 10.05.07 at 6:50 am
Moira Gunn (of TechNation) reads pretty much all of the books for the people she interviews; it doesn’t seem to have done her much harm.
Scott McLemee 10.05.07 at 2:47 pm
Actually, Gitlin didn’t recommend that. It’s my own damned fault. At one news organization, the tendency to read earlier books by an author I was profiling — and then, what was much worse, to discuss them in the piece — was regarded as peculiar and something to be discouraged. It wasn’t forbidden, of course, but there were strong hints that it really was not necessary.
Steven Wasserman’s long article in the latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review suggests this was not an unusual situation.
Michael Bérubé 10.05.07 at 6:14 pm
Oops! I meant “read” in the past tense, as in “it was really nasty of Gitlin to suggest that you had read his book.” Damn this ambiguous language! Give me Latin, where the pluperfect is easy to spot, even in blogs.
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