Journalism

Every once in a while, I will read something that seems uniquely precise in describing aspects of my own condition. A piece from early last fall by Jerome Weeks—at that point book critic for the Dallas Morning News—was very much a case of that happening:

As Mark Twain observed, anything you’re not obliged to do is play. Anything else is work. And as a book journalist, one is obliged to race after the Media Now-Now-Now – what critic David Denby once called “information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”

What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites. But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.

That’s amazing but it means keeping up is a full-time sprint. A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days. Recall those dreaded high school assignments: A bad book can seem like a prison sentence.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much….

As if the good people of Grand Forks, North Dakota don’t have enough to worry about, a local news station has alerted them to the menace of a mutant subculture:

[ we’re having a glitch with the video embed, but it’s also available here. ]

This is tone-deaf even by TV news standards. Even someone who will never see 40 again (yours truly for example) can tell that at least some of the material presented here as typical of “emo culture” has obvious satirical intent.
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The cover story to this week’s issue of The Nation is an article by Christopher Phelps on the new Students for a Democratic Society. I read it in a couple of earlier drafts, and can’t imagine anything more fair to the young people who are being radicalized by the war. As Phelps says, it’s not that they tend to know a lot about the old SDS and want to relive it. They aren’t antiquarians. But “democratic society” just sounds like a good a name for what they want—and they know better than to think they are living in one now.
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Last month I mentioned that Political Theory Daily Review had found a sponsor—the magazine Bookforum. As it happens, the new issue just arrived in my mailbox yesterday, even before it reached the newstand, which doesn’t always happen.

Well, now you can read it, too. As of the April/May issue, nearly all of the contents are online for free. It looks like a couple of items are print-only, out of about 45.

I’m still partial to the paper version. Easier on the eyeballs, for one thing; plus, the ads in a book publication actually count as information that I want to see. But at a time when most newspaper review sections are shrinking when not disappearing, it’s good that one publication seems to be doing well enough to make its content available to the largest possible readership.

I came across James Fallows’ 1991 piece on The Economist (to which my subscription has just lapsed), The Economics of the Colonial Cringe, and thought it pretty interesting. On the one hand, this seems a little dated:

In functional terms, The Economist is more like the Wall Street Journal than like any other American publication. In each there’s a kind of war going on between the news articles and the editorial pages. The news articles are not overly biased and try to convey the complex reality of, well, the news. Meanwhile, the editorials and “leaders” push a consistent line, often at odds with the facts reported on the news pages of the same issue.

If there’s any marked difference these days between the line touted in the editorial pages line and the perspective of the news articles, I can’t detect it. The WSJ seems to still have a firewall between the two (although in fairness its editorial pages are also far loopier than those of the Economist).

On the other, this still seems bang on the mark.

The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist’s success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact. American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as “Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex.” (The BBC radio shows “My Word” and “My Music,” carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.) Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately — and then tried to think what the steps should be.

UK viewers were treated the other night to a superficially impressive global-warming denialist documentary: The Great Global Warming Swindle . The programme was the work of Martin Durkin who has previous form for dodgy science documentaries. Medialens has a reasonably comprehensive account of the film’s reception and also gives an idea of the contents. See also George Monbiot in the Guardian and Steve Connor in the Independent. Central to the film was the testimony of the MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch. Wunsch’s own account of how his material was edited and presented so as to give a misleading account of his actual views is here .

Randy Cohen has caught up with CT, and is looking at the issue of whether it is ok to use online information to make judgments about applicants to college (not grad school, as we did). He says it is not. Not to be mean, but his judgement includes an extraordinarily bad analogy:

You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.

Here I am, writing on a blog, using my own name, hoping that somebody might be stimulated or entertained, or best of all influenced, by what I write, and Randy Cohen thinks that nobody should be reading. The analogy is, in fact, with a diary that I publish and give away for free. I can see there might be a problem with selective reading of blogs (trying to find dirt on someone one wants to reject anyway) and certainly admissions officials should have some sort of protocol for this, but people who make embarrassing comments on their own blog under their own name in public should expect that other people might read and be influenced by them. Writing a diary which one keeps under lock and key seems sufficiently different that anyone who gave a moment’s thought would get it.

Via Shakespeare’s Sister, word of what sounds like an urban legend, though evidently it’s for real. But like many urban legends, it’s also a cautionary tale. An Atlanta TV station, doing a hard-hitting story on the new whole-wheat donut from Krispy Kreme, used an image someone in the art department probably grabbed online shortly before going on the air:

(You can watch the video at ShakeSis.)

Ordinarily I would expect this to have been discussed at Romenesko by now, but so far don’t see anything. All the more surprising given the nonstop debates there in 2003 over nuances of the journalistic ethics involved in covering the opening of Krispy Kreme stores as news.

Suggestion to the Poynter Institute, which not only hosts the Romenesko news blog but sponsors workshops and seminars for editors and reporters: Devote a course to the perils of Google Images, and soon.

As of today, Political Theory Daily Review is sponsored by Bookforum magazine. For a while now, PTDR has provided the widest and deepest pool of links to late-breaking, scholarly, and/or esoteric articles available on the web.
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As Brad mentioned a couple of days ago, Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting and worrying factlet on his blog.

Having tea with my friend Abe McLaughlin this afternoon, he mentioned that, of the two hundred fifty foreign correspondents, one hundred are employed by the Wall Street Journal. I wondered about the geographical distribution of that hundred and the other reporters – would we find a huge concentration of journalists in Iraq and Israel? Would we find any in Africa other than in Cairo and Jo’burg?

The problem, it seems to me, isn’t only about geographic distribution of interest; it’s about the kinds of issues that these correspondents are likely to write stories about. As conventional newspapers cut down on their overseas reporting, it’s ever more necessary to turn to specialized newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to get solid, detailed coverage of what’s happening outside the US. But even if these are both genuinely great newspapers (the WSJ’s news reportage, as opposed to its editorial pages, is excellent), they tend necessarily to focus on issues that US and UK businesspeople are interested in, and subtly to spin their stories accordingly. This means that plenty of stories that would be of interest to non-business people don’t get reported on at all well in the major English language press, and that when they do get reported, their coverage often subtly reflects the priorities of a pretty specific and limited set of social interests. Nor are the blogosphere and related forms of information gathering at all a perfect solution for this problem. Even if blogs like Abu Aardvark provide insight into the Arab media that you don’t get from the mainstream press, Ethan’s research on ‘global attention profiles’ suggests that the blogosphere is actually worse in some respects than mainstream media in drawing attention to under-reported parts of the world (elite bloggers tend to do a little better, but not much). I suspect (but don’t have any smoking gun evidence to prove this) that the same kinds of distortion characterize issue coverage too.

Eugene Goodheart writes in the latest issue of Dissent, in an article entitled The London Review of Hezbollah :

The London Review of Books is an egregious instance of this one-sidedness. Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel [emphasis added], and the target is not simply the governing party, but the whole spectrum of Israeli political life. Absent from the columns of the Review are the injustices and cruelties of political Islam [emphasis added].

Perhaps accuracy is not Mr Goodheart’s strong point. Maybe he is merely unfortunate that the latest issue of the LRB contains an article by James Meek that begins:

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors.

But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s online archives reveals a total of five articles about the Middle East in 2006, some of which are, of course, about Iraq. To those should no doubt be added the well-known Mearsheimer and Walt piece. The LRB is published 24 times a year.

UPDATE: it turns out (thanks to Henry and K. Williams in the comments below) that the LRB’s online indexing is crap. The final para above is incorrect, but the basic point stands and the following para would have been better:

But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s back issues reveals a total of 17 articles critical of Israel in 2006, but ten of these come from two issues published during the invasion of Lebanon (and the LRB is published 24 times a year). It is certainly false to say, as Goodheart does, that “Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel.”