Media and Journalism
The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly
edited by Robert Vare
This collection of some of the best, most consequential works to have appeared in what has consistently been, for a century and a half, one of the world's greatest magazines makes an excellent addition to any bookshelf or bedside. It's organized thematically into ten sections: Firsts, Black and White, Gods and Monsters, Behind the Scenes, States of War, Controversies, Capitalism and Its Discontents, The Natural World, Crowd Pleasers and The American Idea.
Excerpts that may be read online include
James Russell Lowell's "Lincoln for President";
Henry David Thoreau's "Walking";
Mark Twain's "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It";
John Muir's "The American Forests";
Woodrow Wilson's "The Ideals of America";
Albert Einstein's "Atomic War or Peace";
Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think";
Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail";
William Greider's "The Education of David Stockman"; and
James Fallows' "The Fifty-first State?"
The American Idea ... published October 16, 2007 by Doubleday
The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons
by Donald Dewey
This history of America's contributions to "the ungentlemanly art" features over 200 cartoons from the like of
Thomas Nast,
Puck,
Bill Mauldin,
Herblock and
Jules Feiffer. Sections on presidents; war and foreign relations; ethnic, racial and religious issues; local and domestic politics; and business and labor. Dewey begins with a 70-page introductory essay on political cartoons that asks,
Have they been only an entertainment all along, with congressmen and presidents taking the role of mothers-in-law for joke telling? ... When all the dust has settled from the blowups between editorial directors and art departments over slants on a given issue, have cartoonists still delivered only graphic versions of the self-important editorials newspaper print every day to no surprise or fascination? Ultimately, is their function just to provide layout variety, offering a change of pace from words, photos, and advertisements?
The Art of Ill Will ... published September 1, 2007 by NYU Press
Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate
by Alicia C. Shepard
With the help of a just-opened archive and over 175 interviews, an award-winning media critic documents how Watergate affected the lives of "the journalists who single-handedly toppled a president." For openers, they didn't, Shepard shows; this is no hagiography, but a brisk, detailed, evenhanded study of two historically crucial figures. Shepard's particularly interested in how Woodward and Bernstein have been affected by the enormous fame and hero status that they achieved while still in their twenties. Woodward has, of course, parlayed his share of the spotlight into a spectacularly successful career that his relatively modest abilities probably wouldn't otherwise have yielded -- his strong work ethic and apparently sincere concerns with honesty and objectivity notwithstanding. Meanwhile, Bernstein's superior but undependable talent has been largely dissipated as he's "dined off Watergate for the last three decades."
Woodward and Bernstein ... published October 20, 2006 by Wiley
Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the
People Who Fight Back by Amy and David Goodman
"Instead of learning from the media what is actually going on in the world, we get static -- a veil of distortions and half-truths that obscure reality." So say Amy Goodman, host of the "left-wing" TV/Radio/Internet news program Democracy Now!; and her co-author brother David, who writes for Mother Jones. They use both distilled interviews and their own research findings to show not only how the MSM fails to uncover governments' most egregious lies, but how it enthusiastically helps (e.g., Judy Miller) governments to peddle those lies. The media couldn't be co-opted so easily on Katrina, though. Say the authors:
If only the media had acted in Iraq as they did in New Orleans, a consistent theme would become apparent: when it comes to overseeing the deaths of thousands of people and destroying governments, George Bush is an expert. But when it comes to saving lives and rebuilding societies -- as goes Iraq, so goes New Orleans -- and America.
The book concludes with a section on "exceptions to the rulers" such as Cindy Sheehan and The Yes Men.
Static ... published September 5, 2006 by Hyperion
All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of
Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone by Myra MacPherson
This is the first major bio of I.F. Stone (1907-89), one of 20th-century America's most influential journalists. Known for the independent newsletter he published from 1953-71, I.F. Stone's Weekly, he made a career of scouring obscure government documents and uncovering major stories that mainstream journalists had missed. Stone wrote for several Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York newspapers in the 1930s before joining The Nation at decade's end, and then the NY City leftist (and to some extent communist) paper PM shortly thereafter. Five years after PM folded in 1948, Stone drew inspiration from muckraking journalist George Seldes and began publishing his independent newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly, initially devoting much of his energy to campaigning against McCarthyism. In 1964 he was the only major American journalist to challenge LBJ on the official Tonkin Gulf story, and he continued to be one of the Vietnam War's foremost critics. After retiring, he learned ancient Greek and wrote the bestselling The Trial of Socrates.
All Governments Lie ... published August 29, 2006 by Scribner
Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert
The mainstream media are deeply complicit in most of the worst crimes of the Bush administration, a senior Salon writer shows. Those of us who've watched in horror as the like of Judy Miller turned blind eyes to, or were co-opted by, the worst of BushCo's insanity will find relatively little that's new here. But to see so many instances of the MSM's rolling over for Bush -- all in the space of one little book -- is extraordinary. While the MSM shilled for BushCo, Boehlert shows, they ignored "liberals" such as Ted Kennedy:
In September 2002 he made a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about the war. It garnered exactly one sentence -- thirty-six words total -- of coverage from the Post, which in 2002 printed more than a thousand articles and columns, totaling perhaps 1 million words about Iraq, but only set aside thirty-six words for Kennedy's antiwar cry.
Boehlert's views and those of Craig (Attack the Messenger) Crawford blend salutarily.
Lapdogs ... published May 9, 2006 by Free Press
Public Radio: Behind the Voices by Lisa A. Phillips
An award-winning journalist who's worked at six public radio stations in five states, currently a journalism prof at SUNY-New Palz, delivers 43 brief biographical sketches of some of NPR's most familiar voices. Longtime NPR listeners will likely find Phillips' collection to be delightful -- charmingly written with and for an NPR devotee's sensibilities. Phillips says she wrote the book
because I love public radio and I've always been curious about the lives behind the voices. I also hope that deepening the connection between these voices and their listeners is one way to help safeguard public broadcasting in a time when political scrutiny of the medium is increasing and threats to its funding abound. What I've discovered along the way is that the lives of public radio personalities have many of the qualities of the radio they bring us. Their stories are fascinating and significant, stories that enlarge our sense of history and humanity.
Public Radio ... published May 9, 2006 by CDS / Perseus
The Man Who Invented Fidel by Anthony DePalma
In February 1957, Fidel Castro's prospects were not promising. He'd disappeared into southeastern Cuba's Sierra Maestra Mountains after his Dec. 2, 1956 return to the island and had been given up for dead by the world's press. Miraculously for Castro, it was then that he met Herbert Matthews: a well seasoned war correspondent and by then a venerable New York Times editorial writer. Fortunately for Fidel, despite Matthews' weighty credentials, he also suffered from what is for journalists a fatal flaw: a tendency to become infatuated with his subjects. (Matthews had, for example, said nice things about Italian fascism while covering the Abyssinian crisis in 1935, but the next year he was chums with Hemingway and the Spanish Republicans.) DePalma shows how Castro reeled Matthews in, and we see some of the prices that the once-respected journalist -- not to mention a badly misled world -- paid for his repeated failures to report that which was salient and significant about Fidel Castro.
The Man Who Invented Fidel ... published April 24, 2006 by Public Affairs Books
Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas A. Basbanes
One of the world's most renowned bibliophiles shows that books have the power to change people and thereby to change history. In so doing, he explores the readings of historically consequential figures such as John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Helen Keller. Also featured are some thought provoking interviews about books with the like of David McCullough and Harold Bloom.
Basbanes' final chapter tells of an alternative sentencing program centered on the English-professor supervised reading and discussion of selected books. Those involved with the program cite The Old Man and the Sea's Santiago as the character who provokes the liveliest discussion among participants. Says a probation officer, " '[Santiago's] heroism, his endurance, the pain he goes through, speaks to these people in ways they understand. Literature does this.' " Basbanes' interest here, and throughout the book, is with the reader -- a refreshing and important change of perspective from all-too-common paeans to writers.
Every Book Its Reader ... published November 29, 2005 by Harper Collins
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight by Marc Weingarten
The New Journalism of the late '60s and '70s -- that of Wolfe, Thompson, and others -- owes debts to writers including Swift, Dickens, and Orwell. Weingarten also shows that editors such as Clay Felker and Jann Wenner helped sire a genre that proved so apt for an era that often seemed surrealistically out of joint. Said Weingarten recently,
Like Wolfe, Thompson recognised one salient fact of life in the 60s: the traditional tools of reporting would be inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social change. War, assassination, rock, drugs, hippies, Yippies, Nixon -- how could a traditional "just the facts" reporter dare to impose a neat and symmetrical order on such chaos?
And so, for a time, Thompson, et. al. challenged that chaos with their own and sometimes found sanity in the vortex. And sometimes not. Gang chronicles both, but perhaps with an sentimental bias toward the former.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight ... first published November 15, 2005 by Crown
Journalistas: 100 Years of the Best Writing and Reporting by Women Journalists ed. by Eleanor Mills and Kira Cochrane
A thoroughly enjoyable anthology: 70 articles of great variety, many of which qualify as both first-rate journalism and enduring literature. In the vast majority of these selections the talent and intellectual firepower positively crackle off the pages. From Nellie Bly to Naomi Wolf -- the best of the best. One of my favorite passages is a Christina Lamb lead that opens with what is surely one of the greatest first sentences ever:
The day I got out of hospital after having my first baby I went for tea with an evil dictator. My son Lourenço was in intensive care having been born at 29 weeks and my caesarian stitches felt as if they were tearing, but the first interview with General Augusto Pinochet under house arrest was a world exclusive. [full article]
Journalistas ... published November 9, 2005 by Carroll & Graf
Tragedy and Farce by John Nichols, Robert W. McChesney & Tom Tomorrow
[O]n the front pages of the largest newspapers, on the evening news, on the cable TV gabfests and drive-time radio talk shows that have become the town hall meetings of atomized society, the American political discourse is so empty and stilted as to be meaningless.
So say John Nichols and R.W. McChesney, two of America's leading progressive journalists; Tom Tomorrow adds his inimitably pointed political cartoons. There's not a lot of new ground broken in this mainstream media critique, but the tragedies and farces explored here (such as journalistic malfeasance in the run-up to Iraq; the Killian documents fiasco; and John Stewart on Crossfire) demand revisiting: they're of critical importance to the republic -- and the authors' distillations and analyses are lucid, succinct, and provocative. The volume closes with a strategy for developing a stronger, more effective media -- closer to that which James Madison (whom Nichols and McChesney repeatedly evoke) seems to have had in mind.
Tragedy and Farce ... first published November 3, 2005 by New Press
Attack the Messenger by Craig Crawford
A regular at Congressional Quarterly, The CBS Early Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Hardball, and Imus in the Morning explores politically motivated attacks on the media and the ways in which such assaults undermine democracy. Crawford shows that both conservatives and liberals engage in instrumental media bashing, but conservatives (and especially both Bush administrations) bear the brunt of his criticism. He also delves into the many kinds of attacks that "the public" now routinely directs at the "mainstream media." Some of this is merited and salutary, he says, but much is not, and a good deal of it is simply vile, as we see in a sampling of hate mail he's received. Inevitably, the vitriol that both politicians and the public spew on journalists leads to a downward spiral in the quality, tenacity, and pertinence of reporting -- and, as a result, to a degradation of democracy. "Give the media 'refs' a break," he concludes. "[M]ost of us are doing our best to protect democracy, serve the public, and keep the game in play."
Attack the Messenger ... published October 25, 2005 by Rowman & Littlefield
War Made Easy by Norman Solomon
Big Media doesn't merely look bad in this one -- it looks homicidal. Solomon devotes a chapter each to the most cliched and misleading war slogans that politicians typically use -- and that reporters, editors and publishers then hammer literally to death: This Guy is a Modern-Day Hilter; This is About Human Rights; Our Soldiers are Heroes, Theirs are Inhuman ... on and on the list goes. It's nauseatingly familiar.
Solomon makes his case simply, directly, and thoroughly, concluding with a fitting rebuke of an electorate that, despite its leaders' lies and Big Media's lethal cowardice and incompetence, surely knows better:
The writer James Baldwin challenged our desire to deny responsibility -- what he called "the fraudulent and expedient nature of the American innocence which has always been able to persuade itself that it does not know what it knows too well." Do we really not know that bombs financed by our tax dollars are turning life into death? Aren't we at least dimly aware that -- no matter how smooth and easy the news media and elected officials try to make it for us -- in faraway places there are people who are not so different from us who are being destroyed by what journalists and politicians glibly depict as necessary war?
War Made Easy ... first published June 24, 2005 by John Wiley & Sons
Al-Jazeera by Hugh Miles
The Arabic-language, satellite-TV news channel Al-Jazeera ("the Peninsula") has beamed from Qatar to the rest of the Arab Peninsula since 1996, and now has over 50 million viewers worldwide. As Al Jazeera International prepares to go 24 hours a day in English in 2006, award-winning journalist Hugh Miles (who grew up in the Middle East and studied Arabic at Oxford) takes stock of the channel's first decade.
Miles traces the station's origin to a $137 million startup grant from the emir of Qatar, who further enabled the enterprise by establishing substantial freedom of the press in the emirate. Although Al-Jazeera has been the frequent target of Western ire -- and sometimes American weaponry -- Miles says that its reporting reflects the attitudes of its audience, but that it is in many ways significantly more fair, balanced -- and accurate -- than that of Fox News. Its talk shows, he concedes, can be extremely inflammatory, sometimes featuring guests whom Americans might consider supporters of terrorism.
Al-Jazeera ... first published January 9, 2005 by Grove Press
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