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Just the facts, Jack

It is possible to place the ruination of various generations of 20th century would-be writers at the feet of a handful of powerfully voiced (or well-promoted) authors: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson. Those, anyway, would be the reefs my particular ship foundered upon.

Some of that adds up to what was once called, with hope and honor and no small amount of ego, New Journalism. Which argued, New Journalism did (and I do) that the author is and the choices she/he makes are inevitably part of the story. That objective journalism is less honest than advocacy journalism in which the reader knows precisely where the writer's prejudices are.

I still think that's true. I also believe that nobody in the new journalism movement would have believed all journalism should be conducted according to those principals. Rather, New Journalism seemed to argue for its place at the table of public opinion. Or so I remember it.

Which is to say that we hoped New Journalism -- and I was a pup then, hardly a participant except by way of imitation -- could in some way bring us closer to the truth. And the exploits of Mssrs. Woodward and Bernstein...the heroic exploits of Mssrs. Woodward and Bernstein...clearly argued, to me anyhow, that both forms of journalism could and should have their place.

I am burying my lead, as they say. But, then, my only formal journalism instruction came in high school.

I came across this lead paragraph on page three of this morning's Lexington Herald. It is bylined Charles Babington (Associated Press):

"WASHINGTON -- Congressional Democrats have chosen an unlikely source to pay for the bulk of their proposed $35 billion increase in children's health coverage: people with relatively little money and education."

I should note that the headline reads: SMOKERS WOULD PAY FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH COVERAGE.

The AP report continues:

"The program expansion passed by the House and Senate last week would be financed by a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax, taking it from the current 39 cents to $1 per pack. Low-income people smoke more heavily than do wealthier people in the United States, making cigarette taxes a regressive form of revenue."

Now, I don't mean to take a position on the political issue at hand. (I presume, if you visit here often, you can guess.) And Kentucky is a tobacco-producing state; the weed is presented as a family tradition, as a lifestyle, as one more example of the decline of rural farm communities.

But those two paragraphs -- and the entire eight paragraphs of the story -- proceed along that path. It is not what I was trained to call objective journalism, nor is it identified as analysis.

Perhaps that's old school.

Dated.

I was baffled to see Jack Cafferty featured on a one-hour special on CNN flogging his new book. Apparently several other talking heads for the network have been accorded that same bully pulpit, and one can only guess how and whether CNN or one of its corporate affiliates participate financially in sales of those books.

It seems wrong to me. Just wrong.

In the early days of this Republic the newspapers were pointedly partisan.

We do not seem well-served to have our media move back in that direction.

I cannot speak to the merits of Dan Rather's suit against CBS, and it seems a rather sad affair in many ways. And yet he seems right: The truth of the "60 Minutes" examination of President Bush's Vietnam war record was subsumed to one particular error (and a glaring error to anybody used to looking at typewriter type, but I suppose there aren't so many of us). Even more to the point, he seems right that it is dangerous to have so much of the media, which shapes so much of whatever public opinion we have, in the hands of so few corporations of such great size.

We are in danger of learning not to believe in the truth.

Posted by grant on October 1, 2007 11:28 AM | Permalink