At Large : Let a little air out of the windbag
To all those who've let me know, repeatedly and in unmistakable terms, that they don't believe everything they read in the newspapers, I say, your skepticism has not been misplaced. Actually, it is a miracle and a thrill to hear that you believe some of it.
Having had years to watch and even bear a hand in the preparation of news reports, I know it's a messy business. Boiled down to the bitter residue, it's people dealing with people, and we know how risky that can be.
A jumble of aspirations, motivations, allegiances, and limited understandings are busy on both sides of the reporter-newsmaker divide. Everyone realizes that each member of the audience watching a car wreck (or health insurance reform legislation) reports the sequence of events differently. And, it's not merely because vantage points or perspectives vary. And, then there's the driver, whose story may not match that of any of the observers and whose interest in the details will certainly reflect a unique bias.
What you read in the newspaper is, like the eyewitness's testimony given the investigating officer at the scene of the crime, a version of the truth, with some of the details, as seen from one viewpoint, by one imperfect observer. It's worth something, but what?
Of course, I shouldn't move on without mentioning you, the devoted readers. Because, you bring something to the newspaper you read. You aren't innocent of opinions and allegiances, prejudices and biases. I've read news reports that appear to be about this, and soon after heard you complain because the very same story was, in your view, about that. And, by the way, it was deficient and didn't belong in the paper at all.
To make it all worse, news hounds these days call themselves journalists. They inflate themselves generously with tales of their unusual access to newsmakers. They opinionate mercilessly. They dress better than you and I, and get paid more, and they never met a cable TV talk show host whose invitation they'd decline. They can't imagine how the republic could stagger on without them. They explain archly that they are the keepers of the record. They write the "first draft of history." They even demand that government, which it is their mission to watch over and unmask, shield them from government snooping into their activities, their sources, even their knowledge of criminal activities. And, astonishingly, they wouldn't mind some government intervention to bring the Internet to heel, because it's stealing their advertising dollars as well as their readers. They're far too important, don't you know, to stand still for that.
The new breed of news reporters, the ones who know everything, are never wrong, demand the reader's respectful genuflection before every column of type, and hoist a collegial few brewskies with the big shots about whom they write may not like Eric Burns's new book as much as I do. I think Mr. Burns, a reporter and writer with a particular interest in how the news business works, is onto something. His latest, "All the News Unfit to Print - How Things Were ... and How They Were Reported" (John Wiley & Sons Inc., Hoboken, 2009) has the pleasing effect of hauling newspapering (now journalism, pronounced in hushed and reverent terms) back down to earth and daily life.
"Usually," Mr. Burns begins, "when people say that journalism is the first draft of history, they are praising reporters for laying a foundation of knowledge that will last the ages. But there is another way to interpret the sentiment - as a warning to historians to build on firmer ground."
Historian David McCullough of Music Street will tell you that newspapers are invaluable sources as he researches the complicated and extraordinary lives of the subjects of his wonderful stories and illuminating biographies. He will also tell you that newspapers are never the only sources, and he will tell you, as he has told me, that, in particular, the attention paid by news reporters to the preparation of biographies is especially valuable to the biographer and historian. But, he's also told me, his penetrating eye fixed critically upon me, that newspapers often do a poor job with obituaries.
Thankfully, the difficult sounding and sifting that historians do cannot depend too heavily on newspapers. "Most Europeans and Americans [of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries]," Mr. Burns explains, "... were citizens of a world that seemed so small it did not encourage curiosity, a world 'in which news could not thrive as a commodity because it barely existed as a concept.'" That appears to be a reviving attitude, thanks in part to the scattershot and time wasting diversions of the web.
Readers back then (and some today) couldn't see why what was published in newspapers might possibly matter. And, "if the readers were not dedicated to the product, why should the writers be? The latter wanted to earn a living, and on occasion have a lark, more than they wanted to provide the historical record on which future generations would depend. As a result, that record has often been riddled with errors, omissions, and pranks." Reporter Burns does not flinch.
But, news reporting, if it has not always been accurate, has over time served readers well, attracting, by its originality and sometimes peculiar perspective, their interest to matters that would certainly have gone unnoticed. Mr. Burns uses H.L. Mencken to illustrate the point. Mencken is a favorite of mine, though tarnished, I know.
"There has never been anyone like Mencken in an American newsroom," Mr. Burns explains, "and given the nature of journalism today, with its appeal to base emotions, simpleminded analysis, and a slobbering passion for the trivial, it seems certain that there will never be again."
But, Mr. Burns delights in Mencken's "rambling cadences, baroque vocabulary, ingenious metaphors, and exuberant, if pointed, sense of humor." For instance, Mr. Burns recalls Mencken writing of President Warren G. Harding's speech making: "a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."
Mencken was not a writer for the 21st Century. His impossible prejudices and blind spots would find no place in modern journalism, but he was original, imaginative, and exciting to read. He reached beyond what everyone else was pondering and ponderously writing about. And if, as so many readers remind me, and as Mencken certainly would have understood, they take what they read with a grain or two of salt, they are perfectly prepared to be rewarded by what newspapers have to offer, which is not always the truth.
"What ails the truth," according to Mencken, "is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing."
Of course, that may not be exactly what Mencken said. It is, after all, Burns quoting Mencken "recalling" Mark Twain. You'll have to take it for what it's worth.
