Frank links to a review of News stories that set gold standard for journalism. It’s a book on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. I wonder if will read like last month’s fish wrap.
Category Archives: The Press
The friends of Carl
As I re-read Andrew Klavan/Keith Peterson’s books starring newspaperman John Wells (see yesterday’s review), I couldn’t help (though heaven knows I tried) thinking back to my own short, undistinguished career as a small town radio news reporter.
When I consider that time, I find incomprehensible that I could have actually believed that I (that is, me, this guy writing what you’re reading now) might possibly, under any circumstances, be able to do the job of a news reporter. Going out and speaking to strangers. Asking them questions. Pressing them when they’re reluctant to answer. I actually had the idea that I could learn to do those things.
Well, I was young then. All my life I’d heard people saying, “I used to be pretty shy, but I learned how to just get up and talk to people, and I found out there was nothing to be afraid of.” I figured I’d be the same, with time.
But enough of that. Enough to note that I tried it, long, long since, in the early 1980s.
And for some reason, reading about reporter John Wells and his dangerous life as a reporter reminded me of old Carl (not his real name), the guy who taught me the ropes at the radio station.
I don’t know why I’m disguising his name. I’d say the chances that he’s still alive are about the same as the chance that a top-flight literary agent is reading this right now and getting ready to e-mail me, offering me representation.
Because like John Wells, Carl was a degenerative (Not degenerate. There’s a difference). He smoked constantly, drank heavily and was in terrible physical condition (John Wells in the books was much the same, though thinner). When Carl showed me the job routine, it proved to consist of reading the morning paper, driving downtown, talking to a guy at the police station, and then adjourning to a local bar for refreshments.
Carl was not a motivated guy.
And then I remembered something I’d forgotten about Carl. Carl had odd fingers.
His fingers weren’t straight. They were crooked. They kind of zigzagged as your gaze followed them from knuckles to fingertips. They looked very odd when he typed.
His fingers looked, in fact, as if somebody had put his hand in a desk drawer one day, and then slammed the drawer shut. Like in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
And it occurred to me, I wonder if Carl got those fingers on the job.
Maybe once he’d been a hotshot, dynamic young reporter, out to break big stories and pull the curtain away from crime and corruption.
Maybe he made the wrong people mad. And maybe they taught him a lesson about going along and getting along, through introducing him to a desk drawer.
Maybe that’s what made him the sad case he was when I got to know him.
I have no way of knowing.
But it makes a story.
What Would You Do?
“Britain’s defense chief decided Friday to immediately pull Prince Harry out of Afghanistan after news of his deployment was leaked on the U.S. Web site the Drudge Report,” according to this morning’s AP report.
The ministry asked the media not to speculate on Harry’s location — or how and when he would return — until he was back in Britain. . . . The ministry deplored the leak by “elements of the foreign media.”
The ministry knew this was a problem, so they had plans for keeping Harry safe. But if you were a newsman with a strong website or paper like The Drudge Report, would you report the prince’s secret location? Do the people have a right to know something like this?
Incredible
Roger Kimball asks why anyone believes the NY Times about anything. He quotes fellow blogger Bob Owens to summarize:
[T]he bizarre emphasis of the New York Times upon veteran violence without the provision of context can be understood by remembering that Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, once said during the Vietnam War that if a North Vietnamese soldier ran into an American soldier, he’d rather see the American soldier shot.
NY Times Can’t Please Anyone
The NY Times has taken flak for hiring Bill Kristol as a regular op-ed columnist from readers and its own editor. Now, Gaius points to criticism from The Times of London. “Excuse me, but what on earth is going on?” Times’ op-ed editor Daniel Finkelstein asks. “[C]onsidering that Kristol represents a large strand of American opinion (even if it is a smaller strand of NYT reader opinion) it is entirely unremarkable that his columns should be commissioned.”
The American Spectator Online heads-up
A column by me about Hans Nielsen Hauge (about whom I’ve bored you frequently in this space) appears today in TASO.
Is the Media Trustworthy?
“Less than half of Americans, regardless of partisanship, have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media,” according to a Gallup poll.
You know, I suspect it is actually responsible for media outlets to simply repeat what officials have said. The other day I heard a brief report in which the Republicans said a bill extended its target audience and the Democrats said the bill did not. Is that not a matter for media investigation, something they can verify independent of the officials quoted? The bill either covers the same number or types of people as it did before or it covers more or less. And if it can’t be determined because of the murkiness of the bill’s language, then the lawmakers should be ridiculed. This is just one point of distrust I have for most media outlets.
When We They Get It?
Or do they get it already? I’d rather believe they are simply thoughtless, like many Americans–Not objective thinkers, but trusting responders. Watch Anatomy of a Smear
Crash course in English
I love this story to death.
See, there’s this Czech speedway racer who got knocked unconscious in an accident. And when he regained consciousness, he was speaking perfect English, a language he was only beginning to learn at the time. (It faded, unfortunately.)
Does this bring the promise of a new (though painful) means of enhancing international communication?
Or does it just mean that all we English speakers are brain damaged?
Another American Spectator Online Column
Once again The American Spectator Online has fallen victim to my charm, and printed a column by me, just as if it came from a serious person.
This one is the the third, and probably the last, of the Pastoral Letters From the Future.