TS: "Modest Journalism" vs "Imperial Journalism"

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Eddie Hurt's post in "Reccomend Good Non-Fiction" mentioned the Russell Baker piece piece on A.J. Liebling on the New York Review of Books ( http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17552 ). In the review, Baker praises Liebling for his "modest journalism" which, Baker asserts, means that the journalist is "merely another frail human, maybe too woefully human to be entirely trustworthy. This meant establishing the individual reporter's presence in the material, in violation of the old rule that the reporter was to be read, but never sensed." This apparently contrasts with the imperial reporting of journalism schools in our post-Watergate world.

There are no doubt problems with modern journalism and Liebling is certainly a great writer, but something about Baker's paternal tsk-tsking (maybe it's just a Russell Baker problem) rubs me the wrong way. So is the Liebling/New Yorker school of "modest journalism" inherently better than muckraking and "objectivity" or is Russell Baker just a conservative, boring old man?

― C0L1N B3CK3TT (Colin Beckett), Sunday, 7 November 2004 06:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Aw, go easy on Baker. He's a gentleman, and if he's conservative it's only in whatever good senses of that word are left. So, he misses the old days. That's allowed. I think he's exaggerating the "modesty" of both the times and the man he writes about, but he's not all wrong. I'll take Liebling or Joseph Mitchell (or Russell Baker) over preening superstars like Tom Wolfe any day -- not because they were better writers, but because they were better men. The biggest problem with his argument is that he's a couple generations behind. Wolfe and Norman Mailer are practically geriatric, and American journalism could only wish that its biggest problem was an abundance of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 7 November 2004 06:38 (twenty-one years ago)

I'll take Liebling or Joseph Mitchell (or Russell Baker) over preening superstars like Tom Wolfe any day

Me too! But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for Wolfe. I think The New Yorker is the greatest thing in the world but Ross style guide can be pretty suffocating.

― C0L1N B3CK3TT (Colin Beckett), Sunday, 7 November 2004 06:49 (twenty-one years ago)

I know, I wish they'd update the damn thing. Every time I see "focussed" spelled that way I'm reminded that I'm reading not just The New Yorker but "The New Yorker." And Wolfe was a great writer in his day, even up through The Right Stuff. But he kind of typifies the self-important journalist-as-celebrity that horrifies Baker, and I think that's mostly to Baker's credit. Plus, I have a soft spot for Baker because I grew up reading his columns in the Times Magazine.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 7 November 2004 07:07 (twenty-one years ago)

Liebling's epistemology is charmingly olde worlde:

There are three kinds of writers of news in our generation. In inverse order of worldly consideration, they are:

1. The reporter, who writes what he sees.
2. The interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning.
3. The expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn't seen.

This hierarchy only makes sense when you think that seeing does not already contain interpretation and ideology. If you believe that everything, even seeing, is ideological, then number 3 may well turn out to be the most 'modest' of these writers, because at least he's putting his ideology out in the open, foregrounding it for what it is, and advancing no empirical 'proofs' which would stop others from disagreeing.

― Momus (Momus), Sunday, 7 November 2004 08:39 (twenty-one years ago)

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