By Michael Miner
In his recent book, News Values, Fuller writes, “It is always tempting to look at young people’s behavior and project it out in a straight line through their advancing age. Using that methodology you would have said that the Baby Boomers would still be playing with drugs and radical politics.” The Tribune’s publisher was contemplating the slow, steady decline of newspaper readership and a generation of kids with “attention spans that it would be charity to describe as flickering.” Heroically, he found reason to hope.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Duneier made his reputation in 1992 when his doctoral dissertation, which he’d researched by becoming one of the regulars at the Valois, a working-class deli in Hyde Park, was published in book form as Slim’s Table. At the moment he divides his weeks between Madison and an apartment on the north side of Chicago; he calls himself an “urban field-worker” who finds both pleasure and wisdom wandering the city’s streets. “One of the things I always notice in Chicago is its newsstands,” he told me. “They’re always open early. When I talk to the people at them they say the newspaper business is worse than the fish business. A fish lasts two days. A newspaper lasts a few hours. A newspaper spoils faster than a fish. One of the things I noticed in Madison when I arrived is that the biggest and best newsstand doesn’t open until nine in the morning. I just didn’t get it.” Not until he realized it wouldn’t matter to his students when the newsstand opened, since they weren’t going there for the morning papers anyway.
“I said, ‘Where do you get your information?’ Somebody yelled out, ‘Local TV news.’ I said, ‘How many people get information from local TV news?’ Six people raised their hands. Then I said, ‘Where else?’ Somebody yelled out NPR. I said, ‘How many of you are getting your news from NPR?’ Nine people raised their hands. They said they have it on all the time. Somebody yelled out computer. I said, ‘How many get it from computers?’ Eight people raised their hands.”
Duneier’s cited News Values frequently this semester at Madison. In the spring, when he teaches the same course at the University of California-Santa Barbara, it’ll be required reading.
The ideal back then was of a working class blessed with enough leisure time to participate fully in civic society. Reality turned out to be very different. “The communists take control and find they have none of the social prerequisites or economic prerequisites or technicological prerequisites for a decentralized democratic society.” With the Russian Revolution, “the meaning of socialization gets changed to a forced march under a one-party, increasingly centralized and bureaucratic state.”
Weinstein perceives the old socialist ideas just beginning to reemerge, reworked into an “idiom” the world might find useful. “But it’s at an early stage,” he says. “That’s why I want to do the book.”
