In 1942 when John H. Johnson was trying to launch his first magazine, Negro Digest, he couldn’t find a print shop anywhere that would take his business on credit. So he resorted to trickery. At the time he was responsible for the house organ of the insurance company where he worked, and he began slipping Digest copy in with the copy of the company monthly. When the company’s printer finally caught on Johnson convinced him “that since he had already set most of the Negro Digest copy, he might as well finish the job.”
Breaking the News is a useful synthesis of the received wisdom of journalism critics over the past 10 or 20 years. It’s been through four printings already and will have no lasting impact. But early in an election year–as journalists ponder the sins of omission, derision, and trivialization they know they’re going to commit–applauding Fallows is an easy act of preemptive expiation.
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In his book he observes that surveys revealing the depths of the public’s dismay with journalists receive “muted coverage in the national media.” The coverage of Breaking the News has been anything but. Its release last month was heralded by an Atlantic excerpt, Pantheon Books shipped the galleys out to likely columnists (“We knew pretty much who his friends were,” a Pantheon publicist told me), and Fallows spread his views among local talk-show hosts eager to fix blame for an age shot with cynicism. A day or two after my copy arrived in the mail I spotted Frank Rich’s seconding speech in the New York Times (Fallows and Rich were pals at Harvard and worked together on the Crimson), and other encomiums quickly followed. Within just a week or two the counterreaction made its appearance–David Remnick’s New Yorker piece wishing the “priggish” author had spent a day of his life in a newsroom. And the weekend brought a counter-counterreaction: James Warren of the Tribune found Rich too generous, Remnick too harsh, and Breaking the News an “important effort,” though a little whiny and a little careless in lifting material from Warren’s “Sunday Watch.”
Who can argue with that? But when Fallows is correct, which is most of the time, he’s often–not always–correct at this self-evident level of analysis. Sometimes when he’s right he could have been more right if he’d thought a little harder about his subject.
The shift in terrain from Fallows’s book to Ben Burns’s was swift and dramatic. As Fallows suggests, John Dewey might protest the state of today’s mass media, but surely he’d applaud the career that Burns recalls. Burns served a public disdained by the media establishment of a half century ago but engaged by its own press, which sprang up to fill the void. “Black journalism I quickly recognized as having a dual raison d’etre,” Burns writes, “serving a cause and at the same time profiting from it.”
Before joining the Defender in 1941 Burns had toiled for various Communist Party papers. “I had learned well the tricks of angling news stories to the left to savage ‘reactionaries’ and writing headlines to play up protest stories. My Communist apprenticeship served me well in Negro journalism…. I did not hesitate to accept the pro-black ‘angle,’ since I saw the scales tilted so unfairly against Negroes and believed strongly in the goals of racial integration.”
Two seasons ago the Houston Rockets won their first 15 games. Which was a start, and perfection–and a record that’ll mean something until a team wins 16.
