Review
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October 21, 2008 11:06 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about Masson v. New Yorker and immersion journalism at Harper's magazine.
Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and The First Amendment
By Kathy Roberts Forde
University of Massachusetts Press
304 pages, $28.95The Masson case was, like so many other libel cases of the last third of the last century, protracted and clouded. At its core was the question of whether Janet Malcolm, a New...
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October 16, 2008 10:31 AM
Some Kind of Journalist
Hunter S. Thompson: prolific, Bible-loving, workaholic
Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson
by William McKeen
W. W. Norton, 448 pages, $27.95Conversations With Hunter S. Thompson
Edited by Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson
University Press of Mississippi , 240 pages, $22"Well, fuck the Columbia Journalism Review,” Hunter S. Thompson said in a 1974 Playboy interview, responding to...
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October 09, 2008 09:00 AM
The Accidental Icon
How Jacob Riis went from the muck to muckraker
The Other Half: The Life
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Of Jacob Riis and the World
Of Immigrant America By Tom Buk-Swienty
Translated from the Danish
by Annette Buk-Swienty
W. W. Norton
448 pages, $27.95
When contemporary journalists honor their professional ancestors, the accolades are frequently based on secondhand knowledge. Too often, we have never actually read the words or studied the images from long ago. I... -
September 23, 2008 09:00 AM
What Happens in War
Dexter Filkins's decade in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq
Dexter Filkins has been covering the biggest story of the last ten years for the last ten years. A good argument can be made that this New York Times reporter has seen more war than any other journalist working today, not to mention any soldier or marine. From Kabul to Kandahar, Baghdad to Ramadi, Falluja to Haditha, Filkins has...
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August 26, 2008 09:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about the run-up to World War II and the media's coverage of John McCain
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization
By Nicholson Baker
Simon & Schuster
576 pages, $30This curious book is in the form of a chronicle, a stark chronology in which the author has made himself all but voiceless, thus suggesting that his narrative is determined by deity or fate. Hundreds...
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August 14, 2008 01:37 PM
Interpret the World
Vincent Sheean's Personal History reminds us what foreign coverage once was…and what it might be again
On a dreary day in October 1922, a young man from Pana, a small town in southern Illinois, walked into the Paris office of the Chicago Tribune. In experience, he scarcely came up to the knee of most journalists. There had been a stint at the Chicago Daily News, from which he was fired; a few months covering scandal...
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July 31, 2008 09:00 AM
My Facts, Your Facts
America and the pursuit of willful delusion
Reader comments posted on digital news sites are often heavy on invective, hurled from noms d’Internet that allow people to disregard traditional norms of civil discourse. For many of these anonymous snipers, the reported facts are not facts at all, but the unreliable product of paid liars, incompetents, toadies, and haters who dare to call themselves journalists.
How did...
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July 17, 2008 09:00 AM
Pyrrhic Victory
Winning and losing at Guantánamo
Just a few months ago, in April of this year, the Guantánamo Bay detainee Salim Hamdan appeared before the Navy captain acting as his military judge, and announced that he would boycott the war-crimes trial the Bush administration had planned for him. “There is no such thing as justice here,” Hamdan said of the special tribunal constituted to try...
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June 19, 2008 09:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about the Pulitzers, early African American journalism, and the relationship between advertisers and consumers
Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism By Roy J. Harris Jr.
University of Missouri Press
473 pages, $39.95
It is possible that hardly anybody would remember Joseph Pulitzer—he died in 1911—had he not attached his name to the Pulitzer Prizes. Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established prizes in journalism,...
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June 17, 2008 09:00 AM
America's Think Tank
Politics warps a new history of the mysterious RAND Corporation
Ridiculed in Dr. Strangelove (as the “Bland Corporation”), castigated by Pravda (as the American “academy of science and death”), and thrust into the spotlight when the Pentagon Papers were stolen from it, the RAND Corporation has played a somewhat mysterious role in U.S. public policy since its founding in 1946. In Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the...
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June 10, 2008 09:00 AM
What We Sow
The maddening folly of our man-made pension crisis
Over the past couple of decades, American companies and American state and city governments have descended into financial purgatory just the way, in The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell says he went bankrupt: “gradually, and then suddenly.” A deadly combination of generous pension and health-care packages and years of passing the buck has left institutions like General Motors, Ford,...
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May 15, 2008 09:00 AM
Best Face Forward
At the Newseum, a troubled industry looks good under glass
And we think today’s reporters have it tough.
Picture this: To land a job, the journalistic aspirant known to history as Nellie Bly agrees to feign mental illness in order to uncover abuses at the notorious asylum for women on Blackwell’s Island. In a new “4-D” version of this familiar tale at the Newseum, an editor warns the...
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May 06, 2008 09:00 AM
Love Thy Neighbor
The religion beat in an age of intolerance
To watch Townsend discussing the religion beat, click here.
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In the Gospel of Matthew, it doesn’t take long for the author to show his readers two different sides of Jesus Christ. One minute Jesus is sitting on a mountain, delivering a powerful sermon to a presumably rapt audience: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit... -
May 06, 2008 09:00 AM
Love Thy Neighbor
The religion beat in an age of intolerance
Tim Townsend discusses the story he wrote for the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review. To read that article, “Love Thy Neighbor,” click here.
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April 30, 2008 09:00 AM
School for Scandal?
A media critic takes aim at journalism education
In The Big Picture, Jeffrey Scheuer grapples with a highly abstract subject: the intermingled roles of journalism, education, and democracy. The author has read widely and thought deeply about these matters (he is also the editor of a new series on Democracy and the News for Praeger Publishers). And in a rarity for just about any contemporary book touching on...
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April 29, 2008 09:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about Tarbell's muckraking, the cost of war, and that headless body in a topless bar
Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller
By Steve Weinberg
W. W. Norton
256 pages, $25.95Those who have seen the new film There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s novel about the oil industry, will recognize the cutthroat tactics and carnage in Taking on the Trust. Steve Weinberg’s book focuses...
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April 28, 2008 09:00 AM
Crowd Control
Bouquets and brickbats for the 'electronic mob'
Roughly a dozen years ago, when use of the Internet and World Wide Web was first ramping up, I was among a group of journalists to whom media critic and New York University professor Neil Postman delivered an informal talk. To paraphrase his remarks, he contended that we had already solved the problem of access to information and its...
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February 26, 2008 09:00 AM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books: Woodward and Bernstein, the U.S. record on torture, and media populism
Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate
By Alicia C. Shepard
John Wiley & Sons
288 pages, $24.95In my files I have a folder of clippings, brown and soft as an old shoeshine cloth. The one on top led The Washington Post’s October 10, 1972, edition: FBI FINDS NIXON AIDES SABOTAGED DEMOCRATS. The double byline reads,...
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February 14, 2008 09:00 AM
May I Speak Freely?
Anthony Lewis on the First Amendment's march to victory
It is our misfortune that Anthony Lewis stopped writing his column for The New York Times in 2001. For more than thirty years, that column was the first place to look for commentary about public affairs that was informed by a deep knowledge of and commitment to constitutional rights, expressed clearly, gracefully, and forcefully. Lewis’s retirement deprived us of...
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February 12, 2008 09:00 AM
Appetite for Fear
David Everitt's history of the pamphleteers who hunted 'pinkos'
Sixty years after the house un-American Activities Committee began hunting for Communists in the entertainment industry, the HUAC hearings that bred the screen blacklist are vivid in the received memory of countless Americans too young to recall the proceedings from life. Hollywood triumphed, ultimately, in ways more glorious than mere vindication. The movie business gained an ennobling narrative of...
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Desks
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Above the Fold: Slanting the Torture Story Everything you won’t learn about torture in The New York Times
- Talking Shop: Gail Collins The New York Times columnist on caucuses, campaigning, and the glory of deadlines
The Audit Business
- WSJ Watchdogs Sketchy Conseco Insurance Move
- Ebony on the Fall of Detroit The magazine reports the U.S. car industry’s demise is hitting blacks especially hard