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September/October 2000 | Contents
BOOK REPORTS
BY JAMES BOYLAN
THE FORTUNE TELLERS: INSIDE WALL STREET'S GAME OF MONEY, MEDIA,
AND MANIPULATION
By Howard Kurtz
The Free Press. 327 pp. $26
The prolific Howard Kurtz, media reporter
for The Washington Post, has
found time, while working at his day job, to spend eighteen months at the
elbows of the new breed of cable and Internet Wall Street journalists and,
equally important, the "analysts" who pop up on screen and push their products,
often without disclosing their own financial interests. In Kurtz's view, journalists,
analysts, c.e.o.s -- all the talking heads -- tend to become Wall Street touts,
playing a primarily promotional role -- to keep Americans, on line and off,
feeding the ever-expanding market. He focuses in particular on the rambunctious
Jim Cramer, who plays all of these roles and is the very embodiment of conflicts
of interest. Kurtz chronicles the competition, feuds, and avarice of this
suffocating little community in such tight focus that the story becomes, as
Kurtz remarks of the coverage itself, "numbingly repetitious." At times he
seems so involved with these often unpleasant personalities as to have forgotten
the outside world. Yet in the end he pulls it all together, warning that Americans
in general and investors in particular are being ill-served by frantic hypesters,
roaring ahead, as he puts it, "like drivers in a demolition derby." He is
sternly critical of the media outlets that act like carnival barkers, but
has no real prescription for reform, and merely urges investors to use caution.
Caveat emptor.
STORIES THAT CHANGED AMERICA:
MUCKRAKERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
By Carl Jensen, Ph.D.
Seven Stories Press. 272 pp. $26.95
Carl Jensen of Sonoma State University, known for founding Project Censored (which looks into important uncovered stories), here assembles his old heroes. It is always a treat to see them -- Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and so on up through Woodward and Bernstein -- all of whose works are excerpted here. Each item is accompanied by a biographical introduction that reads a little like a tearsheet from a reference book. But these little biographies also yield a curious aspect of this collection: The youngest muckraker represented (Carl Bernstein) was born fifty-six years ago, and the most recent work represented dates from the 1970s. This suggests that nobody under fifty has done worthy muckraking, that muckraking died in the 1970s (as Jensen hints in his introduction) or that Jensen's assemblage is like a repertory company, trotted out once more -- the same cast, the same old roles.
MEDIA ETHICS AND
ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS
By Claude-Jean Bertrand
Transaction Publishers. 164 pp. $29.95
Bertrand, who is associated with Institut Français de Presse in Paris, has spent his career studying media ethics on both sides of the Atlantic. Here he sums up his findings and offers recommendations for helping news media meet higher standards. However, the book is so tersely written as to constitute more an outline of issues than an exposition. The most useful portions are the final chapters, which summarize what he calls "media accountability systems" (oddly abbreviated "M*A*S"), where he demonstrates the common goals of such apparently diverse phenomena as higher education, journalism reviews, press councils, and ombudsmen, and the obstacles to all forms of accountability. This is a chewy but ultimately rewarding presentation.
CREATING THE MODERN MAN: AMERICAN MAGAZINES AND CONSUMER CULTURE 1900-1950
By Tom Pendergast
University of Missouri Press.
289 pp. $34.95 paper
This prolix book -- it smells like a doctoral dissertation, but is not identified as one -- is, for journalists, more valuable for its history of magazines than for its ostensible topic, how character-based Victorian manhood became consumption-based modern manhood. Pendergast chronicles the evolution of magazines -- editors and advertisers working in tandem -- as showcases for a manhood built less on what men achieve than what they own, what they wear, how they conduct their sex lives. At the same time, he reilluminates the careers of a surprising variety of magazines -- not only Munsey's and McClure's and the Saturday Evening Post, but such male-oriented publications as Athletic World, True, and Argosy. In separate chapters, he traces the struggles by black-oriented magazines to gain larger audiences, largely unsuccessful until the founding of John H. Johnson's Ebony, just after World War II, a periodical that successfully adopted the consumerist orientation. Pendergast, an optimist, does not think that the change in character of American magazines has been for the worse, but has opened the way toward more diverse, more imaginative lives.
LAPSING INTO A COMMA:
A CURMUDGEON'S GUIDE TO THE MANY THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG IN PRINT -- AND
HOW TO AVOID THEM
By Bill Walsh
NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group.
246 pp. $14.95 paper
Contrary to what self-designated language curmudgeons such as Bill Walsh may think, a curmudgeon is not by heritage a contrary, demanding, but ultimately worthy and lovable fellow. Dictionaries still define a curmudgeon as grasping, avaricious, miserly, and loathsome. Bill Walsh, copy desk chief on The Washington Post's business desk, is none of these, and he's not old enough (thirty-eight) to be a curmudgeon, either. He has gathered up the advice he has offered on his Web site, www.theslot.com, for the last five years and offers it in this compilation. Almost all of it makes good sense; he combines adherence to traditional grammatical standards with a willingness to bend when necessary. To take one example, he favors using "media" as both a plural and a singular noun, depending on circumstances. This takes temerity. As he remarks, "It takes guts to publish the media is and risk incurring the wrath of educated but misguided readers."
James Boylan is founding editor of cjr and professor emeritus of journalism and history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
