November/December 2000 | Contents

BOOK REPORTS

BY JAMES BOYLAN

EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT POLITICS . . . AND WHY YOU'RE WRONG
By Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Basic Books. 287 pp. $15 paper

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, provides this list of what many Americans, including journalists, believe about American politics: "Soundbites are worthless. Politicians don't keep their promises. Campaigns are increasingly negative. Attack is the dominant form of campaign discourse. The public can't learn from campaigns because they are vapid and vacuous; debates contain no new information. Both advertising and attack drive voters from the polls. Newspapers have lost their impact." Jamieson and her associates challenge each of these axioms with enterprising -- if unrelentingly quantitative -- research. Even while casting a more favorable light on the country's political condition, they avoid overoptimism, suggesting merely that the American political system, with all its faults, is resilient and self-correcting. If anything is missing here, it is any awareness of the role of big money in national politics -- a little like Moby Dick without the white whale.

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERARY JOURNALISM: THE EMERGENCE OF A MODERN NARRATIVE FORM
By John C. Hartsock
University of Massachusetts Press.
288 pp. $50; $17.95 paper

Hartsock, a former journalist and now a scholar based at SUNY, Cortland, provides a complex genealogy for an orphan form. Literary journalism is usually considered not literary enough for literati, not journalistic enough for journalists. But somehow the effort to create writing that offers both truth and a narrative has survived through centuries. Hartsock, perhaps stretching, finds its origins in Roman times. In American terms, he traces it through three flowerings -- the century-ago age of such writers as Stephen Crane and John Reed; the 1930s, with, for example, John dos Passos and James Agee; and the "New Journalism" of the 1960s and 1970s, the glory days of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, and kindred. Hartsock perceptively distinguishes literary journalism not only from workhorse "objective" newswriting but from journalistic sensationalism and muckraking. The other forms, he contends, set journalists at a safe distance from their subjects; literary journalists get close, even attempting to stand in the subjects' shoes. Today, he concludes, literary journalism as a genre remains marginalized, not least because the majority of schools of journalism and mass communication have excluded it from their curricula.

YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE YESTERDAY: A LIFE IN TELEVISION NEWS
By Garrick Utley
Public Affairs. 304 pp. $27.95

Garrick Utley has been a familiar face, and voice, since 1963 when, two years out of college, he hooked up with NBC News -- which had employed his father, Clifton Utley -- and remained there for thirty years. Reliable, energetic, clear, and concise, he covered more than his share of big and difficult stories without ever, it seems, attaining the household-name renown of network anchors. His memoir has the ingratiating qualities of his work on television (a CD-ROM of his outstanding reports accompanies the book). It is notably clear; it moves swiftly from point to point; it tells you the major facts. But it is also like a good television reporter's story -- somewhat impersonal, and recalled in set scenes, as if his life were something he witnessed rather than experienced. He has had many adventures, but if he had personal crises or doubts, they are muted here.

STOPPING THE PRESSES: THE MURDER OF WALTER W. LIGGETT
By Marda Liggett Woodbury
University of Minnesota Press.
271 pp. $18.95

Minnesota in the 1930s was no placid Keillorland. Politicians and mobsters ran the state together, and woe to those who stood in their way. A ragtag alternative press tried to do the job of exposure that mainstream papers neglected. One editor, Jay M. Near, became the plaintiff in the landmark First Amendment case, Near v. Minnesota, when the authorities tried to suppress his paper. Two other editors were killed: Howard Guilford and the subject of this book, Walter W. Liggett. Liggett was a Minnesota native, a practicing radical; and his little newspapers were the fearless, even reckless, antagonists of bootleggers and corrupt officials. His daughter Marda and her mother were sitting in their parked car when Liggett was gunned down on December 9, 1935; a Minneapolis hoodlum was tried for the crime and quickly acquitted. Prepared for research by her career as a librarian, Marda Liggett Woodbury began to reinvestigate her father's murder in the 1980s and has produced this report, which tells as much, it seems, as can possibly be known about the crime without definitively solving it. It is worth reading, even when the tangles of Farmer-Labor party politics in Minnesota become murky, because it gives a lost martyr of the free press his place in history.

HOLDING THE MEDIA ACCOUNTABLE: CITIZENS, ETHICS, AND THE LAW
Edited by David Pritchard
Indiana University Press.
203 pp. $39.95; $16.95 paper

This modest volume, produced by scholars from a some-time-ago seminar at Indiana University, seeks to bring media law and ethics down from the planes of constitutional law and philosophy to the working level. One article exposes casual deceptions used in a television newsroom. Another finds that people who have complaints about news stories rarely actually complain. Another discovers, no surprise, is that many complaints to newspapers get lost or fumbled. Still another finds that a long-surviving local journalism review, in St. Louis, has little influence on journalistic practice -- but even so, it appears, more influence than the national journalism reviews, if the journalists interviewed are to be believed.

James Boylan is founding editor of CJR and professor emeritus of journalism and history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.