BOOK
REPORTS
BY JAMES BOYLAN
DOUBLE
FOLD: LIBRARIES AND THE ASSAULT ON PAPER
By
Nicholson Baker
Random
House. 370 pp. $25.95
Nicholson
Baker, novelist and now polemicist, here attacks the nation's
libraries for turning their paper resources into film and digital
simulations. Double Fold contains fascinating history --
for example, the relationship between national libraries and the
intelligence community, and their common affection for a favored
intelligence tool, microfilm. Baker concedes that microfilm has
its uses; what angers him is the simultaneous destruction in the
microfilming process of the printed material, particularly the
bound volumes of America's vast newspaper heritage, by no means
so dilapidated as apologists for microfilm would have us believe.
For example, Joseph Pulitzer's graphically innovative New York
World now exists largely on crude film made in the 1950s,
lacking both the clarity and color of the originals (see the book's
striking illustrations). To save remnants, Baker himself has established
a modest storage facility he calls the American Newspaper Repository;
he argues that libraries could well have done the same at minimal
cost. He is so intent on accusing the libraries that he only glancingly
suggests that the newspaper publishing industry itself has been
negligent in preserving its own records.
THE
PRESS AND RACE: MISSISSIPPI JOURNALISTS CONFRONT THE MOVEMENT
Edited
by David R. Davies
University
Press of Mississippi. 302 pp. $30
This
collection of articles, edited by the chair of the journalism
department at the University of Southern Mississippi, recalls
the work of eight Mississippi journalists in the turbulent decade
between Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Freedom
Summer (1964). Some of them were well known nationally; Ira B.
Harkey, Jr., of the Pascagoula Chronicle, Hazel Brannon
Smith of the Lexington Advertiser, and Hodding Carter,
Jr., of the Greenville Delta-Democrat Times won Pulitzer
Prizes for courageous editorials urging their state to move beyond
racism. But others, such as J. Oliver Emmerich of the McComb
Enterprise-Journal, also showed courage, without gaining national
applause. Two editors on the other side -- Jimmy Ward of the Jackson
Daily News and Percy Greene of the Jackson Advocate,
a black newspaper -- are also included, unflatteringly. These
reassessments make clear that the real "movement" that these editors
faced was less the civil-rights movement than the white-supremacist
movement, which ruled the state by violence and espionage. It
is partly owing to the work of the best of these editors that
a book as candid as this one can be published in the state now
as a matter of course.
JOURNALISM
AND NEW MEDIA
By
John V. Pavlik
Columbia
University Press. 272 pp. $49.50; $17.50 paperbound
John
Pavlik, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism,
offers in Journalism and New Media a survey of current
technological changes and their implications. He briskly covers
such devices as omnidirectional cameras and the complexities of
digital reporting. He avoids the trap of being a mere enthusiast
for every incoming gadget, and emphasizes emerging problems affecting
privacy, accuracy, and editorial integrity. He is concerned in
particular with appropriate training of today's journalism students
for a future journalism that promises to be increasingly challenging.
If the book has a drawback, it is that it was written in a slow
traditional medium; many of its references may already be dated.
THE
PUBLISHER: PAUL BLOCK: A LIFE OF FRIENDSHIP, POWER & POLITICS
By
Frank Brady
University
Press of America. 562 pp. $49; $29.50 paperbound
Paul
Block (1875-1941) makes a cameo appearance in George Seldes's
Lords of the Press (1938) as a kind of tinhorn sidekick
of William Randolph Hearst. This laborious biography by Frank
Brady of St. John's University makes it clear that there was more
to Block than Seldes thought, but perhaps not as much as Brady
believes. Block's was a classic story of immigrant success --
migration from East Prussia, a first newspaper job at the age
of ten; success in New York as an advertising representative;
newspaper publisher, sometimes as a front man for Hearst; and
years of hobnobbing with celebrities and politicians, including
Republican presidents. He failed in two quests: to found a major
newspaper and to run a paper in Manhattan. What endures of his
reputation is his association with two solid newspapers, the Toledo
Blade, which he bought, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
which he and Hearst created by closings and mergers. Today both
are still published by his descendants.
YELLOW
JOURNALISM: PUNCTURING THE MYTHS, DEFINING THE LEGACIES
By
W. Joseph Campbell
Praeger.
209 pp. $62.50
W.
Joseph Campbell of American University has engaged in industrious
research (almost a third of the book is footnotes) aimed at clarifying
controversies over yellow journalism -- such as who invented the
term and whether yellow journalism got the country into war over
Cuba. Moreover, he is intent on giving it a clean bill of health.
The results are interesting enough; he credits Ervin Wardman of
the New York Press with first using "yellow journalism"
in print, in 1897. He absolves the yellows of creating a war fever
that led to the conflict with Spain, arguing that the newspapers'
attention to the Cuban issue was inconstant and that policymakers
were disregarding the headlines in any case. He also contends
that the influence of the yellow press on American newspapers
was generally beneficial, providing lasting innovations in graphics
and enterprise reporting. Credible as Campbell's findings may
be, he is, alas, trying to expunge a slur that has gone around
the world and endured for a century. "Yellow" will never be much
of a compliment.
