BOOK REPORTS

BY JAMES BOYLAN
 

THE FORM OF NEWS: A HISTORY
By Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone
The Guilford Press. 326 pp. $35
 
Two enterprising scholars and newspaper buffs offer here an original new frame for American journalism history by analyzing the changing appearance of newspapers. They hypothesize that the display of news reflects the public role that journalism has sought to exert. They compare the news selection of eighteenth-century papers to a town meeting, and the partisan debates in nineteenth-century papers to a courtroom. This idea is useful in parsing the twentieth century, where they see newspaper formats changing with the dominant form of newspaper organization -- from the industrial ("department store") to the professional ("social map") to corporate ("index"). In their view the era of professionals, who tried earnestly to give readers an orderly view of a disorderly world, was a brief episode sandwiched between the garish industrial journalism and the new corporate style, which tends to be a guide to individual consumer tastes. The authors also trace the rise of newspaper design to the present, when a designer may be more dominant than an editor.
 
ONE SCANDALOUS STORY:
CLINTON, LEWINSKY AND THIRTEEN DAYS THAT TARNISHED AMERICAN JOURNALISM
By Marvin Kalb
The Free Press. 320 pp. $26
 
Marvin Kalb, veteran correspondent and executive director of the Washington office of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, believes that the standards of American journalism buckled under the impact of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. He has now returned to the scene to find out how and why. Concentrating on the period of emergence, from January 13 to 25, 1998, he reconstructs the decisions of the journalists involved. He has talked to most of them, and their reflections, occasionally thoughtful but rarely regretful, provide the meat of the account. In the end, Kalb finds four disturbing phenomena in the coverage: The conclusion by news organizations that a story must be covered (or borrowed or stolen) merely because it is "out there," not because it is authenticated; the temptation to sound important by predicting the outcome; the blurring of lines between journalists and political activists; and the pseudo-sourcing or non-sourcing that let both the special prosecutor and conservative activists manipulate the news. Kalb suggests that these phenomena may have permanently undermined the integrity of the press.
 
AN HONORABLE ESTATE:
MY TIME IN THE WORKING PRESS
By Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
Louisiana State University Press.
216 pp. $22.50
 
This is a story of first love. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who has spent most of his career as a literary scholar and writer, recalls here his affair with journalism. His was an old-fashioned newspaper career, and his account is somewhat in the tradition of Dreiser's and Mencken's reminiscences of newspaper days, which he invokes. Still in high school, he followed two uncles into the business in Charleston, South Carolina. After college and army service, he joined The Bergen Record, primarily because he was engaged to a New Jersey woman. When they broke up he left to become city editor of a small paper in Virginia, then served an enervating term with The Associated Press. There is a charming chapter on the sedentary, listless old-time copy desks where he worked while in graduate school in Baltimore. His final effort to make a go of it was to serve as subordinate to the dynamic Jack Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News-Leader. He tried to convince himself that, like Kilpatrick, he could defend segregation, but ultimately gave up. In the end, he decides that his real yearning was to go home again, to the newsroom of the Charleston Evening Post with his uncles. He concludes ruefully: "I never made it."

REPUBLIC.COM
By Cass Sunstein
Princeton University Press. 224 pp. $19.95
 
Cass Sunstein, a political scientist based at the University of Chicago, is concerned that the American public is increasingly receiving news, much of it online, in a form he calls the "Daily Me" -- that is, a self-selected diet that reinforces opinions already held. The danger, he contends, is that people will listen only to one side of public issues and thus become more and more partisan. His remedies seem awkward, particularly the notion that partisan Web sites should be compelled to offer connections to alternative views. Having received adverse reactions to this and other proposals, Sunstein decided to have the last word by issuing a downloadable rebuttal entitled Echo Chambers: Bush v. Gore; Impeachment and Beyond. In it he argues that the post-election crisis last year and the impeachment of President Clinton both demonstrate the effects of the "Daily Me" -- the hardening of opinion and the increasing difficulty of reaching the consensus required in a successful republic. Because both of these issues so heavily involved party politics, rather than public opinion in general, they seem a poor fit for his thesis.
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As noted in the July/August issue, The Press and Race, edited by David R. Davies, contained articles on the work of eight Mississippi journalists in the years following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Inadvertently, two of the eight were not mentioned. George A. McLean of the Tupelo Journal is credited in the book with providing editorial leadership that helped Tupelo "proceed peacefully toward becoming a more integrated community." Of Wilson F. (Bill) Minor, head of the Jackson bureau of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the book says: "His legacy is that during troubled times, he accurately and compassionately respected the public's right to know by reporting . . . the plight of Mississippi blacks. . . . under the threat of possible physical harm to himself and his family." Minor's work can be read in a new collection, Eyes on Mississippi: A Fifty-Year Chronicle of Change, published by J. Prichard Morris Books of Jackson.