What the People Know: Freedom and the Press, by Richard Reeves. The Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures on American Civilization and Government, Harvard University Press. 149 pp.

Richard Reeves, a journalist of good sense and long experience, avoids both pretentiousness and what he calls "Old Fartism" while asking whether journalism as he has known it can survive. He is more concerned than alarmed, but warns that big money, the entertainment ethos, and hubris threaten to swamp the reportorial tradition -- that is, the tradition of the outsiders who try to tell the truth about what the public needs to know. But he invokes history to show that journalism has encountered and persisted through bad times before. Alluding to the repeated mutations of media technology in this century, he concludes: "Machines come and go . . . . Reporters endure."

This was a serviceable enough idea: a how-to book on civility in political campaigns for journalists and other participants. Alas, like many other alphabetically arranged works, this one suffers from its format, and even as practiced a hand as Stephen Hess of The Brookings Institution cannot do much about it. Essays on promising topics -- the Horse Race, Consultants, Lying -- get only so far and no farther. See, for example, Anonymous Sources, which concludes that reporters should try to avoid using unnamed sources but if they do should try to be sure that the information is accurate. Didn't know that. Still, what's there should help reinforce any stray impulses toward better behavior.

Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet, by Michael Wolff. Simon & Schuster. 268 pp.

This tale of sound and fury -- the title, Burn Rate, signifies the pace at which a startup company consumes its capital -- has gained notoriety because of its rough portraits of the entrepreneurs whom Michael Wolff encountered in his ultimately unsuccessful exertions to promote himself from a mere publisher of computer books to an Internet multimillionaire. The frankness is entertaining, but the details are hard to believe. Did Wolff, unless he was wearing a wire, really capture all that dialogue he puts into quotation marks? If there is any moral here, it is that in those first heady days of the Internet, puffery and self-promotion worked better than achievement. The publisher has placed an index on the Web at www.burnrate.com, and a continuing debate about the book can be found at www.amazon.com.

The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, by Michael Schudson. The Free Press. 390 pp.

Michael Schudson, whose previous writings (for example, The Power of News) have added fresh insights to American journalism history, here employs formidable scholarly resources on a vastly broader topic: the common American political experience from colonial times to the present. He still weaves in a good deal about the press, often to contradict commonly held propositions -- for example, that the founders saw the First Amendment and the free press as key components of our political system. Not so, says Schudson; the First was added as a politically advisable afterthought by Framers who regarded the press mostly as an annoyance. Similarly, he contends later that the often derogated Kennedy-Nixon debates were "a fine moment for American public life," and no more show biz than the Lincoln-Douglas debates. As for the present, he sees our present "fretful" political culture less as a sign of collapse than a portent of latent vitality.

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations, by Larry Tye. Crown Publishers. 306 pp.

Aged 103 when he died in 1995, Edward L. Bernays was a figure from another age, the man who engaged less in what we now call spin than in the practices of mass persuasion suggested by the phrase he coined, "the engineering of consent." Larry Tye of The Boston Globe is the first biographer who has roamed the eight hundred boxes of papers that Bernays left to the Library of Congress, and he has the advantage of reappraising, and correcting, much that Bernays wrote in his voluminous, Bernays-centered memoirs. Tye has produced a readable appraisal -- encumbered by a topical rather than chronological organization -- of the public relations counselor (another term he coined), whose chief client often seemed to be himself.

Professionally, Bernays's chief technique was to set up front organizations to advance, while disguising, the interests of his clients. Most notoriously, he represented United Fruit in the 1950s; when a leftist government in Guatemala challenged his client, Bernays orchestrated the press hue-and-cry that led to a CIA-sponsored coup. Not least, he was close to the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, a relative of Bernays's wife, Doris Fleischman, and attempted to influence the assignment of reporters to Central America. In the end, Tye acknowledges that Bernays was by no means the first to practice public relations, but claims that he was "the first to demonstrate for future generations of p.r. people how powerful their profession could be in shaping America's economic, political, and cultural life." He fails to add, but implies: for better or worse.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe