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Book Reports
by James Boylan
ALL ON FIRE: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
by Henry Mayer. St. Martin's Press. 707 pp. $32.50.
The Liberator, which never paid its own way, was nonetheless a successful newspaper; it never missed a weekly issue and never lost sight of its cause -- that slavery must end unconditionally, even at the price of splitting the Republic. With the end of slavery, it ceased publication, thirty-five years to the week after its editor made his famous declaration: "I WILL BE HEARD." That editor, of course, was William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), and Henry Mayer has devoted this immense new biography to restoring Garrison's centrality in the movement that achieved a distant goal that, at the start, seemed beyond reach. It is a remarkable story -- a poor, self-educated Massachusetts printer who seized on the idea that slavery was a sin and devoted his life to agitating for its abolition, setting his own type, raising his own voice, risking his own neck against mob violence. Mayer does much to dissipate the stereotyped view of Garrison as a thin-lipped, cold fanatic, emphasizing his pacifism, his gentle manner, his warm family life, and the enormous affection that came to him in the end.
TED POSTON: PIONEER AMERICAN JOURNALIST
by Kathleen Hauke. University of Georgia Press. 326 pp. 29.95.
The American news business was as slow as baseball to drop the color bar. As late as the 1960s, a majority of the black reporters working for major American newspapers could be, and were, gathered in a single hotel room. Ted Poston (1906-1974) was their forerunner, the first African-American to have a full career on a New York newspaper. That paper was the old New York Post, for years the liberal dissident in a crowd of conservative dailies. Poston, a Kentuckian by birth and a journeyman on Harlem's Amsterdam News, got to the Post by the old traditional route -- earning so much writing at space rates that the paper put him on salary. That was 1936, and he remained, a gallant and witty warrior and energetic reporter, until his retirement in 1972. Kathleen Hauke has written a compact biography that emphasizes the richness and variety of Poston's career -- for example, his membership in a group of sub-cabinet level black officials during World War II -- but does not skimp his troubled, angry private life. Somewhat shaky on larger historical contexts, Hauke provides rich anecdotal background on the perils of being black in a persistently white business.
MAKING THE NEWS: A GUIDE FOR NONPROFITS AND ACTIVISTS
by Jason Salzman. Westview Press. 289 pp. Paper, $19.95.
This is a commonsense handbook for activists seeking time and space in the news media for their causes. As such, it offers a compendium of tactics that have worked. But journalists ought to read it too, because it provides a mirror's-eye view of how journalism--primarily television journalism -- really works. See especially the chapter titled "Create Newsworthy Visual Imagery, Symbols, and Stunts." What an array of pig noses, Santa Claus costumes, clowns, lemons, and -- not least -- literal bullshit dumped at a senator's door! Salzman sums it up: "Successful media events are, above all else, entertaining." Elsewhere, he adds: "Ideas, in the simple and image-dominated language of the media, are generally considered boring (and hence not newsworthy)." His conclusion is backed by supportive comments from journalists. It gives one pause.
LIFE THE MOVIE: HOW ENTERTAINMENT CONQUERED REALITY
by Neal Gabler. Alfred A. Knopf. 303 pp. $25.
In his memorable 1961 study, The Image, Daniel Boorstin warned that American society was so flooded with pseudo-events, celebrification, and seductive imagery that reality was all but submerged. Now Neal Gabler (author of a fine biography of Walter Winchell) carries forward Boorstin's work, reporting on a more advanced stage of the disease. He sets forth the notion that entertainment values have come to dominate not only the mass media but also personal conduct, turning American life into the cultural equivalent of a movie. This thesis is easy enough to apply to celebrities, but Gabler bogs down in psychologizing when he tries to apply it to the rest of us. Even so, he brilliantly demonstrates that we swim in a sea of media-marketed gratifications: we are given, instead of literature, the writer on the dust jacket; instead of art, the life-style of the artist; instead of sport, the wisdom of the super-athlete; instead of justice, the show trial.
TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SUPREME COURT: ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO AIR?
by Elliot E. Slotnick and Jennifer E. Segal. Cambridge University Press. 264 pp. $59.95; Paper, $19.95
This cautious monograph by two political scientists is laden with reviews of previous research and endless quotes from scholars and journalists. Moreover, much of the material is hardly fresh, the core consisting of analysis of one case each from the 1970s and the 1980s and a review of two past court terms, 1989 and 1994. Yet the authors do eventually
get around to drawing at least one strong conclusion: that in reporting Supreme Court docketing decisions -- that is, whether to hear cases -- television journalists get it wrong three times out of four. Most often reporters erroneously turn a procedural decision into a quasi-substantive one, saying "the Court upheld . . ." when it has not upheld anything at all. Like many others before, Slotnick and Segal recommend that the Court open its proceedings to television, but do not seem optimistic that it will.
