Just the Facts
Mindich, David T. Z.
ing imperial rule to be morally acceptable "if its administration was fair and just." But Morel was more discriminating than Hochschild. Morel would have seen the truth of the distinction that...
...Two people were seriously wounded: a Mrs...
...Second, the articles assume the guilt of the victims anyway....Finally, the articles share an 'objective' and 'balanced' tone...
...Rather than congratulate Bennett on his newfound success, or take him to task verbally for mocking Webb's obesity in print, Webb throws him down a flight of stairs and savagely thrashes him with a cane...
...press changed fundamentally in the nineteenth century under a variety of social, cultural, and economic pressures, Mindich takes his reader back to an age when American journalists were more like their European colleagues...
...In the main, Hochschild has written a moving and important book about wickedness triumphant and defeated...
...facHow the Press Lost Its Bias, Or at Least Its Bite The American Spectator • February 1999 69 ticity," or a basis in empirically demonstrable information...
...Mindich's first narrative thread begins one day in May of 1836 on the streets of lower Manhattan, just as James Watson Webb, editor of New York City's best-selling Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, catches up with his rival James Gordon Bennett, founding editor of the upstart Herald...
...News is gathered systematically by men stationed at all the outlets of it, like guards at the gates of a walled city...
...he calmly talked Cermak out of shock, and he visited the victims that night and returned to the hospital the next day with flowers, cards, and baskets of fruit...
...JOHN LILLY is co-owner of Liberia Vertice, a bookstore in Seville, Spain...
...After all, foreign newspapers, for all their wide-open bias, do work...
...His Leopold merits a place among the great modern enemies of civilization...
...In Bennett's response to Webb's attacks, Mindich claims to have found the seeds of "detachment" as the term is now understood by professional journalists—one of the five essential ingredients that for him compose the doctrine of objectivity...
...That his behavior this night was fresh in the minds of the nation that heard his First Inaugural address established his presidential bona fides as no mere speech could: The people around FDR were watching him to see how this man who was about to lead a troubled nation would react to the attempt on his life...
...Born in 1900 in Calabria, the province at the toe of the boot, he was a sickly child made sicker by a brutal father who beat him, starved him, and put him to work at the age of six, .',F,AA when his chronic stomach pain began...
...One doesn't hear much about the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer nowadays, and according to Mindich, the reason has a lot to do with Webb's reasons for beating his rival senseless: Bennett's Herald was defeating the Courier and Enquirer in a circulation war...
...A former slave and schoolteacher who had risen to prominence for her briefly successful lawsuit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad (which had thrown her off a train in Tennessee for refusing to leave the "ladies' coach"), Wells investigated the facts behind "balanced" stories of lynchings...
...Why is that...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...However, in the matter of Leopold, who presided over what was truly an empire of evil, and whom decent men brought down because his rule was nothing less than insufferable, the accepted idea fits only too well...
...Typically, we learn, lynching stories in the New York Times of the period share at least three characteristics...
...The attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt is almost forgotten today, but for connoisseurs of Fate there is nothing quite like it...
...The image was meant to characterize the Tories' moribund state, and to herald a cosmic shift in the paper's political line...
...Sitting atop the back seat of a convertible, he rode slowly through the packed crowds and stopped in front of a stage full of VIPs, among them the mayor of Chicago, Anton J. Cermak...
...and balance...
...Mindich sets out to answer in Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism...
...firing a .32 revolver at the presidential party...
...Newspapers in the United Kingdom, ranging from the Sun (downmarket, populist, and tabloid) to the Guardian (upmarketly socialist and broadsheet) hold self-consciously to their socio-economic allegiance and political line...
...By presenting a laundry list of "facts" generated by "both sides" of a conflict and untested for their relative truth-value, a newspaper's editorial apparatus can avoid giving open offense to much of anyone...
...FDR stayed four hours at the hospital, showing by his actions what he would soon express in words about the needto banish fear...
...A reporter conveys both the lynchings and the charges against the accused...
...American newspapers are different...
...he assured the crowd that he was all right...
...Although one might think at first glance that nobody would have less in common with Morel than Winston Churchill—Morel actually ran for Parliament against the incumbent Churchill in 1922, and beat him—the books about imperial warfare that Churchill wrote in his youth tellingly amplify Morel's praise of the British Empire...
...To analyze the origins of "nonpartisanship," for example, he fixes on the slavery debates of the mid-i800's, contrasting the "centrist nonpartisanship" of Bennett with the "antipartisanship" of the firebrand abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and the "activist nonpartisanship" of Frederick Douglass...
...It is no accident that this criticism sounds so up-to-date, even though Julian Ralph of the defunct New York Sun made it in 1903...
...Only the fact that the paper had switched parties, and that it had proclaimed the switch in such a typically extravagant way, were deemed worthy of comment...
...As Mindich points out, the flat neutrality of American reporting arose from an interest in selling papers to the broadest possible market...
...Martin's...
...Churchill's —most notably, The River War, his account of the subjugation of the wretched Dervish Empire in the Sudan—do not shy away from the harsh facts about conquest, but they also make the case that this conquest will benefit the conquered...
...First, each mentions that the victims were accused but not convicted of a crime...
...Mabel Gill and Mayor Cermak...
...This is only more true in continental Europe, where avowedly Communist papers are still rife, duking it out on the newsstands with their neo-nationalist nemeses...
...Not surprisingly, Wells uncovered yawning discrepancies between the lynch-mobs' claims—often involving the rape of white women by black men—and the reality that had provoked those accusations...
...All newswriting necessarily involves the application of a "filter" or "frame" — that is, of the reporter's or editor's own ideas about what is newsworthy or relevant to a story...
...That the Sun would admit to any party adherence at all, without even an election in sight, was considered neither remarkable nor unseemly...
...It should not be surprising that news processed in this way tends toward the 70 February 1999 The American Spectator soporific, nor that such a reliance on "balancing" the pronouncements of official sources affects the quality of reporting at the most basic level of information-gathering...
...It was on this note of personal courage, graciousness, and self-confidence that he was to assume the reins of government seventeen days later...
...In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, virtually every word and action of the president-elect was reported to the nation...
...Cross grabbed the gunman's arm to deflect his aim—both so claimed afterwards —or perhaps it was the unsteady chair...
...In Spain, for instance, there are the reliable voices of Catalan and Basque separatism, as well as the monarcho-Catholic viewpoint expressed in the gloriously anachronistic daily ABC...
...That February evening he was still an unknown quantity...
...Other British papers noted the Sun's front page with partisan articles of their own, and that was that...
...Was he rattled or petulant...
...Their journalists collect and disseminate news at least as well as their Stateside counterparts, and often with a style and wit that would have many Washington Post subscribers switching subscriptions in a heartbeat, were the European press more cheaply and readily available in the U.S...
...Mindich reserves most of the topic's discomfiting ambiguities for his introduction and conclusion, where he points out the epistemological problems inherent in any concept of journalistic objectivity, and specifically in the American version...
...reliance on the "inverted pyramid" structure...
...Relieved that he had escaped unhurt...
...Whatever happened, all five shots missed FDR and hit others...
...How did "objectivity" become the overriding operating principle for virtually all of our journalists...
...cousins when convenient...
...It is unmistakable that Leopold's rule was barbarizing, to put it mildly...
...He may be our most interesting assassin, if only because he was a registered Republican whose chief motivation seems to have been hypochondria...
...Rather than organize a band of toughs to beat up his tormentor or torch the premises of the Courier and Enquirer—as Webb and many other press barons of the time might well have done —Bennett issued a scathing series of irreverent editorials assailing Webb and his immersion in the prevalent culture of dueling and mob violence...
...Mindich's conclusion to this last chapter—indicating as it does the potential of "balanced" reporting to produce misleading results —throws into question the utility of the entire enterprise of "objectivity," and this is a point that urgently needs making...
...The crowd and the police pounced on the gunman...
...he gunman was a naturalized Italian bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara who stood all of fivefoot-one, hence his awkward firing position...
...Some 30 feet from the car, a man in the third row of spectators was standing on tiptoe on a rickety chair, his arm stretched over the heads in front of him, FLORENCE KING'S most recent book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...Directly in front of him was Mrs...
...Specifically, he takes us back to an age when American journalists were more like their colleagues in the rump Yugoslavia...
...To woo that audience, the penny papers had divested themselves of the partisan ties and business-oriented outlook that had characterized American journalism since before the founding of the Republic...
...FDR arrived at the political rally tanned and relaxed from a deep-sea fishing trip on Vincent Astor's yacht...
...After making a brief speech from the car, he was talking privately with the dignitaries who came down from the stage to greet him when five shots rang out...
...For the second time that year...
...The Times and its competitors, for all their reportorial "balance," had merely ended up parroting lies...
...Morel would have seen the truth of the distinction that Jeffrey Hart has drawn between barbarizing imperialism and civilizing imperialism...
...Nevertheless, "By the end of the century, journalists had firmly embraced the idea that one can glean the truth by balancing quotes of figures of authority, a practice still in use today, as any astute news consumer would know...
...This pain A Date Which Should Live in Irony The American Spectator • February 1999 71...
...The other four are: nonpartisanship...
...In arguing that the U.S...
...In his discussion of the origins of "balance," the author relates the campaign of Ida B. Wells—the prototypical "advocacy journalist" — to correct wrongheaded reporting about racial violence in the 1890's...
...These are the sorts of questions David T.Z...
...Of course, one could easily argue that the New York Times is biased in its coverage, and one would be right...
...The main distinction between the American mode and the partisan style so common elsewhere lies in an implied attitude toward the audience...
...Was he frightened...
...Either Armour or Mrs...
...Along with several other "penny papers," the Herald was underselling the omnipotent and elitist six-centers, making up for its lower price by selling to a mass-market audience...
...Nervous...
...Mindich New YorkUniversity Press 201 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY John Lilly A few months ago, Britain's Sun newspaper commemorated the Conservative Party conference by splashing across its front page a mocked-up photo of a dead Norwegian Blue parrot, the prop from a classic Monty Python sketch...
...Mindich might more cogently have discussed it as a matter of stylistic evolution...
...Mindich quotes a New York journalist as saying, "No one looks for [news] anymore...
...Elsewhere in Just the Facts, Mindich considers his four other ingredients oneby-one, each within the frame of a historical case...
...From now on, the formerly Thatcherite Sun (along with most of the British electorate) would be firmly in Labour's camp...
...He appeared unfazed, calm, deliberate, cheerful—throughout the shooting itself as well as during its aftermath...
...The book's one broad flaw is an overreliance on such structural rigor—a byproduct, no doubt, of its gestation as a doctoral thesis...
...These histories of Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism David T.Z...
...The Secret Service ordered FDR's driver to get out of the park but the president-elect countermanded them and went back to pick up the wounded...
...That such a list must necessarily consist of selected "facts" becomes an embarrassing secret, best left unspoken...
...But only in America do all the major papers deny that they are biased...
...Directly behind him was Thomas Armour, a Miami carpenter...
...Mainstream papers tend to lash out at the "less-disciplined" work to be found, for example, in certain political monthlies, but that doesn't keep them from latching onto stories generated by their bastard The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara: The Man Who Would Assassinate FDR Blaise Picchi Academy Chicago / 273 pages / $26.95 REVIEWED BY Florence King A t 9:15 on the evening of February 15, 1933, the greatest "what if" in American history was played out in Miami's Bayfront Park...
...He had met his first test under fire, and he had impressed not only his associates, but the press and the nation...
...In the cases of "rape" she often found a somewhat higher level of consent than the crime traditionally entails...
...Equating Great Britain, not to mention the United States, with Leopold's regime, Hochschild does not think so much as merely accept the thought our time has given him: White man bad...
...He was none of those things...
...He said and did all the right things at the right times: He stopped the car twice to pick up the wounded...
...Whether this constitutes "detachment" in the journalistic sense is open to question...
...On the way to the hospital he cradled Anton Cermak's head on his shoulder and kept talking to him—"Tony, keep quiet, don't move, Tony"— a steady murmur of encouragement that doctors later said kept Cermak from going into shock...
...it is perhaps less obvious, though still apparent to the observer who is not dazzled by his own post-colonial righteousness, that British rule was largely civilizing...
...Lillian Cross, wife of a Miami doctor, who was also standing on a chair...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
