The Great American Column
Rosenblatt, Roger
THE NEWS FROM AMERICA The grandmother of a friend of mine assures him that "today's newspaper wraps tonight's fish." Her maxim is meant as a kind of consolation, but it also goes to the essential...
...We are always given the day's Big Story-Red China Bombs Mars - juxtaposed to the day's Little Story, how members of the 4-H Club of Ames, Iowa, made their own cow out of Sardo and linoleum...
...Even today, Diane Arbus says in her introduction to Aperture, "the more specific you are, the more general it'll be...
...Out of the explosion of fragmented and pictorial literature emerged a new hero in popular American culture, the reporter, or newsman...
...His own morality was considered unimpeachable because the passive eye was considered to be uncorruptible...
...We receive it most clearly on radio and television where the voice and /or face of the reporter becomes part of the news presentation itself, but we also recognize it in the papers, particularly because of the prominent role of reporters in so many news events, and because of the dominant location of editorial pages...
...In the comics, Brenda Starr and Steve Roper...
...On television lately, the newsmen supply this item themselves by whooping it up in desperate hilarity at the close of each program...
...The news sings America, but because it holds such a high position in our culture, it also sings and celebrates itself...
...One would think that the bulletins and extras which are regularly blared at us would be more memorable, that the momentous events which we scan on paper and television would stick in us deeply as we go about our business, would reverberate in our sleep, and shape our conduct...
...Deeds Goes to Town), and Orsen Welles (Citizen Kane...
...When John Chancellor won his reputation by clinging to his microphone while being ousted from the Republican National Convention of 1964, the guards were dragons...
...He was the center of the action, honest, trust-busting, straight-talking, cocksure, relentless, and free...
...In the hands of such people the camera became the legitimate inquisitor of the American experience...
...The news, after all, is made up of our very important, complicated, and exciting lives...
...He pranced about our imaginations as Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday), Alistair Sim (This Man is News), Spencer Tracy (Keeper of the Flame), James Cagney (Come Fill the Cup), Jean Arthur (Mr...
...There was excitement to the very idea of him...
...A succession of photographs within a book or magazine was arranged to speak for the country and for itself as pictorial literature...
...It is the combination, then, of the reporter-as-Romantic-hero image and the reality-as-fragment method that we receive as our news...
...Crusaders all, these fictional characters were based on a glittering chivalric image in the public mind, an image, one suspects, with which some journalists continue to decorate themselves...
...As a result, or at least as one of the results, we are more often aware of the news as news than we are of any of the items it purports to bring us...
...He too was born in the thirties, and has continued to grow in heroic stature since then, only recently to have that stature challenged, though not seriously shaken, by public criticism...
...Like the camera, he functioned as the passive eye to external action...
...It is the phenomenon of the photograph as intellectual or moral statement, an idea which first took hold in the WPA projects of the New Deal, and burgeoned in the photographic commentaries of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, and James Agee and Walker Evans...
...A student riot in a university is counterbalanced by the discovery of a new enzyme...
...But there is another and more specific cultural phenomenon on which the news has been modeled as well...
...Superman was a reporter in costume...
...When we use "influential" in reference to the Times, it has all the thrust of calling the Rockettes the most beautiful girls in the world...
...What we receive, that is, is not simply the communication of information, but a form of popular art...
...it has all the long-lasting influence of popular art, which is none whatsoever...
...Age versus Youth, City v. Country, Love v. Hate, Beauty v. Ugliness...
...Despite the fact that reporters may model themselves on a heroic ideal, the truth is that they make very uninteresting heroes because they have no discernible character...
...The other truth is that the news, despite its imitation of a literary form, is not literature, fragmented or otherwise, because all it gives us is awareness, whereas literature must also give understanding.derstanding...
...On the radio there was "Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press" and "Casey, Crime Photographer" Captain Marvel, Jr., was a newsboy...
...He became, in short, the artist of our times, not because he emitted any personal inspiration, but because he used or embodied what were judged to be the only valid instruments of art, the notebook and the lens...
...There is an impulse in all things American to speak for all things American, and fragmentation, as it allows simultaneously for a depiction of enormous diversity and implicit cohesion, has been grabbed up as an essential means of American expression...
...That organization has been consistent over the years, and simple, and depends on a collection of items of information which in aggregate are supposed to effect a certain dramatic balance...
...Not only don't we remember what happens in the news from day to day...
...With his collar up, his press card stuck in his porkpie hat, his ability to gain entrance to forbidden places, his contempt for authority, his carelessness, swagger, brashness, and disguises, he became the ideal of the detached man, a kind of existential hero...
...By the mid-1930s Eliot, Dos Passos, and others had established fragmentation, that is, the breaking of general experience into dissociated parts, as a respectable method for apprehending reality...
...In many ways our art and culture have yet to stray from that establishment, and for good reason...
...we don't care...
...Photography was fragmentation without words, a form of imagism...
...He could rove about the country taking it all in, permitting his facts to speak for America and investing these facts with high moral quality simply because they were facts, therefore pure, therefore to be associated with truth and right...
...He was hoisted to Hollywood by Clark Gable in Remember the Night, by Joel McRae in Foreign Correspondent, by James Stewart in Call Northside 777, and by a hundred other stars in a hundred other movies...
...If we see the damage done by an oil slick, we will also be informed of some vast community ecology project...
...The truth is, however, that only by the dogged repetition of journalists are news items salvaged from instant oblivion...
...Her maxim is meant as a kind of consolation, but it also goes to the essential transiency of the news, which is a curious thing...
...As a popular hero the newsman became a permanent part of the national folklore almost immediately...
...Every morning, every evening, they paste the country together in one or another makeshift mosaic, and sing America, in parts...
...Not only does the news have all the self-consciousness of popular art, which is considerable...
...the opulent funeral of an eastern prince set against a segment on coupling pandas...
...If we are shown or told about a kidnapping, we also learn of an act of bravery...
...It is not at all surprising that the Times should continue to be referred to as the most influential paper in America, after having insisted that the nation go Mc-Govern...
...On Broadway, Front Page...
...The structural organization of news, of television news and newspaper news, has a great deal to do with this...
...Finally, when we are made sufficiently unhappy by the bulk of the news, we will be given the Lighthearted or Heart-warming Anecdote of the day, which is supposed to correspond to comic relief...
...What newspapers and television are imitating in assembling these collections is the general form of modern American literature, particularly the American novel, since the 1930s...
...This literature said, in effect, that there was no aesthetic or cultural unity to the nation, that various particles of reality - faces, houses, street scenes - which were caught and fixed forever by the camera were in perpetual tension, just as the parts of the nation itself were in perpetual tension...
...There is the Great Name in the News, and the story of John Q. Public...
...Like the modern poet or novelist, he dealt in fragments...
...So, our newsmen have grabbed it up...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
