THE PRESS: No News Is Bad News
Powers, Thomas
with the inclusion in the new Department of ,Education of certain Department of Agriculture and Department of Labor programs. In the USCC's judgment, .non-public school p~rticipation in the...
...We can't all maintain an identical pitch of concern about absolutely everything...
...I'm afraid I'll miss something...
...Paradis spoke of "the concern that a new department may well be controlled by persons almost exclusively committed to public school education and with little understanding for and appreciation of the value and the rights of non-public education...
...There's something bracing in the prospect of a long strike and a forced withdrawal from addiction to the news...
...In the USCC's judgment, .non-public school p~rticipation in the programs conducted by these Departments has been "far more" equitable than participation in the programs conducted by the Office of Education, which will furnish the leadership for the new department...
...Twenty-six days is a long time to spend in jail defending an important principle, better hidden by a newspaper blackout, than by prison walls...
...The rhetorical definition of American education includes all schools, public and private, that serve the Ameri.-an public...
...For a week I contented myself with a glance at the headlines of the Rutland Herald or the Boston Globe, figuring that would keep me abreast of things if San Francisco should finally slide into the Pacific...
...Then I glanced at the front page of the Rutland Herald one morning and noticed that a New Jersey court had ordered his release from jail, pending an appeal, after 26 days . . . . Twenty-six days...
...The higher we set our standards, borrowed from nobler genres, the worse the product looks...
...This definition allows, for example, ' the Education Commissioner, Ernest L. Boyer, to affirm that "Private education is absolutely crucial to the vitality of this nation and public policy should strengthen rather than diminish these essential institutions...
...It is not the newspapers that have been tugging at our sleeves, when we wanted to be about our own business, but the world itself, and we neglect it at our peril...
...That was where the story slipped from my mind...
...Cannot the Home Improvement Page tell us once and for all how to fix a leaky faucet, and then drop the subject forever...
...I might plead 'habit, but it isn't habit...
...We are already approaching the middle of this ordeal right now, and if it were not for the newspaper strike, would be reading about a dozen possible Republican opponents of Mr...
...These schools fall outside their operational definition of American education...
...A quick if busy youth, and a long, impoverished dotage, for those too sentimental to exact the last pound from their lovers...
...But must we accept that the quest for a new restaurant is endless, too...
...here's a chance to unclutter my mind and face life direct, with an eye to what's immediately at hand...
...There is a rhetorical definition and an operational definition...
...But eventually a small incident reminded me what it is that newspapers are supposed to do, the one thing, half-obscured by the bridge columns and mood pieces and articles about the conversion of old barns into weekend homes, which nothing else does half so well...
...29 September 1978:630...
...When a concrete issue presents itself, however, the operational definition is controlling...
...What I am thinking about here is the nagging sense I get, and which I suspect others get, that in reading newspapers we are wasting our time...
...After you've been reading the papers for aWhile you begin to notice cyclic patterns...
...Indeed, with material of this sort, maybe it is in the end an advanCage not ,to have quite so all-encompassing a formal and aesthetic vision as Bergman wou.l'd...
...About the subjects that matter there is generally nothing we can do...
...Win or lose, this wottld have raised the same issues but perhaps in a more constructive context...
...I might worry about the strike[ all I liked, without shortening it by a day...
...The issues raised in the Paradis letter are significant, indeed deserving more attention than they receive...
...I am deliberately refraining here from speaking of all those things about newspapers which ought to be, Commonweah 629 and even might be, better than they are...
...A biography of Bramwell Bront~ is next in line...
...Is there .to be no end to instruction in the care of houseplants...
...Perhaps I was only whistling Dixie...
...I don't really care what's the best restaurant in Soho...
...Nobody has appointed me to keep an eye on foreign policy, or to decide what sort of logging practices to allow in national forests, or to find kidnap victims...
...THOMAS POWERS TESTED METTLE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Tllg $C11[Im For years Woody Allen 'has made comedies out of the same neuroses, anxiety and despair which are found in Ingmar Bergman's fi, hns...
...The commitment to public education in the Office of Education was such that OE never really considered the voucher plan experiment...
...And yet, given the political realities .the USCC statement recognizes, the question must be asked, "Was this approach, opposition to the new cabinet post, the most effective way to raise these issues...
...Now this, I have come .to think, is a bit nuts...
...The experiences that both directors try .to deal with---emotional experiences that 'have no obj~tive eontem, experiences that are purely, as Allen's title says, "interior".-are so elusive .that the more tentative art with which Allen approaches them comes nearer the .truth than does the completeness, the aesthetic elaboration, of a Bergman film...
...And why not...
...On the question of folding programs from other federal departments into the proposed Department of Education, the USCC is apparently aligned with some stronger forces--those within Agriculture and Labor whose programs are at issue...
...I cannot describe it as exactly an improving book, but for sheer interest it certainly rivaled the doings of New York and Washington, and for the first time i learned what happened to those young girls in Jane Austen novels, who ran off with military of...
...Certainly Interiors is a film that works as drama at least as well and painfully s Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage did...
...The judgment is not without some basis...
...We seem to have left the Long Hot Summer Story behind, but Watergate has given us a host of lesser scandal stories which begin with discovery of malfeasance, and then quickly shift focus to those in government who ought to have known but claim they didn't...
...The chief reason for the USCC's opposition to the new Department sheds some light on the pattern described above...
...Public schoolmen either are more sensitive than other citizens to church-state issues or have special reasons (such as fear and dislike of non,public education) for opposing the assistance...
...we arrive in the middle of the story as children, and leave in the middle as decrepits...
...They take the world to be an interesting place, and, like people with a gift for conversation, have always got a story to relate, or an odd fact picked up somewhere, or a bit of practical advice, or a sound instinct that something bears watching...
...Other people have no doubt acquired the habit in a different way, but the result is pretty much the same: a compulsive regularity in the reading of newspapers which is hard to explain by either pleasure or utility...
...The price of Kodak...
...It is just there...
...Might it have been be~ter, for example, to have supported the new department, arguing for provisions in the legislation that would provide non-public, schools with effective representation...
...the reporting is mostly elementary, like a description of an elephant which begins with the number of its legs...
...Least welcome is the Presidential Election...
...According .to Senator Moynihan, "The bureaucracy that would inexorably move from the Office of Education to the Department of Education is a bureaucracy devoted to the demise of [church] schools...
...pretty thin stuff, next to Bach...
...The tirelessness of newspapers is bad enough...
...I can only say that for years I've had the feeling we're close to the edge of something, not the outer but the inner edge, and that I wake up 29 September 1978:628 in the morning wondering if today is the day it will announce itself...
...And why...
...The mid-term Congressional elections bring a flood of them, which never ebbs till the ballots are counted...
...The outcome of acoustical tests to determine if a fourth shot was fired at the scene of John F. Kennedy's murder in Dallas...
...But there's something irritating and highfalutin' in this approach, like remarking with a sniff that the Rolling Stones are...
...All one need do is to take them seriously...
...For the brutal fact is that most of what appears in newspapers does not measure very high as literature, and does not tell us anything we really need to know...
...Free at last...
...In this instance they had done it first to Myron Farber of the New York Times, a reporter threatened with jail in New Jersey for refusing to surrender his notes to the judge in a murder triM...
...Must we submit to it all as permanent aspects of the human condition, like the heartbreak of psoriasis...
...The winner of the ninth race at Saratoga...
...the newspapers are tugging at our sleeves with reparts of fire and flood, the doings of great men, the plight of the snail darter, estimates of the Russian wheat crop, old scores being settled by the Palestinians, the torn ligaments of atl~letes, a recipe for turkey stuffing...
...The addiction has a stronger grip than that...
...The world has been too much with me...
...T, heir operational definition of American education includes only government-provided or public education...
...Newspapers spread us thin...
...Npt the idea that something is waiting to happenmthat is not surrendered so easily~but the idea it will fit into a newspaper headline, and the addiction to news which seems to follow...
...I do not mean the vote itself...
...It reminded me of something I heard first in the 1960s: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you...
...this is not an argument for monarchy...
...I've driven through blizzards, even dug my way out of snowdrifts, just to get a copy of the Sunday New York Times...
...This was not the inner edge of what I have been expecting, nor even anything of the general sort, but it was most unmistakably something which bore watching...
...An episode in John Leonard's private life...
...Finally there is the Strike Story, infuriating for its opacity where the exact bone of contention is concerned, and dull because the secrecy of negotiations is so rarely penetrated...
...but severe restrictions appear when (as under ESEA) the elementary and secondary levels of schooling are involved...
...A picture of Carter on the Colorado...
...The only thing tougher than reading Strike Stories, is covering them...
...For a week, it worked fine...
...or it may have been sheer relief at a break in dogged routine, a kind of vacation...
...I'm sorry homosexuals find life so tough, but have to confess I do not think seriously about their problem...
...It is worth recalling that the federally funded effort to test the educational voucher was undertaken by the -Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and not by OE...
...Or so I felt when the strike began...
...Carter in 1980, some with prospects so remote not even they take them seriously...
...Still, even taking newspapers for what they are, there's something about them which gets to you a~ter awhile...
...They cannot surrender the world for a day...
...How can the sexual revolution be a revolution, if the old morality is never discarded, and the new never wins .the day...
...Of course it's easy to be tough on newspapers...
...And this is all sheer profit, books I wouldn't have read if there had been no strike...
...Instead of the Times, with my morning coffee I read the memoirs of Harriette Wilson, the witty mistress of a great many peers, including the Duke of Wellington, in Regency London...
...Despite the worthy efforts of several OE officials, research continues to show that private school students receive less .than their share from federal programs administered by OE...
...and of the sheer awfulness of so much of what happens in the world...
...Other cycles are almost as onerous: the Middle Eastern Negotiating Story, for example, which follows a pattern as immutable as an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme...
...Or the Hurricane Story, which builds quickly from the first sighting of the hurricane, reaches a crescendo as the storm hits and the first casualty reports come in, signs off lingeringly at the end with Aftermath Stories of rebuilding and the creaky workings of government disaster relief...
...This very easiness, in fa:t, is one of .the charms of newspapers...
...It's like California jug wine, a bland version of the real thing...
...A review of a .book blaming imperialism on the nuclear family...
...Is it all to go on forever--not just the energy crisis and the quest for the Presidency, but the rise, of the Sunbelt, the decline of the Republican Party, the genesis of religious cults in Southern California, inflation, new ideas for loft beds, the influence of violence on television, tremors ~long the San Andreas fault, the return of the peasant blouse, strange lights in the sky, poisoned candy at Hallowe'en, the spread of the singles bar...
...Even worse is their repetitiveness, which sounds like but is not quite the same thing...
...The fine writing is rarely more than a string of adjectives...
...Those are separate subjects...
...Christmas and the 4th of July are days like any other...
...Miss what...
...For one thing, they're fireless...
...ricers...
...Allen has made a film which is perhaps even better than the film Bergman might have made from the same material, for while Allen is less powerful as an artist, he may also be more human...
...But is nothing else ever to be done with...
...But sometime in the first six months of an administration a story appears weighing the incumbent's chance for re-election...
...and the analysis is bloated with the jargon of the day...
...All signs indicate these departments will succeed .in keeping their educational efforts independent of the new department, and their success may amount to an unraveling of the whole concept...
...The spirit rebels against the relentless resurgence of the same old thing, masquerading as something new...
...After a week into the strike I allowed myself to think I wouldn't care if it were never settled...
...Now, w~th Interiors, Allen has made a film .that Bergman might almost have made himself...
...In a 1968 report, Erickson and Greeley pointed out that: In keeping with a well-established pattern, federal aid flows rather easily through private pipelines when (as under OEO) the beneficiaries fall into "preschool," "dropout," or "postsecondary" categories or if the services are viewed as "welfare" rather than "education...
...Journalists are an unpretentious breed, on the wholewwe might cite an exception or two on the editorial pages--and it would be illtempered to tax them with failing to see through to the heart of things, when a}l they have intended is a fair and honest piece of work, within the limits of the day...
...The pattern of speech-making on the one hand and actual performance on the other suggests that there are two definitions of American education among federat and state administrators in education, especially at the elementary and secondary levels...
...Even the most slovenly and distracted newspaper keeps half an eye out for what they're doing to us...
...All of these stories come around with regularity, but none of the bracing promise, of the change of seasons, and we read them--or at least I read them--with a sinking heart...
...No newspapers...
...I can accept the idea that the Middle Eastern Problem is a fact of nature, like the law of gravity, with no prospect of repeal...
...Focus on the one turns us into collaborators, and suggests we pay even closer attention to newspapers than we do already, while the other simply oppresses the spirit and makes us wonder if there is anything to be done, not about "problems," but about us...
...Ninety-nine percent of what appears in them does not properly or necessarily concern us, and often does not concern anybody at all...
...O Lord, from the tyranny of the quotidian...
...We may learn to live with the fact that the affairs of men are never done...
...Msgr...
...My back's to the wall, but I can't answer...
...This is closely related to the Oil Spill Story...
...Better to read books, care about one or two things, think deeper and more steadily on those matters we might do something about, pay attention to the life which is truly at hand, and let the cluttering distractions of the world go hang...
...you might ask...
...I read Ben Hecht's Guide Jor the Bedeviled, in which the author discovered he was a Je~v after the first reports of concentration camps began to emerge from Germany in '1943...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 19
