The Wayward Press
Jaffe, Jacob H.
The Wayward Press THE PRESS, by A. J . Liebling. Ballantine Books. 284 pp. 75 cents. Reviewed by Jacob H. Jaffe THE PRESS regularly faces a stern, if qualitatively uneven, battery of...
...Gradually, news becomes nonessential (for the newspaper owner) and advertising physically overwhelming...
...The most probable result of Liebling's collective enterprise, scheduled to achieve a wide circulation by its appearance in inexpensive paperback form, will be more and more people reading newspapers with less and less confidence...
...Stylistically and ideologically at variance with each other, the critics seem, nevertheless, to unite on one point: America's newspapers have never been more of a mess...
...The difference between the Thirties and the Sixties is viewed substantially as a matter of degree...
...The newspaper reader is suddenly aware that he has no other place to go...
...But years after the events, much of this material has paled...
...Lyle Stuart (The Independent) and Burton Wolfe (The Californian) lambaste it from the corner of the neo-muckraker...
...Liebling's most fundamental shortcoming, however, is a primary attachment to basic premises and standards of judgment drawn from a distinctively past era of journalism...
...Yet, in spite of their separate efforts, which must be apparent to an army of reporters, many editors, and a few publishers, the critics have exerted no appreciable influence on news media...
...Although Liebling offers no astonishments and examines dailies as an outsider exclusively, his taste and curiosity produce fresh observations...
...The size of Chiang Kai-shek's army in Formosa, a Long Island Railroad strike, and the final illness of Josef Stalin, as covered contemporaneously by the dailies, no longer appear to have dramatic importance...
...Reviewed by Jacob H. Jaffe THE PRESS regularly faces a stern, if qualitatively uneven, battery of professional critics...
...But the change may be much more drastic...
...The tragedy of the American press might not be so much its "decline" as its massive indifference to every legitimate complaint and appeal...
...The process is curiously tied in with the prevailing low-level capital-gains tax, which enables the weaker of two competitors to buy out the stronger one...
...Liebling sees newspapers as personalities young and growing or old and subject to the favorable and unfavorable characteristics of that state, with externals playing good and bad roles...
...The impact of competing media, the strange new power of publishers like Samuel I. Newhouse, the terrible dependence of dailies on the public relations giant, the absurd emphasis on typographic window dressing paralleled by a depressing editorial stagnancy, and the awesome transformation of so many news media into apologists (or fall guys) for public officials, are either skimmed over or ignored...
...You may regret the futility of Liebling's punch, now spanning almost twenty years, but it is impossible not to be stimulated by his sparkling style, a temperament that mixes humor with skepticism, and a determined exploitation of timely specifics...
...In The Neiu Yorker pieces, Liebling's most familiar device has been to make fools of journalists by exposing the silly ways in which they contradict each other relative to a specified story...
...What he says is true enough, but he has not satisfactorily probed all of the forces that are reshaping the press situation...
...He argues that if there were simply more newspapers in a given geographical area, heightened competition would bring readers a larger fund of news...
...Carl E. Lindstrom expertly delineates a host of flaws as an appreciated member of the academy, Charles Collingwood aims charmingly at his target on New York's weekly "WCBS-TV Views the Press" program...
...With this conviction serving as a theoretical base, he shows that monopoly has .traveled from the national to the local scene: "The industry's ideal now is absolute control in a number of cities, or even one...
...The latest collection of his essays—most of them New Yorker items, a lew orginals, and a considerable ratio coming by way of two previous Liebling "Wayward" volumes (contradicting the publisher's promotional claim that "this is an original publication, not a reprint")— may not touch the conscience of calloused publishers, but they are likely to educate or entertain just about everyone else...
...In his world, the numerical, sometimes shaped as wealth, often matters most...
...if there were more reporters and correspondents, a greater diversity of approaches to complicated affairs would result...
...and the sophisticate of the set, A. J . Liebling, uses "The Wayward Press" department of The New Yorker magazine to needle subjects and invigorate readers...
...He also brings a distinguishing trait to his subect: Just as some men are economic, moral, or psychological determinists, Liebling has faith in numbers...
Vol. 25 • November 1961 • No. 11
