Our Timid Press
Jaffe, Jacob H.
Our Timid Press The Fading American Newspaper, by Carl E. Lindstrom. Doubleday. 283 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Jacob H. Jaffe With the fierceness of H. L. Mencken and the contemporary pace of Vance...
...He denounces editors for desperately striving to please everyone in a community (and, therefore, gratifying no one), strikes at press associations for contributing an Orwellian sameness to dailies from coast to coast, and damns what he sees as the continuing effort by newspapers to report the news swiftly, despite the substantial time advantage held by broadcasters...
...The primary charge made in this book is that, in failing to furnish readers with sufficient kinds and volume of news, the dailies have persuaded many to move on to radio-television and the news magazines...
...Despising chain newspaper systems and witnessing the distressing effects of monopoly (one-newspaper town) journalism, Lindstrom delivers a series of smashing blows...
...His positive recommendations are comparatively few...
...Paradoxically, while he calls repeatedly for facts to be added to facts as a major means of curbing the steady migration of readers to competing media, the structure of his own arguments contradicts this appeal...
...He is remarkably precise in recalling his own personal experiences, but his general ideas follow each other without the intellectually nourishing endorsement of examples that are both timely and specific...
...We have seldom been so starved for a hard-hitting critic of journalism to expose the muck of mediocrity, timidity, and indifference that has virtually buried our press...
...Lindstrom, with about forty years of reporting-editing experience behind him, is apparently available for the role...
...his bold attack reaches into every corner of newspaper enterprise...
...Presumably, he seeks the reverse of what he attacks— that is, editorial daring and a far greater total of news data (which he appears to prefer to prosaic, and potentially misleading, "interpretation...
...Reviewed by Jacob H. Jaffe With the fierceness of H. L. Mencken and the contemporary pace of Vance Packard, Carl E. Lindstrom, until recently executive editor of the Gannett chain's Hartford (Connecticut) Times and now a professor of journalism, rushes head-on into the newspapers of America...
Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3
