The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Notebook: Speaking of liberal media, or any media: is there anything more dissonant than a reporter or a media company’s self-importance? Back in the distant days when reporters could write, they’d inevitably end their career with a memoir, thinking–wrongly, usually–that their own life was as fascinating as all the fascinating things they’d covered somehow. The Times’s Russell Baker is an example. Growing Up, his memoir of pre-journalism days, of growing up in the Depression and all that, is affecting and a very good read. The sequel, which begins with his first days at work (the Baltimore Sun, as I recall), numerous nuggets aside, can be dull. So is Mencken’s Newspaper Days, by the way, which is a feat in itself for someone who had trouble writing a dull line. But the memoirs have continued. The self-absorption seems to be getting worse. The New York Times is doing something that would have been unthinkable a generation or two ago. It’s running these insufferable pieces about itself on page 3, “In Times Past,” or items about how this or that page got made, or what this reporter had for breakfast before a prime minister’s assassination. Sunday was a double bill. “In Times Past” featured a whole article about the unveiling of a portrait of Pinch Sulzberger, the publisher from 1992 to 2017, making it something of a double-mirrored bit of narcissism: the Times admiring itself admiring itself. There’s a picture of the painting, by somebody or other, and a whole story about how it came to be, where it hangs, where similar portraits used to hang until Sulzberger’s son, the current publisher, decided to move them all “to a balcony overlooking the 14th floor cafeteria,” and how a committee decided the particulars of the portrait. Seriously? Above that item was another bit of navel-gazing you’d have never seen before: a map of the world showing four locations of four foreign correspondents and what they’re writing about. A generation or two ago you’d have needed two full pages to keep track of foreign desks. These days the Times needs to advertise its foreign correspondents to remind us that they’re still there. It gets worse: the Times has thankfully adopted the custom of providing some of its articles on audio. Problem is that it feels compelled to have its reporters narrate a whole bit of mini-biography about the article they’re about to read, telling us how it made them feel to report it, giving us bits of trivia, or showing off, about how many days they spent reporting, what they had for breakfast. Just get to the story. Let it speak for itself.

—P.T.

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

FlaglerLive News Service, Palm Coast (@flaglerlive) • Instagram photos and videos

Until that night I had held religiously to the American faith in “objective journalism,” which forbade a reporter to go beyond what the great man said. No matter how dull, stupid, unfair, vicious, or mendacious they might be, the utterances of the great were to be reported deadpan, with nary a hint that the speaker might be a bore, a dunce, a brute, or a habitual liar. For a reporter from an important American newspaper to question the value of “objective journalism” was worse than unthinkable. It was subversive. It was revolutionary. Now I was not just questioning it; I was thrusting my own judgment into the story by calling the speech “long-winded” and by publishing one of Eden’s sillier statements, which tended to satirize him. Harry Boardman, a conservative elderly gentleman who wrote plain, quiet English and had no use for typewriters, had set me on the path to revolution. After that I began sneaking my judgments into stories where I thought they would broaden a reader’s understanding.

–From Russell Baker’s The Good Times (1989).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.