Regarding Tim Stafford’s “Show Biz Reporters and Jihad Journalism” (July/August 1996): As the news director for two radio stations in Chico, California, I have had occasion to scream in outrage when someone labels me a “journalist” (it doesn’t happen very often). I am more a news packager, tying together and rewriting already brief headline stories from the Associated Press and the local daily newspaper. My news reports are a minute or so long, and most of my stories are two or three sentences. Aside from presenting the major news (often determined by that morning’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal), I look for the offbeat story, especially one of malfeasance in high places (political or ecclesiastical). A kicker at the end and my report is finished. Other local radio stations are able to send reporters to news conferences and city council meetings, with the local television outlets desperately searching for something visual to lead off the night’s newshour.
All of that, for better or worse, is what the public knows as “news.” James Fallows’s vision for “public journalism” is perhaps being realized by the public affairs programs usually aired at odd weekend times by local media. These programs, often a half-hour long, discuss the issues of the day with prominent local spokespeople and may even achieve some measure of enlightenment on the part of the listener or viewer. But that, in my mind and in the public’s mind, is not “news.”
The problem with the news biz is that there is too much information generated each day for anything but a superficial acknowledgment (and then it’s on to the next news cycle). Certainly there are people who are trying to hide something and, thankfully, some journalists are called (and paid) to investigate, but the real difficulty is in picking wisely from the welter of “things that happen” each day.
There is so much detail that Cokie Roberts can only report on a general mood or strategy on Capitol Hill, and Sam Donaldson can only fulminate at the latest excess of the House Speaker. Even cable news services, which presumably have the time and resources to develop a story, rarely devote more than a few minutes throughout the day to a given issue, punctuated with a call-in or two.
The fact is that the prominent news “stars” have become the news personified, the public’s “agents” representing to readers or viewers some aspect of the daily news cycle. Those aspects are presented not as the interplay of complex realities, but as the battlefield of strong personalities. Ideas get cursory treatment in favor of human interest mini-dramas. It’s like a room full of interesting people all discussing reviews of recent books. No one has actually read the books, but it doesn’t seem to matter. We get the news as filtered through the keyboards of Dan Rather or Peter Jennings-and it appears that in general, the public would not have it any other way.
Perhaps what is called for, then, is not the transformation of our culture into one that pays rapt attention to the details of the latest Medicare bill (short of a miracle, such a transformation is not about to happen) but rather the development of more and wiser editors or distillers.
I wish I were wiser, at any rate. How do I explain the tragedy of TWA Flight 800 in three sentences?
Dan Barnett
Paradise, California
Evangelical autobiography
I read with interest your comments on biography and autobiography (“Stranger in a Strange Land,” July/August 1996). I was especially struck by the reference to a forthcoming memoir by Daniel Barth Peters, the son of evangelical missionaries. My own attempt at such a work (Some Far and Distant Place, about the Muslim-Christian encounter through the eyes of a child, the son of Baptist missionaries in Pakistan) is forthcoming in February 1997 from University of Georgia Press. I wrote the book very much in isolation. As you suggest, “we have precious few examples to guide us.” Indeed, I wasn’t aware of any evangelical models. John Espey’s Minor Heresies, Major Departures: A China Mission Boyhood, published by the University of California Press in 1994, represents the mainline, pre-World War II missionary experience, and comes from a time when the missionary endeavor was much more at the center of popular American culture.
Jonathan S. Addleton
U.S. Agency for International Development
Almaty, Kazakstan
Your letters to the editor are welcome. If published, they may be edited for space and clarity, and they must include the writer’s name and address. Write to Books & Culture, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630-260-0114. Send e-mail to BCEdit@aol.com.
Correction: More than 20 readers wrote (mostly via e-mail), and several phoned, to ask what happened to the end of Harry Stout’s essay, “Biography as Battleground” (July/August 1996). Due to an error, the last line of the essay was dropped. Here is the concluding sentence as it should have appeared on page 10: “Competing legacies, in other words, can coexist-at least in the life of the church-and, when properly situated, can be a light of insight both to th e church and the world.” Apologies to Professor Stout and to our readers.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine
September/October 1996, Page 5
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