Killing the Messenger

by Professor Tom Goldstein (Editor)

Criticism of the press has flourished at times over the last one hundred years, especially during the first part of this century. For a 1920 issue of the New Republic , Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote a stunning indictment of the New York Times for botching the coverage of the Russian Revolution. The 1980s have been a fallow period for cogent press criticism, but the decade has been characterized by a series of upheavals crying for fuller scrutiny. Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter, was forced to return the Pulitzer Prize for a fabricated story about an eight-year-old heroin addict; the National News Council collapsed; a blizzard of libel suits covered newspapers, magazines, and networks; and Gary Hart in his bid for the presidency forced an examination of what should be private or public knowledge. Killing the Messenger is an anthology of some of the most provocative writing that has been done in this century about the press. It is a seminal collection of neglected pieces linked together to offer different perspectives on many of the issues that are plaguing the press today. Killing the Messenger examines how the concentration of media ownership denies access to the public, how the media inadequately police themselves, how reporters could be better trained, and how the press sensationalizes on the one hand and censors itself on the other. Tom Goldstein has selected five areas of reporting on private matters, journalists and their biases, the power and limitations of the press, making better reporters, and the techniques journalists use to portray reality. Some of the selections have been taken from books that have been long out of print, or from official reports. Others come from magazines of speeches. The contributors include Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph Pulitzer, Upton Sinclair, Louis Brandeis, Spiro Agnew, and John Hersey. The editor has provided brief introductions and headnotes to each section. Tom Goldstein has chosen these articles to encourage contemporary journalists to look at themselves more closely, to apply the same skepticism to themselves that they readily heap on city councilmen, police chiefs, football coaches, movie directors, and heads of state. According to him, journalists have not shown much appetite for self-analysis during a crucial time when they should welcome, not recoil from, criticism of their own performance.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 1989

Reviews

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

About the only excerpt in this book I would enthusiastically recommend is the final essay, “The Legend on the License,” by John Hersey (author of Hiroshima) which critiques the New Journalism movement, specifically Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner's Song, and Truman Capote’s Handcarved Coffins, lamenting the fictionalization of nonfiction. Criticism worth reading if you’ve read any of these authors’ nonfiction (which I have, and which I have enjoyed a lot). Also somewhat interesting is a 1930s essay by George Seldes covering the press’s mistreatment of two Charles Lindberghs (the aviator and his father) and Upton Sinclair. Most of the rest would only be enjoyed by someone who is really really really interested in the history of newspapers. On a side note: Throughout all the excerpts, much talk of men of the press & newspapermen; don’t believe there was a single reference to a woman working in the field of journalism — not even from Joseph Pulitzer in his essay explaining why he endowed the Columbia Journalism School.