The Wayward Press Critic

The occasion of Barbara Walters announcing her retirement seems as good a time as any to share this anecdote, one which I still find to be shrouded in some mystery.

I teach journalism in a building at Marist College named for the broadcasting legend Lowell Thomas. Thomas found his real fame with his travelogues (the Marist library has a wonderful exhibit on them), in one of which he brought even bigger and more lasting fame to one of his subjects, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). He was also a magazine editor, a narrator of newsreels and one of the founders of the broadcasting corporation Capital Cities. I’ll admit that despite being a journalism historian, I didn’t know much about him until taking up professional residence in the building that bears his name.

But as happens, once I did, I took up a particular interest in him. Then, a couple years ago, I was in The Strand, one of my favorite book stores, browsing the journalism section (that The Strand has a journalism section is one of the things that makes it a favorite), and I came across a used book: Lowell Thomas: The Stranger Everyone Knows. It’s mostly a collection of anodyne profiles of Thomas, published as a collection in 1968, when Thomas would have been a very respectable 76. Lowell himself wrote the introduction.

But it was what was inside that made me really decide to buy the book. It was inscribed by Lowell Thomas himself. And not only that. It was inscribed to Barbara Walters. Barbara Walters!

For Barbara Walters’ shelf—

Don’t bother to read except maybe P’s x and 58.

Lowell

Interesting that Walters had dumped this book, though I suspect she hadn’t done so intentionally. Probably she asked an intern or an assistant just to clear out a room of books and sell them all to the Strand. It’s the sort of thing that keeps the Strand so well stocked. (Also among my Strand treasures is a history of the New York Times that looks like it was owned by Homer Bigart.)

Anyway, the volume’s provenance aside, I had to read pages x and 58.

Page x is where Lowell Thomas’s introduction begins. He charms and self-deprecates, saying that none of these pieces is worth reading, since they were all written by friends, “so naturally they wouldn’t cut me to pieces.” But he does suggest reading one piece, by H. Allen Smith, about a “Prohibition Era ‘literary’ wing-ding.” The piece mostly describes Thomas’s wife, Frances, shocked at the bad behavior of the guests, many of them uninvited, and some of whom destroyed furniture by dousing it with Golden Wedding whiskey. In the introduction, Lowell Thomas says that he wanted to update the story, relating its aftermath:

When the last celebrity (?) staggered into our Sutton Place elevator or slid down the stairs, I went to my bedroom on the floor above, to calm down, and think over this unexpected catastrophe into which we had stumbled. There sprawled across my bed was as beautiful a blonde as you’d ever hope to see—out cold.

I read this passage in the basement of The Strand, eyes widening. Could this be Barbara Walters, splayed across the bed of Lowell Thomas, 40 years her senior? The scandal! I kept reading:

Hurriedly I dashed downstairs again, to see if by chance my wife might have gone out to a nearby delicatessen or somewhere. She hadn’t. So, I returned to the bedroom, gingerly tapped the young lady—on her cheek. Whereupon she opened her eyes, and with a startled look, but not a sound, jumped from the bed, dashed for the elevator, and vanished.

Could it be? I bought the book and now keep it displayed on a shelf in my office. But a closer reading makes the Barbara Walters interpretation impossible. Allen Smith says the party happened in 1930. Walters would still have been an infant.

So why did Thomas inscribe the book this way? Is there some secret to be gleaned from it? I know as a journalism professor that I should investigate, but I like leaving some of the mystery. Still, I think the answer is likely prosaic, embedded in LT’s introduction to the book. I suspect he inscribed every copy this way, saying not that the book was for Person X, but rather for Person X’s shelf. And that those two pages were the only ones worth reading for the same reasons he disclaims all the other chapters—they’re laudatory and he was embarrassed.

I know that Walters and Thomas crossed paths. There’s a photograph of them together on the wall of the second floor of the Lowell Thomas Communication Center. It’s part of a collection of photos of LT, tracing some of his history. That wall won’t exist in September, since Marist is renovating the top floor of the building this summer. But it’s good to have my hands on the artifact, to keep a little piece of history in my office—even if there’s no whiff of scandal wafting from it.

Kyu Ho Youm, the president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication has issued a statement on behalf of the organization (of which I am both a member and a division officer), urging caution in the prosecution of government leakers and whistleblowers. Here is the text of the statement:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 25, 2013

Contact:

AEJMC President Kyu Ho Youm

youm@uoregon.edu

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is committed to freedom of speech and the press in the United States and abroad. AEJMC believes that this commitment must include a free exchange of information and ideas, even some information that the U.S. government considers or wishes to be “secret.” The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair and the existence of clandestine CIA prisons are examples in which secret government information was leaked to and publicized by the news media. In these and in many other cases, the dissemination of secret information served a greater good to American society by informing the public and by allowing for a needed debate on the ethics of secret government policies and covert actions. We believe that a democracy shrouded in secrecy encourages corruption, and we agree, as Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court said, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

AEJMC, therefore, calls attention to the current administration’s zeal in prosecuting those in government who leak secret information. Only three times in its first 92 years was the Espionage Act of 1917 used to prosecute government officials for leaking secret information to the press. However, the current administration has already brought six charges under this Act. The accused in all of these cases appear to represent whistleblowers, not those engaged in attempted espionage for foreign governments that “aid the enemy.”

We caution that the prosecution of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who released a trove of secret data to the WikiLeaks website, appears to be excessively punitive, with a chilling effect on a democracy’s requisite freedom of speech and the press. The release of this information advanced and clarified public debate on the morality of U.S. policy. Some observers even suggest that the honest (albeit secret) diplomatic assessments of Middle Eastern regimes helped spark the Arab Spring. Pfc. Bradley Manning has already admitted in military court that he did break the law through his actions. But to accuse him of “aiding the enemy” is egregious, given his credible stated intentions and the global breadth of the dissemination.

The government’s current approach toward leak prosecutions sends a message to the rest of the world that the United States’ actions are not fully aligned with its stated “exceptional” commitment to freedom of speech and the press as a human right.

Therefore, in recognition of the historical benefits of leaked information to our nation and to the principles and values of democracy, in particular the freedom of speech and the press, AEJMC calls on the U.S. government to make prosecutions as rare as possible, to consider the credible intent of the accused in these prosecutions, and to seek punishment that is proportionate and commensurate, not only with credible intent, but also with resulting harm and benefit to our democracy, its principles and values. Furthermore, we ask that prosecutors consider reviewing existing press leak cases in light of the public good and the First Amendment. AEJMC believes that this will ensure an environment in which the public will continue to be served through the occasional leaking of secret information by those whose credible intent was the public good.

About AEJMC

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

As the Associated Press and the New York Times blog The Lede (though theyweren’t alone; the piece, aided by AP memberships, got wide distribution) reported today, China Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, ran a short piece on its web site, in both English and Chinese, reporting that The Onion—which we in the U.S. know to be a satirical newspaper—had declared North Korean leader Kim Jong Un its “sexiest man alive.”

As the Times piece points out, this, on its face, is true. The Onion did make such a declaration (now updated to link to the China Daily piece). But the pieces—and those who are tweeting links to them today—are taking a clear “isn’t it silly that China Daily doesn’t understand that The Onion isn’t real” tone. As did I when I first retweeted links.

And posted them on Facebook.

That’s where I got into a discussion with Simon Zhang, who is the person closest to me who is completely fluent in both American and Chinese culture. And through our discussion I came to complicate my views of the matter. I believe that there are three possible interpretations of China Daily running this story. Here they are, with my analysis, aided by Simon:

1. The editors of China Daily don’t understand the satire of The Onion, but think that Kim Jong Un really is attractive and worthy of such an appellation. I sort of bought this at first. There’s evidence, too. For example, China Daily Online ran a 55-photo slideshow of heroic-seeming photos of Kim, accompanying the report about The Onion. And the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the DPRK is as warm as any relationship another nation has with North Korea, even if it’s wary and not all that warm. And on top of that, China Daily has been fooled before, running at least one previous Onion article (about the U.S. Congress trying to leave Washington) as straight-up fact. But now I’m skeptical of this view. The Chinese Communist Party may be quasi-autocratic and certainly interested in controlling media accounts of itself and its allies, but they’re not stupid, and despite the sometimes poor English of their English version, someone on the staff probably understands that this couldn’t be entirely serious. They know how U.S. publications feel about the North Korean regime.
2. China Daily knows that this is satire, and republished it as such, in the same straight-faced manner as The Onion did. Maybe. If some China Daily editor saw the Onion story and thought that it was funny, why couldn’t they re-run it on their site? After all, it would make Americans look silly to say that we thought KJU was some sort of sex symbol. And making Americans look silly wouldn’t be a bad goal for a Chinese propaganda organ, right? And that slideshow could be interpreted as ample evidence that Americans are misguided in finding Kim sexy. And if they somehow labeled the Onion article as satire (as the Times blog points out they do not), wouldn’t that ruin their own bit of satire? The moment you call something satirical, that ruins the satire. Also, as Simon reminded me (we had had this discussion before), Chinese and Americans have very different ideas of what makes an Asian person attractive. Some of the Asian stars that Americans see as being beautiful don’t fit the conventional definitions of beauty in Asia. That plays into interpretation #3, too:
3. China Daily didn’t realize that the Onion story was satire, but their seemingly straight-faced report and slideshow are actually satire of Americans who didn’t understand their satire the way they didn’t understand the Onion’s. This one is complicated, a sort of two-way misunderstanding. If this is the right interpretation, then the China Daily Online editors saw the Onion article, thought it was silly that Americans thought Kim was sexy, and then posted a satirical piece (again, not labeled as such, and for the same reasons as in #2), taking it over the top by posting 55 deadpan pictures of the Dear Leader. And then all of our media critics went all snarky because we misinterpreted their misinterpretation.

I’m torn between interpretation #2 and #3, which I also like, but we probably aren’t ever going to know, because why would the editors of China Daily answer such a question (but kudos to the AP for trying, as they say they did in their piece). A Colbertian (I hereby acknowledge that Stephen Colbert is a satirist) wag of the finger to all of the news organizations that took this incident as an excuse to mock Chinese state media. Maybe they deserve it, but using phrases like “fall for” imply that we press bloggers know what was in the heads of the Chinese editors.

And we don’t.

THE JOINT JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATION HISTORY CONFERENCE
(The American Journalism Historians Association and the AEJMC History Division joint spring meeting)

When: SATURDAY, MARCH 9, 2013
Time: 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Place: Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University,
20 Cooper Square, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10003 (website:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/)
Cost: $50 (includes continental breakfast and lunch)

You are invited to submit a 500-600 word proposal for completed
papers, research in progress or panel discussions for presentation at
the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference—the American
Journalism Historians Association and the AEJMC History Division joint
spring meeting. Innovative research and ideas from all areas of
journalism and communication history and from all time periods are
welcome. Scholars from all academic disciplines and stages of their
academic careers are encouraged to participate. This conference
offers participants the chance to explore new ideas, garner feedback
on their work, and meet colleagues from around the world interested in
journalism and communication history in a welcoming environment. Your
proposal should include a brief abstract detailing your presentation
topic as well as a compelling rationale why the research is of
interest to an interdisciplinary community of scholars.

All submissions will be uploaded to the Media History Exchange, an
archive and social network funded by the National Endowment of the
Humanities and administered by Elliot King (Loyola University
Maryland), the long-time organizer of this conference.

To join the Media History Exchange (membership is free), go to
http://www.mediahistoryexchange.org and request membership. Once you
have joined, follow the step-by-step instructions describing how to
upload an abstract to a specific conference. Please follow the
corrections carefully. If you leave out a step, it will not work. If
you have any questions or run into any problems, contact Ann Thorne,
thorne@missouriwestern.edu. Upload
all submissions (electronic submission only) by January 6th, 2013, to
the Media History Exchange, http://www.mediahistoryexchange.org.

Networking Session: This year we will offer a networking session with
coffee and cookies. Attendees will be invited to make a brief,
two-slide PowerPoint presentation about their research interests.
Following the presentation, there will be time for everyone to
exchange ideas. For more information, contact Ann Thorne,
thorne@missouriwestern.edu.

Authors: If you published a book in the past year (2012) or have a
book coming out in the spring of 2013 and would like to talk about
your book at the conference, please contact conference co-coordinator
Ann Thorne, thorne@missouriwestern.edu, with a brief statement about your book. Also, if you want to serve as a submission reviewer or panel
moderator, please contact Ann Thorne, thorne@missouriwestern.edu.

Acceptance Notification Date: February 4th, 2013

Any questions? Contact conference co-coordinators Ann Thorne
(programming or submission questions, thorne@missouriwestern.edu) or Kevin Lerner (logistical or travel questions,
kevin.lerner@marist.edu).

Most semesters, I lead a section of Marist College’s communication major capstone course (which Marist calls “Capping”). This semester, as I have done previously, I have asked the students to run blogs and Twitter accounts to document their progress as the semester goes on.

Students are working either individually or in small groups to develop a semester-long project that brings together all of the knowledge, practical skills, and critical thinking that they have accumulated in their three-plus years in the program. They run the full gamut of concentrations available in the major (journalism; sports communication; public relations; advertising; communication studies…) and I think that there are some very promising projects this semester.

Check them out below and follow their progress. Tell them what’s working and what’s not. Part of the reason I wanted them to be using social media was to get used to working in the public sphere. You can also follow our conversation on Twitter. We settled on the hashtag #hapcap (it’s supposed to be short for “happy capping” or “happy cappers”).

I felt a particular (and admittedly somewhat selfish) twinge of sadness when I saw on my phone yesterday that Nora Ephron died (and not just because I used to live across the street from the brownstone that Bruno Kirby tosses the wagon wheel coffee table out of). I was sad because even though I had grown up knowing Nora Ephron as a screenwriter and director—and then later as an essayist, as my New Yorker fetish grew—I had begun to know her as a press critic, journalist, and the co-organizer of the first A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention, a 1972 gathering of maybe 3000 journalists who were looking for alternative ways to do good work. And I’m writing my dissertation about (MORE), the journal of press criticism that sponsored the Counter-Convention.  I have Ephron’s phone number in my notebook. I was supposed to interview her. I missed my chance.

Ephron was a journalist first. As the Wall Street Journal obituary puts it:

Determined by high school to be a journalist, Ephron graduated from the single-sex Wellesley College in 1962, moved to New York and started out as a “mail girl” and fact checker at Newsweek. A newspaper strike at the end of the year gave her a chance. Victor Navasky, the future editor of The Nation, was then running a satirical magazine called the Monacle. He was working on a parody of the New York Post, “The New York Pest,” and asked Ephron for a spoof of Post columnist Leonard Lyons.

She succeeded so well that the newspaper’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, reasoned that anyone who could make fun of the Post could also write for it. Ephron was asked to try out as a reporter. Within a week, she had a permanent job and remained there five years.

Victor Navasky also knew Dick Pollak, the editor of (MORE), and one way or another (New York reporters have a tendency to know each other), Ephron became involved with the (MORE) group, which started the magazine in June, 1971. By the spring of 1972, the trio that founded (MORE) had decided to sponsor the Liebling Convention (counter to the American Newspaper Publishers Association meeting). Ephron would co-organize the conference with (MORE) co-founder and Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas.

Most of the program was exactly as advertised in the printed program—great panels with Tom Wolfe and Pauline Kael and Murray Kempton and Gloria Steinem. Ephron’s future husband,  Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, would attend a later convention (since the Watergate break-in wouldn’t occur until June). But for the “How They Cover Me” panel, Nora Ephron kept a secret (as she would with the identity of Deep Throat). Dick Pollak told me that even he didn’t know the identity of Ephron’s surprise panelist. Ephron said that the panelist didn’t want anyone knowing his whereabouts too far ahead of time.

And then about two weeks before the convention, Ephron told Pollak that there was a problem with her secret panelist. Crazy Joey Gallo, the racketeer-cum-celebrity had been murdered at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. He would have to cancel.

Ephron contributed to (MORE) a few times, writing book reviews mostly, but that was because she had to save her media criticism for Esquire, where she was a contributing editor. Her book Scribble Scribble compiled those press pieces, writing with her characteristic warm but dark humor about Daniel Schorr, Gourmet magazine, Bob Haldeman and her former employer, Dorothy Schiff of The New York Post.

And while Ephron may be best known as a screenwriter and director, it’s worth remembering that even her movie career came from journalism. Carl Bernstein asked her to try a draft of the movie version of the book he and Bob Woodward co-wrote. Her draft of All the President’s Men wasn’t used, but it did lead to other writing opportunities.

May the world produce more witty and stylish press critics like her.

In mid-December, 2011, so almost exactly six months ago, Christopher Hitchens died. I didn’t know the man, so I couldn’t write much of a remembrance of him, but I did get to meet him once, so I typed up a little memoiristic essay about the time he smoked a cigarette in a Columbia journalism school classroom. Bittersweet, a little funny. Very Hitchens. I moved on with my life and my dissertation.

One of the nice features about using WordPress as a blogging platform is that it provides a fairly robust set of statistics telling me who visited the site and where they came from. The Hitchens post got me a little spike for the first few days, which didn’t surprise me. I knew some of my Twitter followers would see it, and so would my Facebook friends and even some people who searched for information on Hitchens. I even suspected I would get some traffic for people looking up the cigarette angle. After all, he died of esophageal cancer, and there could very well be a connection.

What I didn’t bank on though was the fact that six months later, hardly a day goes by that the search string “Christopher

Hitchens cigarette brand” or something of that sort brings people to my blog. It’s not huge, maybe 3–5 page views a day. But that’s a good 600 or so over six months, right? (I did the math in my head.) I mentioned this to my dissertation adviser a few weeks ago, and he suggested I rename the blog “What brand of cigarettes did Christopher Hitchens smoke?” and start selling ads based on the waves of traffic I’d get from that bit of SEO.

Why is it that people are so fascinated by his brand of cigarettes (by the way, the answer appears to be Rothmans (thanks to commenter Chad for the heads-up). When I was searching for my own post so that I could link to it above, I started typing “what brand of cigarettes…” into my Safari search box, and got the list of suggested searches that the image in this paragraph depicts (by the way, changing from “did” to “does” gives a completely different list—notice that only Obama is alive among the suggestions; do people really think Obama’s smoking is in the past tense?). My deduction about people’s curiosity, based on this list, is somewhat depressing. These people are all glamorous. Marilyn Monroe. James Dean. John Lennon. Kurt Cobain. And of course, all of these examples died too young. On the plus side for Hitchens, he’s as cool as John Wayne (or two notches less cool, going by rank order), and a notch cooler than the Beatles (Lennon excepted). On the downside, it means that cigarettes are still seen as being a symbol of cool, and people want to know what brand they should be smoking so that they too can be cool. Not surprising I guess, but still sad.

Anyway, I choose to take the happier conclusion: that ornery, erudite, iconoclastic journalist-essayists are as important to the world as the Beatles. And as cool as James Dean, though Hitchens was a rebel of many causes.

Postscript: I suspect, of course, that owing to the proliferation of Christopher Hitchens cigarette references in this post, it’s on its way to becoming my all-time more popular. Interested advertisers are welcome to contact me by email.