The Last Book I Read

If you saw the George Clooney movie Good Night and Good Luck about Edward R. Murrow and his reporting about McCarthyism, you may recall a side plot about one of Murrow's CBS co-workers named Don Hollenbeck. In the film, Hollenbeck is accused of being "red" and the pressure that created contributed to the causes of his eventual suicide. Those events happened to be true, but Hollenbeck's career was hardly defined by its unfortunate ending. After spending a number of years on newspapers in his hme state of Nebraska, and later in New York, he joined CBS radio and was largely responsible for a program called CBS Views the Press, in which he analyzed the efforts of the numerous daily New York papers in relation to journalistic standards that all claimed to subscribe to (and, not too surprisingly, recognized how often they came up short of meeting those standards). Radio's Revolution, edited by Leslie Ghiglione, collects selected scripts written by Hollenbeck for that program, and it is an eye-opening read. What is immediately striking in the collection is how familiar many of the topics under Hollenbeck's review are to a contemporary reader. That is, even though he was comparing how the papers covered stories in the late 1940s, many of those stories seem to be repeating themselves today, in topics like media bias, welfare reform, witch-hunting (figuratively speaking), racial profiling, and more. They may have gone under different names sixty years ago, but the sorts of commercial or partisan factors that color our news today apparently have a long and strong strong history as well. In fact, the biggest difference between then and now is that there are fewer newspapers, with the bulk of contemporary news reporting the domain of broadcasters and internet sites. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we have any one of Hollenbeck's insight and integrity, so evident in these scripts, to provide the kind of comprehensive analysis on today's media scene. It's hard to imagine that anyone would have the patience or the platform to review in detail how the different outlets cover a story, especially when it's so easy to merely label CNN and Fox as opposite extremes and assume they comprise some sort of representative sample (or, maybe they do, but that's a problem in itself-- Hollenbeck was examining something like nine newspapers just in New York City, each of which functioned as a more-or-less independent voice). One unavoidable conclusion drawn from reading this book is that the press tended to be fairly conservative in that period (though that term didn't mean exactly the same thing then as it does today), which leads to an interesting question: when did the charge of the "liberalism" of the media become prevalent, and more to the point, when did it start to stick? Of course Hollenbeck was clearly liberal in his thinking (though not in the partisan sense, at least where his job was concerned, based on these scripts), if only by virtue of his efforts to expose the racism inherent in news coverage of his day, so maybe those attacks grew with the rise of broadcast, as opposed to print, journalism. It's something I'd be interested in following up on. Because its planted that question, among others, in my mind, I'm calling this the book of the summer, so far.