In Howard Kurtz' column today, there's a nice little take on the difference between reporters and opinion writers. It's actually by Joe Klein, who's been sympathetic to Democrats since he covered Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 ... perhaps even before that when he wrote a biography of folk singer (and admitted communist) Woody Guthrie before that. Klein isn't allowed on the McCain-Palin press plane these days, and Kurtz writes up the political charge-and-countercharge that ensued. All that stuff doesn't matter, but I think something Klein said about it does. Kurtz introduces it:
Here's the Joe Klein response to bloggers' suggestions that Time should pull all its correspondents [from the plane] in solidarity:One of those opinions, surely, is that McCain's campaign is despicable. Carney, Scherer and Halperin might think that (or they might not), but they aren't paid to write it. Klein is. That's the difference.
"My job is different from [Time reporter] Jay Carney's, Michael Scherer's and Mark Halperin's. They are paid to report and, to a certain extent, analyze. They operate under real, and valuable, journalistic restrictions. Their jobs are especially tough when covering a campaign as despicable as McCain's has been: an important part of their brief is to try to see the race through the eyes of the McCain campaign and explain to the rest of us what that looks like ... I'm paid to have opinions."
That's the first. We don't have to read all of Kurtz. (Those who are following the election will see more of it in COMM 386, anyway.) The second follows up on the Peggy Noonan columns we looked at Monday.
Noonan has written a book titled "Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now." It was published Sept. 30, and it has a rushed-into-print feel, but Noonan writes well. According to the blurb on Amazon.com, Noonan argues, "the national mood is for a change in our politics and it is well past time for politicians to catch up. Americans are tired of the old partisan divisions and the campaign tricks that seek to widen and exploit them." In a promotional podcast linked to the Amazon page, Noonan talks about the book and how she came to write it. We'll listen to the first part of it in class (at least till she says "writers have no right to be boring" at 6:30 and changes the subject). We'll also read an excerpt from the book that she discusses in the podcast.
My take on Noonan (for what it's worth): She's a journalist, and her work is uneven, unpolished in the same way that Mark Twain's or Walt Whitman's was. But she tackles the basic kinds of questions that Twain, Henry Adams and Whitman did ... how well she handles them is a matter of opinion, but I give her credit at least for trying. Tunku Varadarajan, business professor at NYU and opinion writer for Forbes.com, praises Noonan's work and says "she makes her point(s) in a way that captures the humanity of its context. This isn't punditry, de haut en bas, but engagement with the reader, with the reader's milieu- -with America."
Besides, Noonan is a Republican writing about politics in a year when it's hard to do that. So we're reading her partly just in the interest of equal time.
The third is a nice little feature in today's New York Times. It's about four Republican neighbors in Brooklyn who are displaying McCain-Palin yard signs in the windows of their brownstone row houses in an overwhelmingly Democratic borough.
I guess that's also giving equal time.
No comments:
Post a Comment