One reason I am not a Super Anchor

TV News in the Age of the Super Anchor — CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

"The Deeper You Dig, Any Story Collapses.” That maxim is attributed to Cy Romanoff, who ran the local news wire in the city of Chicago many years ago. …

In fact, most of life is played out in shades of gray. When you start digging into any supposed scandal you usually find that the bad guy is not all that bad; the good guy not all that good, and often the supposed villain is not really a villain at all. Such subtleties, though fascinating to uncover, don’t make for the kind of clear-cut morality plays that are the staple of the major news shows. 

The producer frequently finds he no longer has “a story.”

From the article by Barry Lando, posted today. For me, as a sociologist, the "subtleties" are the story, the story of how things really work. How are we ever going to make sense of conflict in Ukraine, or the rise of phenomena such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, or "Charlie Hebdo," or anything else that matters, if we have only black and white caricatures in our repertoire?

Nowadays, if you hunt, you can find investigators of subtlety — though not on prime time TV news. Analysts, not actors, posing sharper questions rather than looking for  facile answers. I try to be one of them. And CounterPunch in one place to look for them.

Toward a sociology of satire

We've been reading a lot of serious stuff about humor since the assassinations of the "Charlie Hebdo" team and the related assault on the supermarket in Paris. It's really hard to joke about so much blood. But sometimes humor is the best, or even the only, way to deal emotionally with such trauma, without totally breaking down. And that's really what satire is about, coping with horror by laughing at it. That's what the latest cover of "Charlie" has tried to do. But millions of people don't get the joke, and can't be expected to, because the kinds of horror they're facing is something entirely different from "Charlie"'s audience.

Satire is an interplay of three terms: author, target, and audience, and they have to work in concert. The author is looking for a laugh at the expense of people or practices that make him and his intended audience uncomfortable. The laughter is supposed to be cathartic, a release (however brief) from that discomfort or fear.

For it to work, the audience has to recognize the target and share the author's discomfort.

And there's the problem. Or several problems. To wit,

• To be effective, it has to be deliberately offensive to its targets without alienating its intended audience. But with the Internet and television, its targets are a big part of its audience.   
• In France, readers of Charlie Hebdo were and are uncomfortable with Sarkozy's frenetic impulses, Hollande's wavering, Valls' authoritarianism, the Catholic church hierarchy's moral pronouncements, Zionist nationalists and radical Islamists — among the more frequent targets. But even within France, from Paris center to the banlieues, in Marseille from the port district to the fancy shopping area next door, very different factors make people uncomfortable and fearful.
• Getting the laugh depends on irony, deliberate exaggeration which demands shared understanding of symbols and caricatures. All of us non French have probably been misreading a lot of the jokes in Charlie Hebdo, according to this persuasive discussion by Tekno. And the readings in Chechenia or Pakistan are also wildly opposite the satirists' presumed intention.
•  Satire also requires a shared culture of discourse, i.e., what is permitted and what is not permitted to say. What a satirist can get away with in France can get you lashed to death in Saudi Arabia, jailed in Egypt, run off the airwaves in Venezuela. 
• And you can't really get away with all that much in France, either — as Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, a very funny man but with very different targets, long ago discovered. 

And those are some of the problems with "Charlie Hebdo" and all satire today. But we have to keep laughing, every chance to get, whenever we start quaking with fear. Even, or especially, when we're afraid somebody who is offended is going to try to kill us.

Two trails to terror

Alabama-born jihadist Omar Hammami

How is it that so many young men and women born and raised in secular, post-Christian, democratic societies in Western Europe (or the U.S.) acquire the passion to kill and die for Islam? Not just the slaughterers of Charlie Hebdo or their confederate in the kosher supermarket in Paris, but many others in Syria or Iraq or on the streets of London who pose proudly for videos as they prepare to slay defenseless prisoners.

We actually do know how this happens in most cases, though it's harder to explain just why. What is clear is that it is not Islam that has driven these youth to terror, but their commitment to the movement that requires them to embrace an extremely violent caricature of Islam — to justify their actions. They are what French investigators of the phenomenon have called "precarious personalities," youth bursting with energy and rage who need direction and control in their lives. Some, like the Kouachi brothers, are/were orphans, others feel their parents have failed them for all or any of the reasons that children generally rebel against their parents — the parents' attitudes are from another time or even another country, and thus seem irrelevant. And the children live in societies where employment, education and other social goals seem unavailable or unrewarding, and where other outlets they've tried — becoming a rap star, playing video games, or petty crime in some of the known cases — have failed, and they'd much rather blame the society rather than themselves. Some of these European Jihadists come from Christian or even Jewish families, and even those whose parents were nominally Muslim were not raised to be devout.

In this respect, their path to terror has been the opposite of the original Afghan taliban, whose zeal derived from a skewed but dedicated reading and reciting of the holy scriptures of Islam, the Koran and the haddiths. "Taliban" is the plural of talib, religious scholar, a term which took on a special meaning in the isolated madrasas of the Afghan mountains, which exaggerated the intolerance of very rural people against modern, urban intrusions.

Because of course there are many other Muslims, more modern and worldly, who have also  studied the teachings and history of their religion, but come to entirely different conclusions. Islam was a religion of war, originating in a 6th century warrior society, but became in many parts of the world  a religion of brotherhood and peace and the encouragement of learning in all fields, very notably in medicine in the so-called "Islamic Golden Age" of the 8th to 15th centuries. But, like any religion, a selective reading may be taken as a pretext for bad behavior. How the ignorant, fierce taliban became useful tools for more sophisticated Muslims with other grievances against modern society is a big part of the history of Al Qaeda.

http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2015/01/12/mahomet-en-une-du-charlie-hebdo-de-mercredi_1179193

But back to our European Jihadists. Once they've committed themselves to this violent, anti-European and anti-democratic movement, at great risk to themselves, belief in the literal meanings of the Jihad becomes essential to their self-definition. Other Muslims may laugh at or ignore mocking of their preachers and their poses and their rhetoric, but the new converts to violence cannot stand it. Satire shakes the very fundament of their being, the substance that holds their personality together. It's called "cognitive dissonance" in psychology — people can't stand evidence that tells them they've made a foolish decision.

Could Charlie Hebdo Exist in America? | The Clyde Fitch Report

Laura Axelrod has summed it up beautifully, and reminds us of our (temporarily, I hope) loss of the tradition of outrageous satire in the U.S.

Could Charlie Hebdo Exist in America? | The Clyde Fitch Report

An earthquake of a book about an earthquake event

Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This vivid first-hand reportage of the first ten days of Bolshevik power, from the seizure of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, 25 October 1917 (by the Julian or Old Style calendar, which corresponds to 7 November 1917 in the Gregorian or New Style calendar) to its consolidation in Moscow and gathering force in the rest of Russia, is strongly partisan, pro-Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but also scrupulously documented and honestly, frankly observed. Reed describes the appearance, voices and quirks of the protagonists, including anonymous soldiers, sailors, Red Guards and workers, making apparent the chaotic, improvised character of most of the events, and the quick-witted decision-making and sometimes pitiless actions, especially those of the austere and uncompromising Lenin and the far more colorful, dramatic, and sarcastic Trotsky that repeatedly saved the Bolshevik insurrection from impending disaster. Reed does not hesitate to describe flaws, doubts and internal disputes, showing how precarious was their adventure and how close to failure. He collected leaflets, newspapers and bulletins from all parties, many of them reproduced in the book, and learned enough Russian not only to translate these but also to conduct interviews of Kerensky, Trotsky, Lenin and many other actors in this drama. Events in Petrograd and, later, Moscow are acutely observed, making this an indispensable account of the violent, chaotic, suspenseful first days of the seizure of power by masses of workers and soldiers with no administrative experience and, for all but the few intellectual leaders of the various parties, scant literacy or general knowledge of culture or history.
Those first ten days did indeed shake the world: they determined Russia's withdrawal from the Great European War, shaking diplomacy and strategy for all the other powers involved (Germany, Austria, England, France, the US especially), and created the beginnings of the hastily assembled Red Army which would eventually to triumph over the many fronts in the civil war in the world's largest nation, which was also one of Europe's least developed. The book itself continues to shake readers loose from more simplistic interpretations of this terribly complex series of events that redrew the lines of world power for the rest of the 20th century.
This 1922 edition is the first to appear with a foreword by Vladimir Lenin, encouraging all to read it. Reed was surprised and delighted to learn that Lenin had actually read it, and apparently was not offended by the very frank reporting that did not glorify the Bolsheviks, even though it supported them. Recognized even by the fiercest opponents of Communism as splendid and indispensable reportage, reader demand has not diminished and the book continues to be reissued by any number of publishers and in virtually all languages. Even if you have no particular interest in the Russian revolution (unlikely, but who knows?), you will find this book a model of vivid, scrupulous journalism — as Reed had already demonstrated in an earlier book, "Insurgent Mexico" but was unable to repeat after "10 Days," because he died in 1920 of typhus, in Russia. He was 33. He is buried alongside other revolutionary heroes just outside Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square.

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From the center of the maelstrom of the Paris Commune

Mes cahiers rouges: souvenirs de la commune by Maxime Vuillaume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Maxime Vuillaume’s “red notebooks” (cahiers rouges) contain some of the most vivid first hand testimony of all the writings on the Paris Commune. Vuillaume knew almost all the major players, some of them very well, and was himself an important actor, as a founder and editor of one of the most popular newspapers of the Commune, Le Père Duchêne.

Only 26 when he barely escaped execution in the bloody final week of the Commune (May 20-28, 1871), Vuillaume wrote the first post-commune reports in clandestine documents from his exile in Switzerland, before the amnesty (1880) permitted him to return to France. For years, he was reluctant to publish his notes, for fear of injuring people still living or being sued by their descendants. But finally, some 30 years after the annihilation of the commune, a younger journalist, Lucien Descaves, persuaded him to put them into shape and publish them, and Vuillaume then also began to compose and publish additional "cahiers", sometimes correcting things in the earlier ones or adding detail, and sometimes taking on aspects of the Commune that he had not personally experienced but researched through documents and interviews. All of these, the earliest and most personal and the later researched reports, have been gathered together in this edition of the “red notebooks.”

Vuillaume's Père Duchêne was a foul-mouthed, rabble-rousing, over-the-top scandal sheet, in imitation of the original Père Duchesne of Jacques-René Hébert that rallied the sans-culottes from 1790 until Hébert was guillotined in 1794. As in the original version, the "Old Man" or "Père" of the title was the fictional voice of a man of the "people", i.e., the unprivileged, lambasting the rich, the clergy, and anybody else seen as an oppressor. Its readers probably knew the paper was not to be trusted — reporting events that may or may not have occurred — but they bought it anyway, so many of them that the paper made more money than expected. They must have delighted in the invective against the “jeanfoutres” and “bougres” (gross insults, common in speech but rarely seen in print in those days), meaning all those opposed to the Commune, including Catholic clergy, local bourgeois and the government in Versailles.

The more mature Vuillaume, traumatized by the horrific bloodshed and prolonged repression of the end of the commune, became a much more serious, careful and responsible reporter, but without losing his capacity for vivid and impassioned description. Thus all these reports or “notebooks” are well worth reading, even those that go over material also covered by his journalist contemporaries Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray and Jules Vallès (both of whom Vuillaume knew well). But by far the liveliest cahiers are those on the experiences closest to him: Cahier I, “Une journée à la cour martiale de Luxembourg,” describes the army's systematic killing of suspected communards after their final defeat and Vuillaume’s own very narrow escape from execution; III, “Quand nous faisions Le Père Duchêne,” about all that he and his equally young partners, Eugène Vermersch and Alphonse Humbert, had to go through to get the capital together, write and distribute a daily paper in that period of intense debate, street agitation and combats, and IV, “Quelques-uns de la Commune”, intimate portraits of communards including Raoul Rigault, who in his last days was the commune’s chief prosecutor. Samples from some of those sharp-tongued articles are included in this book, but for the most part, the mature Vuillaume writes a more temperate prose, but still with passion for the lost cause of the Commune.

See also my reviews of Jules Vallès' fictionalized account, L'Insurgé,  and Lissagaray's Histoire de la Commune de 1871

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Will Self declares George Orwell the 'Supreme Mediocrity' | Books | theguardian.com

I surprised myself by agreeing with him! "Wigan Pier", "Down and Out in Paris and London" are important reportage, also "Homage to Catalonia" if you account for the very obvious bias, and even (the much weaker) "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" may be worth reading for the satire (not the characterization or plot drama, which are almost nil), but Orwell as didactic preacher ("Animal Farm", "1984", "Politics and the English Language") really is just mediocre at best. Good reporter, shallow thinker. And barely acceptable as a novelist.

Will Self declares George Orwell the 'Supreme Mediocrity' | Books | theguardian.com

Now I suppose I'd better read something by Will Self.

A context for literature

Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France by Jeannene M. Przyblyski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

These ten essays tell not only about how the modern "news" paper came to be, but also how it shaped the conditions for the creation of the vast and expanding literature of 19th century France. Émile de Girardin (1802-1881) had a lot to do with both phenomena: he created the first paper which claimed to be nonpartisan (and thus called simply "La Presse"), cut the price in half (to the outrage of his competitors, one of whom challenged him to a duel for disloyal competition), and financed the publication mainly by filling the pages with advertising; he thus expanded circulation far beyond the privileged, monied élite, and gained the revenue to pay writers including Balzac, Sue, Gautier and a great many others.
Besides Girardin, a reader can learn here about Daumier's battles (through his caricatures) with Louis-Philippe and Louis Napoléon, and about such colorful journalists as Émile Pouget (1860-1931), who employed deliberately obscene and comical working-class vernacular to attack everybody in power.
What I missed was any discussion of the press during the Paris Commune (March-May, 1871), when over a score of new papers with enormous circulation flourished briefly, with editors including Jules Vallès (Le Cri du Peuple), Maxime Vuillaumine (Le Père Duchene) and Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray (author of the monumental Histoire de la Commune). There is however an essay by Przyblyski on the post-Commune manipulation of photographs and documents by Eugène Appert to contribute to the myth of the "pétroleuses", the crazed women incendiaries who supposedly created most of the destruction of Paris in the last days of the Commune — and who, if they existed at all, must have been very rare.


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Backgrounder on Turkey

Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know by Andrew Finkel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This concise, quick read will be a good starting point for anyone who needs to know about this surprising country. Finkel covers a breadth of topics and suggests linkages among them — language, regional disparities, ethnic history and conflicts, political history, current party and government structure, economic potential and weaknesses, religious tolerance and conflicts, and Turkey's complex and fluid geopolitical strategy. Not a word about the country's vibrant arts scene — theater, literature, film, painting, etc. — but on other aspects, clear and opinionated (he's a fierce defender of free speech, which is sometimes in danger).

Andrew Finkel is an American journalist with long experience in Turkey. He is also the husband of historian Caroline Finkel, author of the monumental history of the Ottoman empire, Osman's Dream, which I reviewed here earlier; she describes him (in her acknowledgements) as an "academic manqué" (he mentions having worked on a Ph.D. dissertation), and indeed he approaches journalism with a scholar's seriousness and the expectation that his readers will be able and happy to follow a sometimes subtle and sophisticated argument. He was fired from Turkey's big daily Today's Zaman in 2011, he believes for defending a critic of the paper's founder and backer, the controversial Islamic preacher and charter-school empresario (in the U.S.) Fethullah Gülen (look him up — Americans should know about him). Finkel now has a regular column in the International Herald Tribune, still reporting from Turkey.

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Lost in revolution

The Angels of Zimbabwe by Peter de Lissovoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When Joe, a conspicuously tall young white American, hitchhikes into white-ruled Rhodesia in the early stages of the 1964-1979 "bush war" against supremacist Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front, his passion for liberty and his reckless crossing of color-lines gets him deeper into confusion and ultimately heartbreak. Hoping to help the black African liberation fighters create the free, black African nation they call Zimbabwe, Joe gets himself hired as a very junior journalist for the daily Clarion — whose editor tolerates his ironies because he's an amusing Yank — and using his position and the paper's resources, he gets to observe closely the routines of both blacks and whites in the small, rigidly segregated capital Salisbury (now Harare) — in the town center, the blacks-only bus station, the whites-only spaces but with black servants in stores and offices, the rundown black townships, police violence against black women protesters with their babies strapped to their backs, and a surprisingly multiracial garden party on a country estate. The portraits of ZANU youth activists, aspiring black journalist Shakespeare Forboni, his buddy the little auto mechanic Moses Chivera and the dour, bitter and determined revolutionary Frankie Mundie suggest the range of personality types struggling for a liberation that meant something different to each of them; among the whites, most memorable are the Clarion editor Mr. Wein, a cautious but canny "liberal," the absolutely apolitical but generally good guy sports journalist, and — most tellingly — an older, formerly influential settler who remembers pioneer days and still clings to the hope that whites like him can make a contribution in the future black republic. The ending is an undramatic fade-out with nothing resolved, either for Zimbabwe or for Joe personally, but in the meantime we have been presented a vivid panorama of that last white-racist holdout in Africa and its tensions in its last days, and some clear suggestions of the conflicts that would emerge in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

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The Spanish civil war in foreign eyes

Many of Spain's current problems stem from the fact that the Spanish civil war set back the country's evolution toward modernity and democracy by at least 40 years, from the outbreak of the army insurrection in 1936 to the death of Franco in 1975, and the distortions of justice and other institutions still persist. It was not an exclusively Spanish conflict, but a global one, acted out in Spain not just by Spaniards but by all the fascist, socialist, liberal and conservative capitalist forces in Europe and the Americas—and thus we need the outsiders' views for a full perspective.


We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, by Paul Preston. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008. 443 pp. + notes, bibliography, index

"Spain" did not die, but it was badly wounded and still has not recovered fully. The Second Republic did die in that terribly brutal war, 1936-39, killed by a coalition of the Church, the old oligarchy and crazed ideologues who feared the power of ordinary men and women—especially of the women—to decide for themselves how to live and whom to love. Paul Preston has done a tremendous job digging up details of the lives and work of more than a dozen journalists from half a dozen or more countries who managed to reveal, and in some cases horribly distort, how that massacre was unfolding, and the hundreds of thousands of more particular murders it required. And Preston has done much more than that: He has pulled together a coherent story from notes, archives, published reports and oral reminiscences by and about those journalists, with their various languages and their diverse political views.

Of the Americans, Herbert Matthews and Louis Fischer earn Preston's greatest appreciation, for their personal courage and their insistence on getting the facts right, regardless of pressures from their respective sponsors to slant their stories. Matthews, writing for The New York Times, was expected by his editors to be more favorable to the "Nationals" (as the Franco-led insurgents called themselves) than to the forces defending the Republic. Matthews was a moral Protestant indignant at fascist abuses, but not ideologically committed to socialism, and he exposed himself to considerable danger to report personally on such horrors as the bombing and strafing of civilian refugees fleeing from Málaga (which had just fallen to the insurgents) along the coastal road to Almería, or the fighting in Valencia, even though he

was convinced that [his dogmatically conservative editors in New York] treated his copy with 'suspicion, anger, and, at times, disbelief', tampered with his wording and buried entire stories because they were perceived to favour the Republican side. In contrast, they printed unashamedly partisan material from William P. Carney, his counterpart in the rebel zone, despite knowing that it was someties faked. [p. 22]

Fischer was under different political pressures. A fluent Russian- and German-speaker and with a wife and child in Moscow, he was committed to socialism and felt comradeship to (though he never accepted the discipline of) the Communist Party. Whether he ever learned to speak Spanish fluently is unclear, though he must have managed: he had excellent personal relationships with prominent Republican (i.e., Spanish Republic) politicians, even including Juan Negrín. But despite his commitment, he perceived and reported on what he saw as gross failures in political and military policy—for example, the lackadaisical defenseworks supposedly protecting Madrid. He was especially indignant with the aged trade-unionist and prime minister Largo Caballero who was afraid to alienate his trade union supporters by ordering idle construction workers in Madrid to go out to Toledo and build serviceable trenches and breastworks.

After the fall of the Republic, Fischer had the good sense to get his family out of Russia before Stalin's paranoia could destroy them. His subsequent career included works on Gandhi and professorship at Princeton. Matthews continued with the NYT and achieved notoriety again years later for his reports from Cuba proving that Fidel Castro was still alive and his guerrilla movement going strong. Both Fischer and Matthews wrote many books, not only on Spain, that merit attention.

Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos are also here, interesting mostly for what they had to say about one another and less interesting for any insight into the Spanish struggle. Hemingway was boisterous and outrageous and having a great testosterone-charged time, at one point firing off a machinegun to no purpose but with dangerous consequences (it drew return fire), but you've got to love the big brute because in a jam, he could pull his buddies through—on at least one occasion, by sheer muscular force, rowing a little boat across the mined Ebro river with Robert Capa, Matthews and Henry Buckley aboard.

Another reporter who deserves and gets major attention from Preston is the audacious and hyperenergetic little Russian Jew Mikhail Koltsov, whose extremely vivid reports for Pravda would be his undoing when he returned to the USSR. He not only wrote rapidly, succinctly and dramatically, he also carried a pistol and didn't hesitate to intervene and give military orders (for which he had no authority) when he saw it necessary to avoid disaster. When required to do so by his party bosses, however, he was quite capable of writing outrageous lies condemning the leaders of the POUM as Trotskyists and traitors to the revolution. As Koltsov surely knew, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista had broken with Trotsky long before and was one of the main defenders of the socialist Republic in Catalonia, but because it did not follow the dictates of Moscow Stalin ordered his operatives in Spain to destroy it—as George Orwell has famously recounted in Hommage to Catalonia. 

Stalin was suspicious of all the Russians who had served in Spain, whether as journalists or military officers, probably (in Preston's interpretation, which is persuasive) because they returned with a more revolutionary, more participatory and much freer vision of socialist revolution than Stalin's democratic centralism could tolerate. Koltsov, like others who had been acclaimed as heroes in Spain, was at first praised and then arrested and ultimately executed by Stalin's forces. 

Oddly, Preston makes only passing mention of Orwell, mostly regarding his impressions of Koltsov and his grudging review of another reporter's book, South African-born George Lowther Steer's report on the ruins of Guernica, from observations made as soon as Steer could get there after the devastating German bombardment of that quiet and undefended little Basque town. The book was essential to counter the massive disinformation campaign by Franco-ist propagandists and their allies in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and other countries, who were claiming that there had been no bombardment but that the destruction was the work of leftist incendiaries. (Orwell recognized the value of the eye-witness report but took issue with Steer exaggerated and emotional bias for the heroic Basques as contasted to the supposedly less noble Spaniards elsewhere.) Of the other British reporters mentioned here, we learn that Claud Cockburn was an imaginative Communist who, it seems, would write anything to support the cause, even if he had to make it up, and Tom Wintringham, Commander of the British Batallion of the International Brigades. Wintringham got in trouble with the CP back home because of his defense of his latest lover, American journalist Kitty Bowler, who was absurdly accused of being a fascist infiltrator (apparently because she was much better looking than most of the Communist women in party HQ in London and so aroused the suspicion of those others, including Wintringham's wife). 

The brazen Swedish nurse-turned-reporter Kajsa Rothman, a courageous and physically impressive women (much taller than most Spaniards and with bright reddish-blonde hair) also deserves mention, more for her presence than for her reporting—though she (fluent in several languages) must have been important to Swedish short-wave enthusiasts for her broadcasts from Spain. We also learn of the Spaniards on both sides of the propaganda war: Luis Bolín, the cruel and pompous chief of the foreign press in the "national" (Franco-ist rebel) zone who tried to control every word and didn't hesitate to order executions of reporters who strayed to close to the truth of the rebel massacres. On the Republican side, the chief concern of Arturo Barea and later the redoubtable Constancia Mora was to facilitate the reporters demands for access—in the belief that the truth could only help the republic—without letting them reveal military secrets (gun emplacements, etc.) which could serve enemy.

Preston ends the book with a tribute to his former professor Herbert Southworth, who got to Spain after the fighting was over but contributed mightily to undoing the myths of Franco propagandists.

Photo: The destroyed center of the Basque town of Guernica after it was carpet-bombed by Germany and Italy, from Nicholas Shakespeare's review of the book in the Telegraph.

Another reason why I am not an investigative reporter

Writers at Risk | Harvard Gazette Online

How 'how we know' is changing

Good review by Michael Massing of books and blogs dealing with
The News About the Internet - The New York Review of Books

It's worth reading the whole piece, but if you don't want to take the time, the essence is in this quote from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's 2009 "State of the News Media" report:

Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions.... Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites.... Experiments like GlobalPost are testing whether individual journalists can become independent contractors offering reporting to various sites, in much the way photographers have operated for years at magazines.

Tweets for twits

Don't bother reading this unless your feeling twittery. A Night Out With - Biz Stone and Evan Williams - The Twitter Guys - NYTimes.com

This earlier piece, though, is actually interesting, about the potential of this seemingly silly system: Finding Utility in the Jumble of Tweeted Thoughts - NYTimes.com. I'm still not sure what I'm doing there, though.

Tweeting

I must be one of the last persons you would expect to find on Twitter, but there I am. The name is off-putting -- sounds like it's just for twits -- and what can you say in just 140 characters? But it turns out that it needn't be the time sink I feared, if you use it as a gateway or pointer to other more developed texts, images etc. It has already pointed me to some really intelligent sites on architecture and a whole bunch on literature, including Daniel Casey's Gently Read Literature, The Smoking Poet, and the odd but smart Speak Without Interruption, which bills itself as an antidote to the staccato brevity of Twitter and most of the other media we're exposed to. John Kremer gives lots of tips on "retweeting" and how to use Twitter to gather many thousands of "followers," which is not what I'm after, but he also has tips on book promotion which are worth following up. And he's smart about pointing to other sites.

New self-publishing possibilities

I've just discovered knol, a newly invented word which I suppose comes from "knowledge on line". It's all explained in the link I just gave you. Basically, it's a software program similar to Blogger but designed for posting longer articles that may be of more lasting interest. I'm intrigued by the idea, and expect that I'll be creating some "knols" of my own. In the old days, before Internet, I devoted a lot of time, energy and anxiety to writing queries and then articles to send out to editors at magazines and newspapers, and sometimes I would get published and paid, but more often I would not, and even when I succeeded (see my Notes & Essays for samples, or my C.V. for a more complete list), the pay was meager. For those of us who write for motives other than money, which (Dr. Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding) is almost everybody who writes seriously, this is an attractive alternative to sending articles to an editor. Maybe my first knol will be about self-publishing, what it has meant historically (I just read a life of William Cobbett) and what the new technologies may portend, for the publishing industry and for political and social thought.

Meanwhile, I'll keep blogging. I like the short, ephemeral form. Which may not be so ephemeral, since things posted on the Internet seem to last forever.

Cantankerous crusader

An English friend here in Carboneras lent me this book about a crusading, cantankerous and extremely energetic journalist who had a lot to do with establishing the ground rules for pamphleteers, journalists and today's bloggers -- nearly two centuries ago.


Ingrams, Richard. The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. London: HarperCollins, 2005.

This is a very detailed bio, focused almost entirely on Cobbett himself (1763-1835), his movements and his voluminous writings, to the point that it is easy to lose sight of the wider context and why any of it mattered. It did matter, however, tremendously. Cobbett's vigorous journalism taking on powerful figures got him into many troubles, including a 2-year jail term, but ended up helping establish truth as a defense in libel actions and thus widen freedom of press in England. His campaign for parliamentary reform was a major contributor to its triumph in 1832 (elimination of rotten boroughs and much else), and his reports on country life in his late collection of articles, Rural Rides, includes vivid portraits of rural life in England, Scotland and Ireland on the brink of the industrial-urban revolution.

It would probably be best to read this after something like E. P. Thompson, so as to get the context and analysis before diving into so much detail of one man's life and career.

Above: Caricature of Cobbett (standing on cart and waving copies of his newspaper to beat his drum) and fellow reformer Francis Burdett (sitting on cart and waving his hat) at the 1806 Middlesex election. Click on image to enlarge.