Hey Ellen,
Here’s a book every journalist and editor coming back from summer vacation should open wide: “Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print.” Compiled by David Wallis, who runs Featurewell.com, a website that offers feature stories for sale, the book gathers 23 stories that were commissioned by magazines and newspapers and then never printed.
As Wallis explains in the introduction, there are many reasons that stories get killed, and
some of them are legitimate. Among them: the Playboy piece written by Glenn O’Brien, “How to Pick Up Princess Di.” It was filed just days before her fatal accident. But sometimes it’s harder to justify “suffocated stories,” as Joe Conason, author of “Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth,” calls these suppressed tales.
Wallis includes pieces from as early as 1942, when The Observer killed a book review by George Orwell because it didn’t like its criticism of the lavish lifestyle of ex-pat businessmen in Singapore. The last piece Wallis offers is also a spiked book review — Carlo Wolff’s review of Mitch Albom’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” killed by the Detroit Free Press, which you and I wrote about in a previous Book Babes column.
Some of the pieces eventually made their way into print — or at least the ideas behind them did. After McCall‘s rejected Betty Friedan’s 1958 essay deploring the fact that women weren’t taking college seriously, she wrote her thoughts down in book form: the ground-breaking “The Feminine Mystique.” Tina Brown at Vanity Fair axed P.J. O’Rourke’s darkly satirical piece about being a tourist in Lebanon during the civil war in the ’80s (“You can’t make fun of people dying”), but it was included in his book, “Holidays in Hell,” a collection of travel essays. Wolff’s review was run by the south Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Most of these pieces, however, first saw the light of day thanks to this anthology, published earlier this summer. Each author has a story to tell of just why he or she thinks the story was killed. The reasons range from a change in editors to more serious charges of political censorship, advertising interference, and cronyism. Not everyone, Wallis admits, will agree that all these pieces deserved to be printed — nor will everyone buy all the arguments put forth by the authors. Taste and judgments vary. But that is the value of this book.
Which of these are simply cases of editors being “less enthusiastic” than Wallis about these stories, and which are cases of journalistic cowardice?
I wonder whether the examples in this anthology are just the tip of the iceberg. Is journalism becoming a meek and self-censoring profession? (According to a 2000 PEW and Columbia Journalism Review study cited by Wallis, about a third of journalists said they avoid stories that might rattle advertisers). How many stories that are “too hot” never get killed because they never even get assigned?
Hi Margo,
Funny you should bring up such a topic in the heat of a presidential race that so far seems more like a he said/she said than a real debate. Politicians, like many journalists, don’t dare venture too far afield. The conventions are a love fest. Pundits analyze the spin, not the issues.
A theory I would like to see explored is how much the members of the media — particularly the national media elite — have been co-opted by the elevation of their status, both economically and socially. Moving from the bar stool to the wine bar may not be a good fit with the old journalistic saw about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. This is a theory for which I have only anecdotal support, but darn good anecdotes (I don’t share them here to protect the innocent). And this idea leads to the latest book on my nightstand (at the top of the pile), which seems relevant to your topic.
The book is Peter G. Peterson’s “Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It,” released in July. The title spells out the argument as succinctly as could be. The challenge is to get the media to pick up the idea and run with it, to compel politicians not only to look at the elephant in the living room (no GOP pun intended), but also figure out what to do with it.
Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, has serious Republican bonafides, including a stint as Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon Administration. But he tosses aside the cone of silence that party faithful maintain around their president. His intent is not to bury Bush, but to state his piece on our post-9/11 profligate ways. No less than Social Security and our entire economy are at stake.
As indicated by the title, he finds neither party blameless. The problem here, in his estimation, is a system of interest-group politics that has all of us, in one way or another, gathering at the trough. Along with this goes the narcissism of our times, which infuses everyone from the top brass at Enron to the kid mowing your lawn. It’s a way of thinking that says, “To heck with the rest of you. I’m getting mine.” Certain recent and well-known violations of journalistic ethics suggest that our field is not immune to a certain self-serving way of looking at the world.
Raiding the cookie jar is not the only issue I’d like to see addressed during the presidential campaign, but it’s a critical one, and who but the media can get it on the public’s radar screen?
America needs to go on a diet — and I don’t mean Atkins. The last presidential contender who was ready to deliver tough fiscal medicine, the late Paul Tsongas, is Exhibit A for aspiring commanders-in-chief: His limited support proved that the public snubs pols who deliver bitter pills. But that doesn’t make the problem go away. Quite apart from the morality of our presence in Iraq, there’s the question of whether we can afford it. So I’m counting on the press to force the candidates to sit down at the kitchen table and start counting their — I mean, our — dimes.
Hey Ellen,
With the incredible tidal wave of liberal-bashing books in recent years, answered by an equally impressive tsunami of Bush bashers, books that try to tackle substantial, and oftentimes complicated, long-range issues have a hard time being heard over the din of partisan politics. Who wants to debate fiscal policy in an election year? Certainly not politicians.
And not the media, especially the electronic media, which prefers conflict and confrontation to content. “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot” vs. “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.” Sure, Peterson’s book has an alarming premise: The country is running out of money. And you would think that that would get it as much attention as an orange alert, wouldn’t you? But the problem is, he doesn’t pick a side, so neither party wants to own him. That elephant in the room is the Baby Boomers’ retirement fund, and he says both parties have been dipping into its till to pay for tax cuts and entitlements. So where’s the fun in talking about his book?
“Increasingly, the media have abandoned their informational role in favor of an entertainment role,” says political scientist Morris P. Fiorina who, thanks to financial support from the conservative Hoover Institution and that hotbed of liberalism Stanford University, has written a book that really tackles a subject apparently too hot for journalism: “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.”
Yes, that’s right, Fiorina argues that the Culture War is a myth. That paradigm near and dear to so many journalists’ hearts — red states and blue states — doesn’t reflect reality.
“The myth of a culture war rests on misinterpretations of election returns, lack of hard examination of polling data, systematic and self-serving misrepresentation by issue activists, and selective coverage by an uncritical media more concerned with news value than with getting the story right,” Fiorina charges.
The parties may be more polarized. But, at least according to Fiorina, the population is not, not even on such issues as abortion and homosexuality, where most people remain moderate and tolerant.
How about that for a hot potato issue?
