Since we’re talking about evolution here on this idiosyncratic forum of cranky individualists, I’m taking the excuse to run some excerpts from a review of the latest Henry Luce biography in the June Harpers, “Reeled the Mind“, because Nicolas Fraser makes it seem as though Drudge and Markos may not have sprung full-grown from Jupiter’s thigh :
… Luce’s views about journalism were simple and starkly expressed, tolerable only if one believes that ownership carries the right to be persistently, dogmatically wrong. “I don’t pretend that this is an objective magazine,” he once said of his beloved Time. “It’s an editorial magazine from the first page to the last, and whatever comes out has to reflect my view and that’s the way it is.” Luce frequently mistrusted the work of reporters, insisting that their copy be altered to suit his own, somewhat traditional, views. It was Edmund Wilson who noticed relatively early that the “considerable value” of having the news summarized each week tended to mask “the ineptitude and cynicism of the mentality” governing the reportage. In the 1960s, Fact magazine collected twenty pages of complaints from the prominent about the deficiencies of Luce journalism, listing grievances from P.G. Wodehouse (“about the most inaccurate magazine in existence”) and Marshall McLuhan (“Totalitarianism . . . rather than insight or intelligibility is the object of all of Time’s technical brilliance”)
[…] …Brinkley re-creates Luce as an Eminent American, royally and sometimes picturesquely flawed. “Luce’s legacy is not that he changed the world,” Brinkley concludes. “His most important legacy remains his role in the creation of new forms of information and communications at a moment in history when media were rapidly expanding.”
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This is a sober, incontrovertible judgment; yet it may not reflect the best spirit in which to approach the Luce phenomenon. Luce’s magazines did change the media world, and one cannot imagine modern journalism without his looming presence. But Luce isn’t easily rendered as an Eminent American. He was an original, touched with madness, in some aspects richly dislikable. Now that journalism is under economic threat, it is possible to see him as the progenitor not just of past glories but of many current failings. At the very least, it would seem too early to be fixing Luce’s reputation.
[…] …Time never paid for the copy it took from other publications to be rewritten by the magazine’s tiny, amateur staff. The stylistic idiosyncrasies and tics were present from its earliest days… On each page, fake homeliness vied with pedantry.
[…] But Time, its somewhat contrived Jazz Age air of frivolity notwithstanding, proved to be the most importantly innovative publication of the twentieth century. The magazine’s willingness to consider anyone, even mass murderers, for the accolade of Man of the Year represented a real desire to see the world as it was, without the blinkers of ideology or good taste. Remorselessly, Time linked the reporting of news with the confection of narrative—this was thought to be the only way in which the busy could be lured to a consideration of public life. In the 1920s, Walter Lippmann, among others, bemoaned the poor state of American journalism. Newspapers were published locally, and they were boringly written. Time ensured that all modern media, not just print, but radio and later television, would henceforth depend on narrative, aspiring to the condition of immediacy, favoring description and personal stories over analysis, and avoiding excessive resort to abstractions. The magazine’s enormous, enduring influence defined, very clearly, the dilemma of journalistic popularization, posing the question of whether, in making everything wholly accessible, one didn’t end up conveying nothing of importance to harried, impatient readers.
[…] Luce shows what happens when the spirit of journalistic inquiry is subordinated to the illusory pursuit of influence. Still, it would be wrong to conclude that he had no lasting impact. The world as sound bite, told and retold each news cycle, is part of the Luce legacy. So is the bizarre mixture of fake piety, ideological fervor, and on-the-sleeve cynicism to be encountered each night, whether on TV or online. Ever the missionary, Luce struggled each week in a misapplied quest for perfection; his successors, however, no longer even pretend to try.
Poopyman
Since it’s an open thread, why is Pammy Gellar on my TV on 60 Minutes?
Napoleon
I did a paper in college, where I was a history major, on a specific Vietnam War offensive and as part of it read a huge amount of all the weekly publications, and in retrospect Newsweek wears well as being fairly accurate on average, Time was just amazingly spun everything towards the right and the establishment. US News and World Report was flat out a reprint of Pentagon propaganda.
John Bird
Thanks for the link.
American discourse on the media reminds me of American discourse on nasty accusations during elections. A lot of our problems go back to before the Founding, and we have to address them that way, not as though the latest people to embody them invented them.
Tom Levenson
I actually worked for Time as a reporter overseas (irregular, to be sure) in the early 1980s. It was after the Luce era, but not before the Luce mentality had waned to its current pale shadow. The one thing that tells you all you need to know is that reporters submitted their “raw” material to writers back in New York, and it was those august, disembodied masters of the word who got to shape the world as their editors saw it.
You could play certain games with the system — a favorite was writing a report that was the length of the news hole the writer had to fill, leaving him (mostly him) room to manouver. But it was New York in all its glory that wrote what it was you may not have recognized as what you saw.
SiubhanDuinne
I have a horrible, horrible suspicion that Time’s 2010 Person of the Year is going to be either Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, or John Boehner.
You wouldn’t believe what a sad I haz at that thought.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: I am hoping for an inanimate carbon rod instead.
WereBear
My favorite thing about the whole Time Empire were two interesting books which came out of it:
The Girls in the Office by Jack & Olsen
And
The Fanciest Dive: What Happened When the Giant Media Empire of Time/Life Leaped Without Looking into the Age of High-Tech by Christopher M. Byron
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: I’d vote for the inanimate carbon rod.
FlipYrWhig
@Omnes Omnibus: In rod we trust!
eric
@Omnes Omnibus: inanimate? I’ll show you inanimate!
Stuck in the Funhouse
General Zod and his diabolical amigos expelled from Planet Wingnut to reek hell and high water here on Earth.
Where is Superman when you need the fucker?
Linda Featheringill
Are you saying that the Honest Human is a creature that we are still evolving toward?
In fairness to us as a species, I must say that the truth is often difficult to discern by primitive, undeveloped folk such as ourselves.
Of course, Luce apparently did not even strive for the truth.
FlipYrWhig
@SiubhanDuinne: It’ll probably be something like “Movement of the Year: The Tea Party.” Or “People of the Year: The Republican Senate Class of ’10,” with Marco Rubio, Joe Miller et al.
(Speaking of which, I think Rubio is a dark-horse for a presidential run. The long-talked-about contenders are all jokes. At one point I thought Jindal would be in the mix, but I’m no longer sure about that.)
FlipYrWhig
@Linda Featheringill:
You might say he was Luce with the facts.
Joseph Nobles
@SiubhanDuinne: I’d bet on Sarah Palin. “Narrative Driver of the Year” isn’t necessarily an honorable title, as I’m sure you’re aware.
John Bird
Yeah, my guess is Palin or Beck for person of the year, because obviously they want to do the Tea Party, but they’ve been doing way too much of this two-person, non-person stuff lately to keep it up. But maybe that’s just how things are going to go from now on.
Belvoir
Interesting.. I started high school right at the dawn of Reagan’s first term, and we got TIME free every week in Social Studies class for four years. Besides being presented to us impressionable youth as mainstream, conventional wisdom, the magazine often went out of its way to scare the shit out of us that a Soviet nuclear strike on us was possible/probable/ certain by the time that TV movie The Day After came out in 1983. Nightmare-inducing. I think my HS also showed us that movie in class.
I look back on that early 80’s school-time with some disbelief and resentment, they way we were sold fear and propaganda like that- it seemed more like the early 50’s rather than the early 80’s. Luce’s maniacal anti-communism (which conveniently also abetted the military-industrial complex) must have reached some crescendo of influence when Reagan took office, and was extra-strong in the magazine’s DNA at that time. I was a poor-ish boy in a famously rich conservative town, and it took me forever to realize the scope of that Republican version of what the world should be. And how ghastly it was. Getting TIME every week in school was sheer propaganda, and I am hardly the hardest leftist in the world, but I sort of resent it. In the early 80’s it seemes to me there was an effort to erase the the good, valiant parts of the 60’s, a fierce Republican pushback. And TIME was certainly a part of that. I wonder what wingnut welfare think-tank paid for all those shiny issues on all of our desks, for years.
TrishB
Open threadiness – How does one encourage a coyote to move on from a fenced yard? I would make the assumption that it can climb fences, since it is here to begin with. The small creatures will need to be let out sooner or later, and the current situation is less than conducive to such matters. I am only hoping that my roommates semi-outdoor cat is smart enough to avoid the situation.
Yutsano
@TrishB: Very easy solution: a big dog. Coyotes are actually rather skittish and will run from anything bigger than they are. If a friend has a German shepherd or something along those night you can borrow for a few nights that should scare the beastie into moving on. The other solution is county animal control, but that could involve killing.
Anne Laurie
@TrishB: Bright lights & human noises are what I’ve heard — shine the brightest flashlight/lantern you’ve got, directly at the coyote if you can, and yell or talk loudly at it. (Obviously, don’t corner the beast or get between it and the escape route.) Unfortunately, the coyote may be targeting your roommates’ cat, or your own dog — obviously your girl will have to be walked on-leash tonight, but do your best to keep the cat indoors. If the coyote is still in your yard tomorrow, I’d call animal control (or your local police department) — there have been a spate of rabid coyotes / foxes here in New England, so even though it’s hard lines on the urban wildlife you DO NOT want to take any chances!
joel hanes
The stylistic idiosyncrasies and tics were present from its earliest days
Wolcott Gibbs in a 1936 article in The New Yorker:
“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”
Mnemosyne
@Yutsano:
Judging by the size of the coyotes that we’ve been seeing around our neighborhood, she’s gonna need a BIG dog. Like a Newfie.
Ah, urban living — when the “urban” is Los Angeles and you live right up against the Verdugo Mountains. Of course, they get coyotes in Chicago, too.
Mnemosyne
@Anne Laurie:
Good point. My mom’s cat used to love to sit safely behind the steel screen door and taunt the coyotes with his sleek deliciousness when they lived in Arizona. Drove the coyotes nuts. Fortunately for all, the cat had zero interest in actually going outdoors.
TrishB
@Yutsano: No big dogs in the neighborhood, though the next door neighbor’s 4 shih-tzus could yap the thing into deafness, I suppose. Or the lab across the street would lick it to death.
I called the non-emergency number for the police and there’s no animal control for the county. I should have known that, as when I was still working for my company, I saw 3 sheriffs trying to take down a wounded non-native deer that had been wandering behind the office park for a week. I’ll just say the hunters in the company were not amused at their technique.
TrishB
@Anne Laurie: All the lights on the back of the house are now on, and I added all the lanterns from when Ike went though to the back deck. I also kicked the recycling bins a few times. How’d all those wine bottles get in there, I wonder?
I’m trying to get the cat back inside, and for now the dogs are staying in. My little boy is just stupid enough to try to take down something that size, leash or no leash.
FWIW, this is an older Cincinnati ‘burb, so not exactly rural territory.
TrishB
@Mnemosyne: What’s a Newf going to do, drown the creature with slobber and drool? I miss being around Newfs.
John Bird
@Belvoir:
Have you ever read Faludi’s Backlash? It dates a little and focuses mainly on women, but is an exciting read that details the exact Reagan-era pushback you describe.
What I found most surprising about it is the sheer amount of names that I recognized from right-wing political discourse today.
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne: There are coyotes all over Massachusetts, where they didn’t exist even 20-25 years ago. There are radio-tracked breeding populations in Boston (Jamaica Plains) and in the next town over from our tired blue-collar city. Haven’t spotted them in our neighborhood, which is a 1950s-era residential appendix tucked inside a light-industrial area between two major freeways, but I live in fear for our 15lb. dogs. (We do have red foxes, living off a healthy population of rabbits, squirrels & voles, but healthy foxes won’t challenge even our little dogs in their own yard.)
Blotto von Bismarck
Speaking of Time hysterics, this article points out some pretty good ones. I especially liked Time’s switchback on their school shooting article.
James E. Powell
@Belvoir:
Not to mention the TV mini-series “Amerika” and the film “Red Dawn,” each of which portrayed a completely implausible Soviet conquest of the United States as not only plausible, but the direct result of liberal policies.
I heard tell that a re-make of “Red Dawn” is in the works.
How can it be that the right-wingers, who have made a god of Big Bad-Ass America, also wallow in paranoid fantasies of American doom?
And, yeah, Reagan’s election was a major and majorly bad turning point in Americans history, and yeah, we are still living with the consequences. But it wasn’t Reagan, it was the bigoted, ignorant Americans who elected him, twice, and who still worship the ideas Reagan represented.
Gary Farber
Hi, Anne Laurie!
Phoebe
P.G. Wodehouse!! <3 I'm going to have to do some googling now..
Phoebe
Ok! The P.G. Wodehouse quote came from here:
http://twister.lib.siu.edu/cni/i24.shtml
In which a whole pile of famous people were asked to give their opinions of Time. Including Vincent Price. Whom I also love.
A.J.
Henry Luce was the Roger Ailes (the bad one) of his day. He was a hard-core conservative, John Bircher, of his day. After WWII he went after Truman with the “Who lost China?” meme (as if it was ours to lose) and it was picked up by the out-of-power conservative repukes, Taft in particular, to beat on Democrats. The bad part was that it worked. After that, no politician wanted a, “Who lost Vietnam?” and its many successors. Luce handed us a ball of fire that we still have not doused.
Here is Jonathan Yardley’s review of Brinkly’s book on Luce from last April in the WaPo:
“(Luce) was venomous in his hatred of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and used his magazines to vilify them; he idolized the corrupt, ineffectual Chinese “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek and used his publications to promote Chiang’s hopeless cause.”
This sentence, also from Yardley’s review, backs up Tom Levenson’s (#4) post above, and then some:
“I vividly recall the ways in which people sacrificed their convictions in order to earn the fat salaries it paid. Going to work for Luce was commonly referred to as “selling out,” and the emoluments were ample: not merely the best salaries in journalism and the most lavish expense accounts, but also carts loaded with free food and liquor that were pushed through the corridors on deadline nights. A great many people hated themselves for taking Luce’s oath of allegiance, but they cashed his checks and drank his booze. ”
Link to the book review: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/16/AR2010041602801.html
Bernie Latham
Luce and LSD.
Many here surely won’t be old enough to recall Luce’s role in the promotion of LSD in American (or in my case, Canadian) culture but it was significant. In my case, I first learned of the drug prior to Leary, Kesey, etc and became interested in taking it as a direct consequence of a Luce article. And yes, I did.
See this Slate piece for further historical information…http://www.slate.com/id/2257717/