BY DAVID MARTIN
Mailer had the balls the
Derek Donovan, The Kansas City Star’s readers’ representative, posed a question in a recent column: Should journalism be interesting?
Donovan says “yes.” But only to a point.
Seldom missing an opportunity to make the lively pursuit of journalism seem tedious, Donovan wrote a piece in Sunday’s paper about “newsmakers’ behind the scenes behavior.” Donovan threw out a generic example of an official “who has a pattern of uncivil behavior behind closed doors.” Does the conduct belong in print?
Donovan suggests that readers would get a more “truthful” picture if reporters didn’t save stories of politicians’ blowing tops for the barroom. Still, as he usually does, Donovan finds room to equivocate. He fails to put a name to an example and ultimately concludes that the proper amount of descriptiveness remains “an open question,” the rallying cry of the mealy mouthed.
The column touched upon a real dilemma. Beat writers risk access when they describe a politician’s habit of screaming at aides or a ballplayer’s tendency to tell off-color jokes. Donovan, however, couched the discussion in entirely the wrong terms. His worry was that if reporters made an effort to provide detail – you know, the stuff that makes newsprint something more vibrant than hog prices on cellulose -- their “objectivity” would be called into question.
Ugh.
First of all, a man in Donovan’s position should know that some readers will perceive bias in anything – a headline, a photo choice, the shape of a columnist’s mustache. Trying to mollify these people is folly. So why try?
Mainly, though, it was dispiriting to see Donovan reopen a discussion that Norman Mailer settled in 1960.
On assignment from Esquire at the Democratic National Convention, Mailer described John F. Kennedy with language so evocative that traditional political reporting seemed like a tetanus shot by comparison. Kennedy, Mailer wrote in of many awe-inspiring passages, “carried himself … with a cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause, his manner somehow similar to the poise of a fine boxer, quick with his hands, neat in his timing, and two feet away from his corner when the bell ended the round. There was a good lithe wit to his responses, a dry Harvard wit, a keen sense of proportion in disposing of difficult questions -- invariably he gave enough of an answer to be formally satisfactory without ever opening himself to a new question which might go further than the first.”
To be sure, reporters usually embarrass themselves when they try to sound like Mailer or Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion. (Movie criticism I wrote in an earlier life sounded like Pauline Kael if Pauline Kael had downed 10 beers and then hit herself in the head with a tire iron.) No one wants Steve Kraske to start referring to himself as “Aquarius.”
But Donovan's caution light on descriptive writing out of “fear readers might still see that as tipping of the hat into subjectivity” sounded like yet another a death knell for the trade.
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