Word: halberstam
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SOMEHOW a rocking chair seems out of place in the repertoire of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Vietnam correspondent and monomaniacal reporter that David Halberstam is. But after a few telltale early-warning signs in The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam has finally lapsed into his anecdotage. The Powers That Be ranks as the ultimate politico-media gossip book, with a thousand jolly stories and vivacious quotes about four big-time media institutions--Time magazine, CBS, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times--and how they have interacted with politics, mainly presidential, during the last century...
...journalists and their employers respond to their increasing power and prestige? Halberstam's book will disappoint those expecting to hear the worst. The Post, for instance, was handed down from Eugene Meyer to his brilliant son-in-law Philip Graham. Eventually Graham used Meyer's money to buy out the competition and create a morning monopoly in Washington. According to conventional wisdom, that is the time when publishers kick out the reporters and make room for the advertisers. Graham did nothing of the sort; he used his newfound security to take on better journalists and increase his paper's authority...
...Halberstam can be rough on his principals, who sometimes emerge as caricatures, but his harshest treatment goes to Paley. While acknowledging Paley's genius and eminence ("the supreme figure of modern broadcasting"), Halberstam also insists that the chairman coldly let highly profitable entertainment programming elbow out the news division. Murrow, who helped invent broadcast journalism and became a symbol of integrity to colleagues and the public, eventually left the network in despair. Much later, Bill Moyers told Paley that he wanted to quit CBS and return to public broadcasting. Paley asked what it would take to keep him. Moyers said...
Because he concentrates so heavily on owners and proprietors, Halberstam's portrait of the press is full of big money. This presence unquestionably adds spice. And his guarded sympathy for publishers also offers a useful corrective to many books about the press. Seeking profits, in Halberstam's story, is no crime; a news organization that goes broke can no longer do any harm or good. "It was a curious irony of capitalism," he writes, "that among the only outlets rich enough and powerful enough to stand up to an overblown, occasionally reckless, otherwise unchallenged central government were journalistic institutions that...
...more than a decade, Columbia University Sociologist Herbert J. Gans spent his spare hours watching journalists go about their jobs at CBS, NBC, TIME and Newsweek. The result, Deciding What's News, is too plodding to knock David Halberstam's gossipy competitor off the bestseller charts. But Gans does offer some shrewd observations about life on the other side of the headlines, and some provocative notions about how it should be changed...