Word: journalistically
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...decision to be a student journalist has yielded many perks. When I reflect on the past four years, I can recall almost every significant event in terms of some piece I wrote. I therefore have a rich and thorough record of my most formative years. I have never been seduced by the temptations of self-involvement. Working on the newspaper, I have always been forced to consider the diverse happenings in the community around me. I have met my closest friends. I have had the pleasure of subjecting my beliefs to the often unsympathetic scrutiny of others. I have learned...
Robert Caro, the biographer of Lyndon Johnson, thinks the main difference is time. The historian has the time to dig deeper and sift more thoroughly than the journalist can. The historian's relative leisure allows for the correction of mistakes - including errors made by journalists in their haste. Caro was talking about this the other night at the New York Public Library. He spent years prowling around in Lyndon Johnson's early life, he said, only to discover that most of the lore on the subject was all wrong; LBJ had invented it. Caro began getting it right only when...
...deadline journalism's inherent defects is that, in order to organize the material and give it punch, a reporter seeks out a narrative line - sometimes the most obvious or sensational, sometimes a merely conventional version, the one that has been arrived at by consensus of the journalistic hive. The narrative line in turn dictates an attitude, the atmosphere out of which the journalist writes. Maybe the story line is that George W. Bush is a little stupid. Or that Al Gore lies about things he did in the past. Everyone loves to hear a story. But is it true...
...said, "Oh, really?" The mechanic, not looking up from the engine, said matter-of-factly, "Yeah, they're all complete rubbish, you know. This entire country is a prison, and you don't even know it." Burns was shocked. It was the beginning of wisdom for him as a journalist...
Historians in a rush may be guilty of both the journalist's errors and the utopian's projections. I have been rereading Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s "A Thousand Days," which comprises more than a thousand pages about the Kennedy White House, written in the year after JFK's assassination. In his grief, Schlesinger portrayed Kennedy as saint and martyr: "He was a Harvard man, a naval hero, an Irishman, a politician, a bon vivant, a man of unusual intelligence, charm, wit and ambition, 'debonair and brilliant and brave,' but his deeper meaning was still in process of crystallization." In recent...