Word: journalists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...through it, only so much can be distorted. In a very real way the past is an important part of the present. And somehow this is much more appealing than desire to bury the past and look toward the future in, say, West Germany, where this summer a German journalist observing Henry Kissinger's personal popularity during his trip to Bonn remarked to an American colleague, "If he hadn't gone to the states, he would have become the chancellor of Germany." On a mass level, this sort of crass, unwritting forgetfulness would never be possible in Eastern Europe, though...
...combat with the N.R.A. was occasioned by The Guns of Autumn, a documentary that purported to describe hunting in America. In 90 minutes, Director-Writer Irv Drasnin, a journalist for 15 years but not a hunter, compiled carnage upon atrocity. Black bears were slaughtered at a Michigan garbage dump by tourists with rifles. A gang of rednecks with the latest electronic gear treed a bear, then watched hounds rip it apart. Explained the pack's leader: "We feel that they deserve a chew." A pert stewardess plunked down $500 to "harvest" her first buffalo; then she pointed...
Knightley's 120-year extravaganza, but some things never change. In the correspondents' rush to be first with the news, the truth is usually distorted and sometimes sacrificed. Sooner or later, a government official gets around to asking a zealous reporter, "Whose side are you on?" The journalist must then try to formulate a convincing answer out of his sense of professional responsibility, fear of losing his job, private prejudices, and not always flattering motives for chasing war news in the first place...
Hemingway used the war to soak up material for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Earlier in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh witnessed Mussolini's campaign against Haile Selassie's antiquated army. Waugh too was no shakes as a journalist-filing his copy in Latin did not ingratiate him with his editors-but he returned from Africa to disguise his experiences in Scoop, still the best satire on journalism ever written...
...Street professional is not without his own inadequacies. His preferences are understandable. The flamboyant correspondents make livelier copy than Knightley's accounts of Edward R. Murrow, A.J. Liebling, Alan Moorehead and Ernie Pyle-men who muffled the "boom-boom" in favor of the human voice. But as every journalist learns, readability has its casualties...