OUR TROUBLED PRESS: Ten Years of the Columbia Journalism Review

by Alfred & James Boylen -- Eds. Balk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 9, 1971

Occasioned by the Review's 10th anniversary, this assemblage of 40 articles, editorials, and comments has a sweeping topical range. Despite Elie Abel's rather gushing introduction, the Review is less of a gadfly than the editors might like to think. Criticisms of Establishment reporting of the Indochina war go little beyond queries about how the press missed the Song My story and descriptions of smuggling news behind the backs of military press agents; Don Stillman, a West Virginia University professor, digs a bit harder into conflicting stories about the Tonkin Gulf. Slanted news, press freedom, the decline of the independent press, journalese, campus politics, science writing, and ploys to please advertisers are often amusingly dissected, but the targets are sometimes too easy. . . . Southern small-town newspapers, Agnew, Presidential press secretaries. . . and protestations that the press was being ""used"" are raised without wondering whether it sometimes hadn't invited the rape. Harrison Salisbury makes an historical survey of distorted Moscow reporting by the Western press without mentioning his own paper's fantasies about Bolshevik free love and perennial ""imminent collapse."" Mild muckraking without radical taint and some posies to the freedom of the press -- an enjoyable rather than important collection.

Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION