Byline Vs. Timeline

For some reason our attempt to point you to Steve Gilliard’s compelling thoughts on “New Journalism” failed yesterday, so we’ll try again. I am envious of Gilliard’s broad-ranging feel for the middle-distance history of journalism—particularly as it was affected by the convulsions of the sixties and seventies. How could such intense social and political upheaval have NOT energized journalists and journalism? (How can it fail to do so today? And I am not talking about blogs.) In a free society, it is impossible for these sorts of phenomena to happen without the press taking notice, and once they do, the phenomena can kind of feed on themselves and develop in new trajectories. How much longer would Vietnam have lasted without television cameras in the field? How would the world be different today if Gerald Ford had never been president? (Uh… hmm…)

But but but. Several issues to follow-up on from yesterday’s addendum. Gilliard’s lowest diss is to call someone or something “irrelevant” and we think this could bear a little unpacking. It is Gilliard’s paradigmatic assumption that journalism can and should change the world, right the wrongs, redress the complaints of the timid and weak, fix flat tires, and generally point in the right direction out of the slough of the present. We have no problems with this view of journalism—it is what the nation’s daily and weekly newspapers should be doing, and generally are doing, when they aren’t publishing the lifestyle tripe they believe is necessary to attract all those solipsistic, suburban TV addicts.

We must confess that we took a moment to enjoy the sweet taste of schadenfreude in Gilliard’s funny and precise dismissal of Dave Eggers—”a silly, irrelevant man. ” We also couldn’t agree more that The Writing Program has done more violence to writing than a half-century of TV, radio, video games, and the web combined. Still, we think it is a little unfair to expect someone like Eggers to bear the cross of New, New Journalism. Yes, it would be nice to have a class of literature that embraced the world more directly and energetically, rather than turning inward, but why throw out with the bathwater anyone who has ever out pen to paper? Besides,Galliard is being selectively myopic when he carps about the state of literature today. I think, for example, that Franzen and Lethem are the spearhead of a new, new literature that synthesizes the introversion of young people today with a terra-stomping kind of allegorical quality. And what about the medium-old guard, folks like Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Nick Hornby, not to mention the old old guard like Philip Roth and John Updike? To see these writers as essentially hermetic is to read them in less than one dimension, while at the same time idolizing youth.

Anyway, the whole point is this: Why expect literature to do journalism’s job? Good writing, no matter what the genre or category—whether you’re talking about first-edition hardcovers or cereal boxes—has only one obligation, and that is to the Truth. There are inward and outward truths, and presumably these can inform each other.

The problem with workaday beat journalists is that they approach literature and the truth on a deadline, and they believe that great work is measured by the writer’s last byline. History moves in bigger circles than that. It is easy, today, to see that Hunter Thompson’s work transcends its time, transcends itself. It is not primarily about its outward marks—the stylistic departures, the lack of formalism, and it’s a fool’s errand looking for a contemporary equivalent. The reason there are no Thompsons today is not that there aren’t any; it’s that we won’t know about them for a decade or so.