Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
News is a made thing. News is not facts. News is what is easiest for a reporter to recognise, not necessarily most important for the public to know – a kidnapping, a bombing, a court filing – anything that pokes up from the irregular and massive tissue of reality and events. For example, you could say: ‘Today there is a British Airways strike.’ But underneath that is a morass of barely detectable instances and feelings, a cavalcade of greed and human longing and anger. News is good at recording the overt act but it loses the how and the why of the event in the process.
Tell me about Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann.
I can’t tell you how deeply I love this book. Some people get excited by Sex and the City but I get excited by Public Opinion. I could read you chapters on end and say: ‘This is brilliant and true!’ It was written in 1922 and is an insider’s view of how news is made. That is, news is a made thing. News is not facts. News is what is easiest for a reporter to recognise, not necessarily most important for the public to know – a kidnapping, a bombing, a court filing, anything that pokes up from the irregular and massive tissue of reality and events. For example, you could say: ‘Today there is a British Airways strike.’ But underneath that is a morass of barely detectable instances and feelings, a cavalcade of greed and human longing and anger. News is good at recording the overt act everyone can see but it’s less equipped to determine the how and the why of the event. One example Lippman uses is the Russian Revolution. He was fascinated by what he saw in the newspapers and how there was no reporting of the Revolution’s successes, partly because of censorship, propaganda, and the difficulty of the Russian language, but ‘the hardest thing to report is chaos’. I find this so familiar from my own reporting.
Read full interview
Princeton educated Lorraine Adams was a staff writer for The Washington Post for 11 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She is the author of Harbor, a novel about the experience of young Arab Americans, and more recently The Room and the Chair, a book that deals with US newsrooms, cockpits over Afghanistan, intelligence headquarters and the way the truth about violence can be manipulated, glossed over and forgotten. In a democracy, she says, you can’t go to war when the public has been so unreliably informed by the media and will poll accordingly.
