I have to say that I find Baker's view of newspaper accounts odd. One of the people he cites without comment in Human Smoke is the notorious Walter Duranty, hardly an exemplar of journalistic excellence. Newspaper accounts are valuable mostly for enabling us to appreciate the ignorance at work during a given period, which, as The Black Swan demonstrates, is very much worth knowing.
Frank, I'm slightly surprised to hear you (a long-time newspaperman) saying that newspaper accounts are valuable mostly as records of ignorance!
ReplyDeleteI find many history books highly limited in their intellectual scope. The economics of book publishing force a conformist approach (how many more Civil War books, for instance, can we possibly need?) that newspapers, liberated by the need to publish as the clock ticks, are not fettered by. When I was in college, I took it upon myself to read every issue of Time Magazine since 1945, and I remember, page by page, being thrilled by the liveliness of the history bottled up in these dusty library volumes. Just as one example of many: I learned a great deal about the rise of Fidel Castro by reading Time's ongoing account of the Cuban revolutions that I'd never be able to find in a standard assembly-line book about the same subject from Knopf or HarperCollins.
Hi Levi,
ReplyDeleteI wasn't suggesting that books were any better.
Newspaper accounts, precisely because they are written on the fly provide a glimpse into the outlook prevailing at any given time. That outlook does not always turn out to be accurate. Newspaper accounts of the start of World War I hardly suggested that the war would turn out to be a cataclysm lasting four years.
Everything you say about assembly-line histories is true - you should have seen the steady flow of them into my office! The problem with histories written long after the events covered is that they tend to (a) rely too much on the clarity of hindsight or (b) cast the past in terms of the present or (c) both.
Really to understand a period requires seeing to from the perspective of those alive at the time and an essential element in this is what they did not know. Newspaper accounts do provide insight into this. So I was not intending to disparage newspaper coverage, only to caution against undue - let alone principal - reliance upon such coverage.
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