By Milan Kundera.
Penguin,1981.
228 pp. $4.95
By Luciano Pellicani.
Hoover, 1981.
136 pp. $8.95
Lawrence W.Lichty
So far, 1982 has been a good year for news, much of it bad news, but highly "visual" news-anguished faces last spring of the relatives of victims of El Salvador's civil war, clouds of grey-black smoke billowing over the high-rises of West Beirut during the Israelis' summer-long attacks, Iraqi tanks clanking into action against the Ayatolla Khomeini's invading revolu- tionary youths, the demurely smiling face of the Princess of Wales with the newborn Prince William, Solidarity's...
If this pensive ylo~~izg News (1978)is
woman in Alfred Leslie's Seven A.M. an average American consumer of news, she does not favor "news as entertainment," or TV news over print, or newspapers that strain to cater only to her whims. Surveys indicate that she just wants the news
The ion Quarterly/Special Issue 1982
48
Probably no business in America, of late, has seemed so prone to upheaval as the multibillion-dollar "news business," with the prospective expansion of "electronic...
RAN ON
by Leo Boga~t
When World War I1 ended, eight daily newspapers in New York City reported the story, as did seven in Boston, four in Philadelphia, five in Chicago, four in San Francisco. Now, not quite four decades later, New York is down to three (the Times, Post, and Daily News), and Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago have only two newspapers apiece. The most recent major casualties are the Washington Star, Philadelphia Bulletin, and Cleveland Press. In Toledo, New Orleans, Des Moines...
The press, wrote A. J. Liebling, is "the weak slat under the bed of democracy." Journalists have always liked to think the contrary-that the press keeps the bed from collapsing. They thought so even more after Vietnam and Watergate: Journalism, its champions then argued, deserves the privileges and im- munities of a fourth branch of government, and its practitioners should enjoy the status, rewards, and invulnerability that go with being known as "professionals."
Unfortunately...
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States consists of a single sentence:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
When that sentence became law in 1791, the clause pertain- ing to the press rendered Congress powerless to enact any law...
this light alone. They cannot govern society episodes, incidents, and eruptions."
Such lofty talk was long in coming to American journalism. In Ameri-can Journalism-A History: 1690-1960 (Macmillan, 3rd ed., 1962), the University of Missouri's Frank Luther Mott notes that the first con- tinuous U.S. newspaper was the Bos- ton News-Letter, founded in 1704 by Boston's postmaster, John Campbell. The weekly did not thrive: 15 years later, Campbell complained that he could not "vend 300 copies...