Spurred by four collections of essays by A.J. Liebling, which have just been published, Russell Baker recalls an era “when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.” His point, of course, is that that’s not the case today.
Nor was it the case by the time Liebling died in 1963. The “modest style” had already succumbed to what Baker calls “the imperial state of mind,” when “the press” was already becoming “the media.” In fact, Liebling’s own rule of thumb about the journalistic pecking order in his own time, which Baker cites, best summarizes our own.
There are three kinds of writers of news in our generation. In inverse order of worldly consideration, they are:
1. The reporter, who writes what he sees.
2. The interpretive reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning.
3. The expert, who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn’t seen.
Liebling elaborates on “the expert” with a contempt clearly intended for the magazine mandarins and royal op-ed sages who got under his skin.
All is manifest to him, since his powers are not limited by his powers of observation. Logistics, to borrow a word from the military species of the genus, favor him, since it is possible to not see many things at the same time. For example, a correspondent cannot cover a front and the Pentagon simultaneously. An expert can, and from an office in New York, at that.
Ironically, today’s media barons of print and television have the same sort of contempt for bloggers. If Liebling were alive today, my sense is that he’d curse us all. Or cure us.
