A scattershot recounting of a life spent in journalism, as well as
a critique of the way news is gathered and reported. In a career
spanning nearly 50 years, Bagdikian (The Media Monopoly, 1983,
etc.) has seen a great sea change in the world of journalism as
family-owned newspapers peopled with colorful, slightly
disreputable characters have yielded to media conglomerates and
celebrity journalists. He worked for a number of newspapers,
including the Washington Post, played a role in the publishing of
the Pentagon Papers, and became one of the nation's first media
critics. All this, however, does not ultimately add up to
compelling material for an autobiography. And Bagdikian has neither
the style nor the storytelling talent to make up for the
deficiencies of his raw material. He writes like a reporter, not a
memoirist, structuring his account in the classic inverted pyramid
style dear to journalists: all the interesting material up front,
succeeded by increasingly less interesting details. There are also
numerous repetitions as well as strange omissions (whole decades
seem to pass almost unmentioned) and frequent chronological leaps.
There are some interesting sections on his Armenian roots,
especially his family's flight from Turkish massacres. And the
fluster and cloak-and-dagger drama surrounding the publication of
the Pentagon Papers are well detailed. Bagdikian also offers some
trenchant and timely critiques of the Fourth Estate, especially the
journalistic pose of objectivity, which pretends that reporters are
not uniquely shaped by the circumstances of their lives. The
subtext of this book, in fact, is how strongly Bagdikian's life
influenced his reporting. Thus in place of objectivity, he proposes
a standard of "fairness and balance," reporting that "concentrates
on the fundamentals of social justice in any democracy."
Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of stolid decency that
makes for great obituaries but not great autobiographies. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The dramatic memoir by one of America's most respected journalists
and media critics takes us from the author's narrow escape from a
Turkish massacre of Armenians as a young child, to his secret
acquisition of the Pentagon Papers, to the transformation of
American journalism over the last half century. "Riveting
reading".Mark Jurkowitz, THE BOSTON GLOBE. Notes. Index.
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