Producers' Pick | Lance Morrow: What set 20th century journalism apart

I think we all know if it bleeds, it leads. The more they can get you to stay inside and watch their panic porn, the higher the ratings. Researchers at Dartmouth built a database recently monitoring the COVID coverage of the major news outlets across the world and found that while other countries mix the good news in with the bad, the U.S. national media reported almost 90 percent bad news. Even as things were getting better, the reporting remained negative. And politicians, they lie because it's their nature to cover their ass so they don't get blamed if things goes badly.

And also to keep in practice. But when all of our sources for medical information have an agenda to spin us, yeah, you wind up with a badly misinformed population, including on the left. That is Bill Moore, again, to me right on the money.

And I didn't really think that up until the last 18 months or so. Lance Morrow joins us now, journalist and author of several books. His latest, The Noise of Typewriters, Remembering Journalism. Lance, did journalism drop the ball during the pandemic? Well, yeah, I think that, well, a lot of people dropped the ball. I think it was a it was a failure on on many fronts, but certainly journalism tended to follow bad leads from there. It's a larger problem in journalism of who who are the authorities?

Who do you do? Who who can tell you the truth about a big story like that? And how how does journalism dig into it and think for itself? A lot of it is just kind of following the lead of Dr. Fauci or whoever. And so, yeah, there was a tremendous amount of confusion and disinformation. Not all of it perfidious or I mean, some of it was understandable.

But but you're right. It was a it was a very confused and tumultuous kind of journalism. Journalism is very imperfect stuff.

And as we know, the first rough draft is often very rough indeed. So you have this book, Out the Noise, a typewriter, remembering journalism. When was the journalism? When was journalism's heyday? The I don't idealize the 20th century journalism and all of that.

A lot of it was just following the the you know, the authorities and so on. But nevertheless, there was a difference that it was a different world and it was a different journalism. And there was a different standard in the sense that a journalism, a journalist believed. And by the way, we never called ourselves journalists. We thought that was a pompous term.

We call ourselves either reporters or newspapermen or newspaperwomen. But the the assumption was that there was something such a thing as objective truth, for example, and that it could be found out. And that you you dug at it and found it out.

And there was not this very unstable strange world that we're in now, which is the world of the screens and the keyboard and the computer and the mouse and social media and everybody with a smartphone and everybody with a Facebook or Twitter account and a very unstable idea of what the world is and what the facts are. So the the assumption was, back in the period that I'm writing about, was that that you could discover the truth in the same way that you could solve it. The cops could solve a crime. You know, there was a gun of a certain caliber and the victim was white or black or whatever. And the murderer was described as wearing a green jacket and being five feet nine and so on. The facts of the of that kind, I mean, the Woodward and Bernstein, when they were running down the Watergate thing, well, they were they acted like cops, you know, instead of political reporters. And it was as cops that they chased that particular story. So and of course, I think they're celebrating some type anniversary.

I think they're both in their 80s now or close there. Lance Mora, our guest, the name of the book is The Noise of Typewriters Remembering Journalism. So, so, Lance, another thing was brought up to me in that journalism, journalists, for the most part, was more of a blue collar profession.

You weren't really rich or famous. You were just doing the work. Correct? Has that changed? Yeah, there was a there was a lot of that. There was a yeah, there was a change. Actually, when I was a young man, it tended to be a little more to become a little more gentrified, just as I was coming in in the 60s, gentrified in the sense that reporters now or then rather would started to become college graduates and especially Ivy League graduates at the other papers before it was much more blue collar. Although you you don't forget that columnists, columnists like Walter Lippmann and Joe, Joe Alsop and Stuart Alsop were very much blue blood type. There's always different classes of journalists. There was a saloon journalist like Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, who would, you know, get their cast of characters from the police precincts and they'd walk up and down the tenement stairs and they covered working people. But then there were there were the the rather lofty people like the Alsops or the big picture characters like Dorothy Thompson and so on.

So it was it was a variety. It was a variety, but it was it was a different world and a different journalism, very different from what we have now. So who is who's the who in your mind, percentifies the perfect journalist or the near perfect journalist with the produce the results? I know you cite Ernest Hemingway and what he wrote and how he wrote even when he was writing fiction. But who do you who do you lean on? Well, I certainly I certainly wouldn't propose Hemingway as the perfect journalist, but he was a great writer in his in his way, although he wrote a lot of stuff that was really pretty terrible, especially as he got drunker and drunker toward the end of his life.

And is more injured in his head. But in my book, I talk about John Hersey's Hiroshima book, which was many thought was the best journalism of the 20th century. And I talk about that and kind of argue with that premise. And then Walter Durante, the guy who worked for The New York Times, had got a Pulitzer for his horrible failure to report on the Ukrainian famine in 1932.

And I talk about that as the worst. But for do you mean today or just? Well, in the past and then today, who do you look up to or not look up to?

But who do you single out? Well, I talk about, for example, there's still plenty of really terrific journalists around. I mean, Dexter Filkins, formerly of The New York Times, is a terrific war reporter.

I think he's he's very, very good. There's still some very good war reporting, I think, and very brave reporting from from Ben Hall, for example, of Fox News, who was so badly, badly wounded, injured earlier in the war. And, you know, terrific stuff from the New York Times. Brave, good journalists.

I think you've got me a little I hadn't thought in those terms of who were the outstanding today. My book focuses mainly on the past 20th century. There are a lot today, but there's a lot of people are really bad and there's today and in the sense of much too partisan and a little bit witless and shallow. And is it true that what's wrong today, in my view, is a tremendous failure of leadership, editorial leadership at places like The New York Times? I mean, the the failures in it was said that the casualty, the great casualty of the 1960s was authority.

Well, now, you know, the authority of the parents and the president and the military and so on. Well, now, in the old age of the baby boomers, you see that playing out in the failure of the authority of editorial leaders in places like The New York Times. I mean, the failure, the evident in the firing of James Bennett, who ran The New York Times editorial page or the failure implicit in the firing of Donald McNeil, one of the top reporters at The Times, for a perfectly ridiculous and nonexistent offense involving the forbidden n-word.

It wasn't an offense at all. It didn't, you know, it was completely, it was a very immature act on the part of the leadership of the paper. And I think, throughout journalism, you see that sort of immaturity and, and frankly, venality, that a deference to just making the bucks and also pandering to the party line, the basic party line of wokeness or whatever, whatever the party line is. I think that the standard of a more disinterested journalism, where you felt an obligation to give both sides of the story or, and that's now derided as some kind of prejudice or white supremacy or God knows what, but to try to understand both sides of the story, that was the point, you know, you had to comprehend, you didn't just give your party line just as, as it would be ridiculous for me to say, well, Brian, I must tell you my truth.

And well, okay, but it's my version of the truth, but the fact that it is mine does not make it the truth. And so these are all problems in 21st century journalism. In the 20th century journalism, if I used the first person pronoun, I'd better have a very good reason.

If I used adjectives, colorful adjectives, I'd better have a very, very good reason. And in the 21st century, boy, go ahead, do it, you know, and, and often, that's okay, if you happen to be a genius, but if you don't happen to be a genius, then you better watch yourself. And unfortunately, a lot of really third rate people are doing those things, slinging their opinions around. And the result is lousy journalism. The result is, is a debasement of the journalism that we get in the 21st century. Where it goes from here, I don't know, I hope that it sorts itself out. And there's some reassertion of maturity and leadership, editorial leadership, but it's, it's a mess now.

It's a terrible mess. Lance Morrow, it's all in your book to find out how we go forward. It's always good to look back.

The noise of typewriters remembering journalism. Lance, thanks so much for joining us. Delighted. Thanks a lot, Brian. All right, go get them. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts,