Media Criticism Killing the Messenger:

Media Criticism

Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism contains a collection of fifteen essays on media criticism. A UC Berkeley Graduate School Dean at the time of publication, Editor Tom Goldstein's selections span several centuries, focusing on the American press in particular. Goldstein is keenly aware of both the power of the press over a society and of the lack of adequate self-criticism among media professionals. Killing the Messenger was published in the 1980s, long before the first "Survivor" episode hit American airwaves to spark off a wave of reality television shows. Killing the Messenger also hit the presses decades before the 2000 presidential election or September 11 and therefore predates the current media crises facing the United States. Nevertheless, Goldstein's collection of articles remains relevant. Moreover, even in the 1980s, many of the authors included in the collection were already dead and gone. Included in the compilation are Louis Brandeis, Samuel Warren, William Allen White, George Seldes, Theodore Roosevelt, Spiro Agnew, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, Clifton Daniel, Will Irwin, Upton Sinclair, Carl Ackerman, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Joseph Pulitzer, Frederick Lewis Allen, and John Hersey, as well as one selection from the Commission on Civil Disorders. Many of these men wrote before television and even radio were daily realities. Goldstein brings them all under one collective cover, illustrating trends in journalism styles and changes in the ways media is perceived in the United States, as a force of social conscience and social control.

Each of Goldstein's selections is prefaced by the editor with a brief synopsis of the writer's contribution to modern journalism. Killing the Messenger is divided into five topical sections: reporting on public and private matters; journalists and their biases; the power and limitations of the press; making reporters better; and news and reality. Goldstein's election to subdivide his essay selection contributes to the collection's organizational appeal. Goldstein is, moreover, a frank and forthright journalist who is unafraid to critique the press or the popular culture that it both informs and reflects. For example, in his Preface, Goldstein states, "Contemporary journalists have not shown any great appetite for self-analysis, and they pretty much hunker down when others pick on them," (xi). His selection of essays is an attempt to awaken a slumbering media from its complacency and self-satisfaction.

If Killing the Messenger has any faults it is Goldstein's implicit idealism with which he views the press. Modern journalism is motivated more by a bottom line of profit than it is on the muckraker mentality. Unfortunately, corporate capitalist ideals sometimes run counter to what many journalists have in mind: the expression of the truth. Furthermore, what the muckrakers taught and what the blog writers have since picked up on is the necessity of infusing any subject with passion and even opinion. The term muckraker originated in the early American work by John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress and was later borrowed first by the New York Post and later made famous by President Theodore Roosevelt. Muckrakers were essentially "writers who engaged in exposing corruption," (55). However, Roosevelt was quick to point out, according to Goldstein, that muckrakers were preoccupied with "the negative aspects of American life" and criticized muckraker journalism for being unnecessarily cruel to public officials (57-58). The term muckraker was subsequently misappropriated and interpreted as a complement on a journalist's integrity; muckraker journalism now refers to any media criticism of the government or of the elite. Although lauded by the politically left, muckraking journalism has been continually criticized unduly negative, their journalists as "more than cantankerous...unhelpful...their adversarial posture becomes destructive, perhaps unpatriotic," (53). If Goldstein elected to reissue a second edition of Killing the Messenger, he would do well to include an essay by the recently deceased Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist who proudly revived the muckraker tradition by declaring that the best journalists are willfully opinionated.

By selecting Roosevelt's "The Man with the Muckrake" as part of Killing the Messenger, Goldstein presents a balanced perspective of modern journalism. He concedes to the fact that many critics of the media accuse journalists of being "muckrakers" in the Rooseveltian sense of being unnecessarily negative. The media cannot and should not fall into the role of only being a social critic, never pointing out the uplifting or positive aspects of a culture. With too much negativity in its tone, the press risks influencing the public into being cynical and hopeless. On the other hand, a press that wears rose-colored typeface risks contributing to mass delusion and brainwashing, otherwise known as media propaganda. In fact, Spiro Agnew's essay elucidates the conflict inherent in modern journalism, as he points out the "right to know belongs to the people," showing how the mass media can often be as corrupt and biased in their presentation of the facts as even politicians can be (85). Thus, through his inclusion of Roosevelt's and of Spiro Agnew's essays, Goldstein suggests that when journalists muckrake, they should do so with discernment and discrimination.

On the opposite side of the press ring from Roosevelt and Agnew was Upton Sinclair, a premier journalist and novelist who accused the press as being "a slave to capitalism," (140). Similarly, Will Irwin critiqued the press for being unduly sensationalist and "wedded to wealth," (122). Media men like Irwin and Sinclair offer a keen balance for the stances of politicians like Roosevelt and Agnew. Killing the Messenger in part illustrates the tenuous and codependent relationship between the press and politics.

Through his judicious selection of essays, Goldstein shows students and scholars of journalism the multiple facets of the media: its many roles and responsibilities and its ability to mould public opinion and even social values. Readers of Killing the Messenger will conclude that the press must at once provide a truth as objective as possible, one based on observable fact and report all sides of any given issue. However, it must do so with selectivity and judiciousness, and also with a human touch and with integrity to morality and societal values. Muckrakers, "gonzo" journalists, and bloggers play an important role as social critics; White House press conferences almost serve an opposite role.