This paper reviews Tom Goldstein's anthology Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism, a collection of fifteen essays spanning several centuries of American press history. The review examines Goldstein's organizational framework, his selection of contributors ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Upton Sinclair, and the recurring tensions the anthology surfaces: journalistic objectivity versus opinion, corporate profit versus truth-telling, and the press's dual role as social conscience and instrument of social control. The paper also evaluates Goldstein's editorial restraint and considers both the strengths and limitations of the collection as a resource for students and scholars of modern journalism.
Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism contains a collection of fifteen essays on media criticism. A university 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 a wave of reality television shows, and decades before the 2000 presidential election or September 11. It therefore predates many of the current media crises facing the United States. Nevertheless, Goldstein's collection of essays 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 decision to subdivide his essay selections 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 in how he views the press. Modern journalism is motivated more by a bottom line of profit than by the muckraker mentality. Unfortunately, corporate capitalist priorities sometimes run counter to what many journalists have in mind: the expression of the truth. Furthermore, what the muckrakers taught — and what 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 work Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan and was later borrowed first by the New York Post and subsequently 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 was subsequently misappropriated and reinterpreted as a compliment to a journalist's integrity; muckraker journalism now refers to any media criticism of the government or of the elite.
Although lauded by the political left, muckraking journalism has been continually criticized as unduly negative, its practitioners characterized as "more than cantankerous... unhelpful... their adversarial posture becomes destructive, perhaps unpatriotic" (53). If Goldstein were to issue a second edition of Killing the Messenger, he would do well to include an essay by the late Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist who proudly revived the muckraker tradition by declaring that the best journalists are willfully opinionated.
"Roosevelt, Agnew, Sinclair on press bias and commerce"
"Objectivity, selectivity, and the press's social duties"
"Goldstein's restraint and reliance on primary sources"
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