Remnick on hero journalism: Dial. Leave message. Hang up. Repeat four times an hour for 12 hours.
David Remnick. Martin Schneider
12:14 pm Jul. 23, 20121
The Lineup collects the media stories, big and small, that are on our radar each day.
As a respite from all the grim news that is no doubt overwhelming your Twitter and RSS feeds today, treat yourself to this Storyboard interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who profiled Bruce Springsteen for this week's issue.
Speaking of the art of reporting a profile—as in the type of New Yorker-caliber profile in which the writer gets to spend five years talking to 500 people intimately familiar with his subject—Remnick invoked a classic Seymour Hersh anecdote to describe the "tenacity" that is required to perform this type of journalism:
According to Remnick, Hersh “was working on the Watergate story. The New York Times needed to catch up with the Washington Post … it was killing them. He needed to get Charles Colson, one of the bad guys of Watergate, on the phone. How did he do that? He got to the office at eight a.m. — nobody gets to a newspaper at eight a.m. — and on a rotary phone, he called Chuck Colson’s home number every 15 minutes till seven p.m. Eight a.m. to seven p.m., every 15 minutes on a rotary-dial phone. … He got Chuck Colson, and there was the front page story.
“When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’” Remnick concludes, “I want to pull my hair out.”
More on that here.
In other news...
David Carr: "Yahoo has what all media companies want, which is a large audience. The company just doesn’t know what to do with it." [The New York Times]
More David Carr: "We will eventually know exactly what happened in Aurora, but the why will remain beyond the craft of journalism." [NYT/Media Decoder]
Rupert Murdoch has resigned as director of the companies that run his British newspapers. [The Telegraph]
Bloomberg is prepping a daily magazine for the Republican and Democractic conventions. [Adweek]
A prescient promotion at PBS' "Frontline." [The New York Times]
R.I.P. Alex Cockburn. [The New York Times]
Fashion mags are thriving in China. [The New York Times]
Behind The New York Times' and Wall Street Journal's online video push. [Digiday]
People often wonder about the confessions and jail sentences of those accused of complicity with the Watergate affair. To these people I would refer them to the opionion loudly propagated about those who confessed when held in 'communist' countries. I would suggest that a version of the Stockholm Syndrome was at play here. Once a meme that there is wrond doing at the Nixon White House had taken root (brought about by ceaseless campaigning or over two years by the liberal press), and it takes some one with very strong will and rather foolhardy to question the premise of Watergate. So why did Nixon resign? It may be that he was trying to preserve the US constitution in which Freedon ofthe Press is fundamental. A self sacrifice. Bob Haldeman has never admitted to be gulity! He had sworn twice on his family bible to defend it. Read his "The Six Crisis."
The entire Watergate saga has become so ingrained in the national psyche that it is almost impossible to reverse. Toi be able to understand what truely happened, one has to start with an open and enquiring mind. and answers to the following questions has to be furnished:
1. Why were the raiders arrested at their THIRD attempt?
2. Why did the dollar notes found on the arrested have consecutive serial numbers pointing to the White House?
3. Why wa Howard Hunt's details in the address books of TWO of the arrested Cubans?
4. Was Watergate a setup with such bizarre break-ins by professional ex-CIA operatives?
5. What did the juror on the grand jury tell Carl Bernstein?
6. Why are certain aspects of the arrests still kept as a secret from the US public?
Read Watergate - The Political Assassination by a non Nixon supporter to see if there is ny merit in the possibility of an alternate interpretation.