by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

The Lone Correspondent, Yesterday and Today

     The shortlists for this year’s PEN Literary Awards were just announced, and the five of us who are judges for the PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award settled on five works of general nonfiction from 2013 and 2014.   

The other five books on the longlist are strong in their ways – and their strengths support the case for the recent move toward longlists by PEN, the National Book Awards, and other prize-giving bodies.  

Clay Risen’s The Bill of the Century, for example, carries a passage that by-the-by and matter-of-factly serves to counter several cherished ideas – clichés – of writing about the media just now.

Here’s the passage:

The members of the United States Senate slogged their way to the Capitol on the morning of Monday, March 30, through a freak early spring blizzard that dropped five inches of snow on Washington.  In the midle of the storm, just outside the massive edifice, stood CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd.  A D.C. native and a rising star on CBS’s national news reporting staff, Mudd had made a name for himself covering such seminal events as the March on Washington and the Kennedy state funeral.  In early 1964, Fred Friendly, the new president of the network’s news division, had suggested that Mudd cover the filibuster in a one-man, flood-the-zone campaign, “not only on the evening news with Walter Cronkite but also on each of the network’s four other TV newscasts and on seven of the network’s hourly radio newscasts,” Mudd later recalled.  “My initial reaction was less than enthusiastic. It sounded more like a flagpole-sitting stunt.”

And here are the clichés it counters:

1- The notion that round-the-clock news coverage (the twenty-four-hour news cycle) is a thing of the present, whereas coverage in the past consisted of the evening news.  

2 - … that the lone reporter is a product of today’s diminished news staffs, whereas the halls of the Capitol used to be full of correspondents, many from each network.  

3 - … that TV news executives cooking up clever, gimmicky reporting (and being resented for it by their reporters) is a trait of our diminished media age, not of the past golden age characterized by the robust and conscientious CBS News and its anchorman, Walter Cronkite.  

4 - … and that “unseasonal” snowstorms are evidence of climate change: way back in 1964, it was snowing in Washington at the end of March.

Truly, media commentators who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it.  That Clay Risen knows the past is clear all the way through his book. 

The image is of Mudd outside the Capitol after the Kennedy assassination.