I.F. Stone, �The Haunted Fifties: 1953-1963�
Okay. The site that once housed two and a half years of reviews is now no more. In the meantime, there�s this site which was supposed to take over eventually, once I moved all the reviews over, which is a time-consuming project � more time than I really have.
Now that the other site is gone, I don�t have anyplace to put current reviews. Except here, which is where they would have ended up, eventually. So I�m going to start entering newer reviews as well as older ones, seeing how I have about 40 books waiting on my desk, which is about to collapse.
Hopefully, this will all make sense in the older archives. As of right now, it looks like it�s going to be quite the mish-mash. And on that note...
After seeing the slanted vision of Michael Moore in screen and print form (ED NOTE: See? It�s getting confusing already! What I�m referring to is back from June, 2004. Urrgh.), I wanted to get a perspective of a real journalist, one who both played by the rules and knew how to skew them for his own benefit. What better way to do that than to read columns from the legendary I.F Stone?
Stone was a pioneer journalist, a muckraker and proud of it. Although he was good enough to write for major daily newspapers, and did, he decided to start his own weekly in 1953. It had a small circulation at first, but expanded to over 70,000 subscribers when he stopped publishing in 1972.
Seventy thousand people. Think about that. Seventy thousand people subscribed to a small four-page newsletter, and not so they could get movie times or read the comics. Instead they wanted hard analysis of the political climate.
I know 70,000 people aren�t really all that much. San Jose alone has a population of over 926,000. But it�s still a hell of a lot of people, and I�d like to think that the majority of them actually read it. I doubt anything like that could happen today.
Still, in the same way that a slow news day can make for a dull episode of The Daily Show, a slow news week can make for a boring column by I.F. Stone.
But holy god, tonight�s episode of The Daily show was not one of those! Jon Stewart�s guest was CNN�s Wolf Blitzer, and Stewart laid into him, making the point of what is wrong with our mass media today. Now that the CIA has said they didn�t know what the hell they were talking about, Stewart�s point was that CNN, along with the rest of the media, should have been more skeptical from the get-go, rather than the rallying around the war that they did.
�So what was it?� he asked. �Was it groupthink with the networks or was it retardation?�
Blitzer�s excuses for CNN�s were lamer than the CIA�s. If you have high speed Internet, you should check Comedy Central over the next couple of days to see if they have clips from this interview. It usually takes a full day before these clips are put up. Personally, I think Stewart�s doing a better job of media analysis than all these media critics that I�ve been reading for all these years. And he�s a hell of a lot funnier.
Anyway, the last collection of writing from the I.F. Stone weekly that I read seemed to pick the best of the best, while this seems to be a complete collection from 1953 to 1963. There�s lots of misses here, enough misses for me to shout at the book to stop being so boring.
Stone�s long dead now, which is a shame. I�d love to see what he thought of our celebrity culture and eroding rights. Instead, I have to read every other journalist espouse how great he was, while not putting half the effort or drive that Stone had.
Except for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show team.
And that�s all I can think to say. Consider this a slow news day for yours truly.
Jesus Christ. Moving all this stuff around is going to be a lot harder than I thought.
