new journalism WAS Re: Wolfe

[David Morris]

>Doug Millison writes:
> >
> > The idea that journalism is somehow supposed to present "objective 
>truth" represents at best a naive understanding of what journalists 
>actually do; usually this concept is used as a club by people who don't 
>like what they read in the newspapers (or hear on broadcast news, etc.) and 
>who seek to discredit one journalist (or publication) at the expense of 
>another.

http://www.videomcluhan.com/lectures.htm

The old journalism used to try to give an objective picture of a situation 
by giving the pro and the con. Objective journalism meant giving both sides 
at once. It was strangely assumed that there were two sides to every face. 
It never occurred to them there might be 40 sides, or a thousand sides. No. 
Two sides: pro and con. And suddenly this form of journalism disappeared and 
the new journalism popped in, represented by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer 
and many others, Tom Wolfe. The new journalism doesn't give you any side. It 
just immerses you in the feeling of the whole situation. So it just plunges 
you into the feeling of being at the convention, or being at the fire, being 
somewhere. And it began with that famous phrase: Something funny happened on 
the way to the Forum. A happening is not a point of view. A happening is all 
sides at once and everybody involved in it. Mardi Gras is a happening. You 
cannot have objective journalism about Mardi Gras. You just have to immerse. 
Well, Mailer was one of the authors of the new journalism of immersion 
without any point of view. No objectivity, just subjectivity, and he 
subheaded his Armies of the Night: fiction as history, history as fiction. 
So the new journalism, quite frankly, regards itself as a form of fiction, 
not objectivity at all.
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