A couple weeks ago I read a
commentary by Charles Madigan of the Chicago Tribune. I
wrote a responce in this blog and sent the link to him. He wrote back. He was very nice. He evidently recieved quite a bit of "Feedback". So I am publishing below his whole response to this. I must confess, I dearly love this kind of give and take. I don't want to argue, I just want to explore ideas. He does that well and his examples are very well done. Thanks Chas.
Handling discourse without the attitudePublished July 19, 2005
Last week we strove to clarify the problem between journalism and conservatives by strongly suggesting a lot of critics just can't handle bad news.
In the wake of way too many e-mails rife with anatomical references, I have decided to revisit the subject by presenting a journalism lesson on the difference between news and commentary.
The earliest archives and oral histories tell us that journalism has its roots in primitive time when a remarkable bird called the foo, tired of predators, decided it should lay its huge eggs while in flight. This doomed the bird, of course, and created history's first aviation hazard. A man named Noog was the first victim, killed by a blow on the noggin from one of the foo's basketball-size eggs.
His friend rushed from the scene and encountered a whole collection of other primitives debating the wisdom of eating oysters, which were slimy, suspicious but, somehow, enticing.
Waving his arms in the air, he shouted, "Noog, is dead!"
A primitive stepped away from the oyster debate.
"What do you mean Noog is dead? Who is Noog? What killed him? When? Where? Why? Are there other Noogs? Aren't we all really Noogs? And you don't need a comma between "Noog" and "is."
Within an hour, word had spread.
In another gathering of primitives, a man whose mate had been stolen by Noog announced: "Frankly, I think it is good Noog is dead. He was liberal, hedonist scum and he should have died long ago. Foo eggs are good." Another stepped forward and said: "Noog did not deserve to die, especially not that way. No one deserves to die that way. Eggs are bad for us."
And there you have it in a nutshell, the births of three important journalism disciplines: news, editing and commentary all in the same place, along with the earliest debates about a subject that remains important to us today, whether eggs might be bad for your health.
It's hard to believe that all of journalism flowed from that ancient incident and, truth be known, it didn't.
I made it all up. The foo bird is a plagiarism, lifted from an old joke in which what falls from the sky is not an egg and the punch line plays with the cliche, "If the shoe fits, wear it."
I can suggest that this is the history of journalism here in this blessed space, which we call "op-ed," because other rules apply in the world of commentary.
News is and should be different.
Critics will never believe it, but there is a delightful simplicity to much of news. Something happens today that didn't happen yesterday, you work it out as best you can and then write a clear, accurate account of it. That is the newspaper model. What you think about it doesn't matter. How you feel in most cases doesn't matter either. It's much more craft than art and I, for one, always loved it.
The problem is that news has become a very challenging subject over the last few decades and its presentation has changed.
Newspapers, television outlets, the Internet, magazines, they are all involved in a life-and-death war over market share. Everyone wants to become more interesting, more provocative, more enticing, as part of that process, and that has warped the way news is presented in many cases.
Political news, for example, is full of nuance, suggestion and, in some cases, manipulation, either on the part of the writer or on the part of the politicians creating the story. The latest arrival on the political writing scene is attitude. Newspapers haven't caught up with it yet, but it is the defining element on the Internet. You need a loud, aggressive voice there that people can either love or hate. And either response is just as valuable.
These are interesting developments on a political landscape on which the words "left" and "right" have no clear meaning, along with their polysyllabic, snootier descriptions, "liberal" and "conservative." They have mutated from actual descriptive words to nothing more than slanders people glue on one another when they hear, see or read what they don't like. And now they are defining criticism of the media. "Liberal" or "right wing" are easy labels to slap on unpleasant commentary or news.
But here's the truth of it. Most of journalism never comes near the world of politics and its hyperboles. Most of journalism is about mundane, local, important events such as zoning battles and tax rates and crime and weather. Most of journalism is still, "Noog, is dead."
As for the part that isn't news, the commentary part, I would suggest the more passionate the voice, no matter what the political slant, the better. That is what makes talk radio so compelling, the clarity of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, with whom I agree on just about, oh, Nothing! But I really value the way they do their work because it works so well for their listeners.
As for the rest of it, I'm still not sure about eggs, although I do, indeed, love them, and oysters always have been just fine whenever you can get them.
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Charles M. Madigan is the editor of Perspective and writes The Rambling Gleaner at chicagotribune.com/gleaner. E-mail: cmadigan@tribune.com
