Customer Reviews

Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print

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This book is an anthology of articles that have been rejected by print media but the article by Robert Fisk gives examples of self censorship in TV media too. Fisk's article "Remember 'the Whys' was killed by Harper's magazine in 2002. It dealt with Israel. Mike Sager's article was also killed and it was about the "gripping account of life in a squalid Palestinian refugee camp." The Washington Post Magazine killed that article, called "Travels With Bassem", in 1988. The editor of this book said in an interview, "I realized that I had a book after I read 'Travels With Bassem,' a remarkable piece by Mike Sager about living in a Palestinian refugee camp during the first Intifada."

I read very few non-fiction books, and most of them are histories. I DO read journalism every day. But this is a first in that I've just finished reading and am now reviewing an entire BOOK comprised solely of journalism---ahem, it was a Christmas gift.

And, so, what do I think about this book about killed (or "spiked" seems to be the operative word in Journalese, at least in this book) pieces of journalism? I feel grateful to the gods, or Fate, or genes or whatever powers that may be or may not be that I never felt compelled to go into journalism. Even Joe Conason, whose blurb for the book tops the front cover, says in his review for Salon that the overall effect of the book is one of depression. True, literary endeavours, with which I'm more familiar, can be just as cruel and cutthroat when it comes to publication, but this is to be expected. In the arts, it's either feast or famine - Mostly famine- One ends up working for the sake of art itself. If it ends up finding grace with some publisher or agent, it's a nice lagniappe. If not, not. But journalists are in it to have their work published, posthaste. It's not so much that these pieces were killed that irks one (although, of course, that plays a part), it's the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature of the day in and day out life of a journalist that I found monumentally depressing.

Well, a few comments and I'm done: The most robust article (unsurprisingly) is P.J. O'Rourke's "A Ramble Through Lebanon," written in O'Rourke's uncanny, inimitable style combining erudition with a keen eye and ear for the absurdities of life. The "spike" was made by Tina Brown, who ends up being the "killer" of many of these pieces, who simply wrote, "You can't make fun of people dying." What a blockhead! It's clear that Ms. Tina Brown has no sense of nuance or irony or she would have seen that this is exactly NOT what O'Rourke is doing here. I consider myself lucky that I had never even heard of her before reading this book.

Award for eccentricity: Tad Friend's article "Jesus Worms" on an engaging few days spent with eccentric (and histrionic) Brit travel writer Redmond O'Hanlon. I've read O'Hanlon's works and fancy them, regardless of the obvious fact that you have to take them with more than a few pinches of salt. He belongs to that "Dr. Livingston I presume" tradition of intrepid, eccentric Brits losing themselves in various hearts of darkness to cheerfully emerge and write memoirs that encourage people like Noel Coward to write pieces like "Mad dogs and Englishmen".-The only thoroughly enjoyable piece of the lot.

Finally easily the finest piece of reportage here, splendidly well-written and well-documented, is John Entine's "The Stranger-Than-Truth Story of The Body Shop." This piece clearly deserves some sort of award. I'm so out of touch with this whole journalistic enterprise that I don't know what sorts of awards are bestowed on pieces like this one. But whatever they are, this piece is worth the entire book. I'd never heard of The Body Shop either. But I have no compunction now in saying that some public-spirited citizen should have taken an acetylene torch to these stores long ago. - To restate, this superb writing and investigation all for nought make it also one of the most depressing stories of the bunch.

That's it. The book was well worth the read. But I'm plunging back into literary fiction tomorrow.

I have not finished reading all the articles in "Killed..." because it's that kind of book; some you'll read and some you won't. It certainly was worth the price and if it weren't for the overly stimulated front cover, it's a good one to have lying around.

What is unfortunate for some of the articles is that there is often a shelf-life to humor. And what was "too hot to print" may really be past its prime.

But there are some real gems. I loved Erik Hedegaards piece on Mellencamp's battle with smoking. A rather incomplete ending, but the article illustrates how journalists thrive on taking advantage of the weak and famous.

What I found most interesting about the articles I read, was not that they were necessarily "Great Journalism or Too Hot to Print," but that they illustrate how advertisers dictate content. Any medium that is primarily subsidized by advertising risks rejection.

I don't know if I'd consider this book as "ground-breaking" as the back cover suggests, but there are lots of good pieces that should interest all sorts of readers.

On the surface of it, Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print is a good idea. You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at what it isn't allowed to read, but who made David Wallis God?

The fact that most national and international magazines are owned by corporations which have agendas of their own is true, and very possibly damaging to the objectivity of the editorial policy of the publications so owned, but who made David Wallis an objective observer all of a sudden?

Who says any writing is, or even can be, objective? Who annointed David Wallis to determine what is great journalism anyway? What's to say his selection process is any less biased by the forces that have made him than the editor who initially rejected the pieces he features in his book?

I think that David Wallis has done the world a service by pointing out some of these overlooked articles, but there is a kind of autocracy in his approach to this subject which he is unwilling to admit.

After a recent lecture, I asked Mr. Wallis if he honestly thought press censorship today is actually worse than when the robber barron William Randolph Hearst used his iron hand to crush reporters who did not agree with him. Wallis just reiterated that grave offenses had been committed today.

In the 1830s and 40s in America you'd buy the newspaper you wanted according to what spin you wanted on your news. It may be a little more subtle now, but people will be people and there's no avoiding that. Virtually all publications have a known bias, and we all manage to find the point of view we want to read in our magazines and newspapers. We know the rules.

In this book, David Wallis seems to be making a plea for something that is not humanly possible, and he fails to understand that he is human too.

I guess I just wish this book were a little more self-aware.