The Language of Journalism: Newspaper Culture [Hardcover]

Melvin J. Lasky (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0765800012 | ISBN-13: 978-0765800015 | Publication Date: September 19, 2000

"Hugely enjoyable--and valuable. I dropped everything else to read it. A treasure..."--Charles Wheeler, senior foreign correspondent, the BBC

The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magaines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity.

The third part emphasies the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan.

Melvin J. Lasky was the editor of Encounter in England from 1958 until its close in 1990. It was viewed as the most brilliant European periodical of its time. Lasky served as foreign correspondent for the New York Times and The Reporter, and has written for many of the intellectual journals from Partisan Review to Commentary. He is the author of The Hungarian Revolution, Africa for Beginners, Utopia and Revolution, On the Barricades, and Off, and Voices in a Revolution.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In the first of a three-volume collection, Lasky, former editor of the defunct British periodical Encounter, asserts that sloppy journalism is debasing language and that this, in turn, corrupts culture. To make his point, Lasky collects hundreds of passages from print journalism and then comments on trends in language misuse. Alas, his comments are frequently sneering, as when he claims that a Washington Post reporter is writing "like some aging coquette, trying hard to mime her old come-hither look." This tone of derision permeates the book and distracts from Lasky's argument, creating an atmosphere of contempt rather than instruction. The final chapter, which chronicles the rise of what Lasky calls "the f-word" in common journalistic use, will challenge anyone's assumption of what free speech means. It is unfortunate that getting there is so tiresome, with Lasky so intent on repeating what is bad and ugly in journalism that ultimately the language is diluted even more. Recommended only for academic libraries with extensive journalism collections. Cheryl Van Til, Kent Dist. Lib., Comstock Park, MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Melvin J. Lasky (1920-2004) was the editor of Encounter from 1958 until its close in 1990. Before that he was the editor of Der Monat in Berlin. He is the author of The Hungarian Revolution, Africa for Beginners, Utopia and Revolution, On the Barricades and Off,and Voices in a Revolution, the last three available from Transaction.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 453 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (September 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765800012
• ISBN-13: 978-0765800015
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,187,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unclassifiable masterpiece, akin to "Anatomy of Melancholy", March 17, 2001

By 

Marc Svetov (Berlin, Germany Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Language of Journalism: Newspaper Culture (Hardcover)

I helped read the proofs to the book. I would like to submit two quotes from two reviews of the volume in question. "Despite the textbook title, this is not a dry book....It is a fine journalist's fascinating view of late 20th-century public manners, satirically funny, cold-eyed, affectionate, tolerant and harsh by turns....Superb, fascinating, amusing...a splendid explosion of properly directed outrage....Anyone with the slightest interest in civilized discourse will find it a rich and refreshing account, not just of errors to avoid, but of how to recognize, laugh at, and dispose of the flatulent rubbish which assaults us from every journalistic side." Herb Greer, THE SPECTATOR (London), 20 January 2001. "...After all, Goethe knew how much harm newspapers and magazines can do when what is good in them gets swallowed up with the bad and the mediocre....He would have approved of the way that Lasky, in his new book, went about criticizing the mainstream press of New York, Washington, London, Paris (and Frankfurt)....Not 'systematically' or 'scientifically' but in a 'wild profusion of echo and allusion.' Readers are led from text to text, in clippings galore, featuring puns and punch-lines; and, once the happy reader salutes a point well made by doffing his hat, he'll never get to put it on again. And yet this is a deeply serious, urgently argued book....Who knows newspapers who only newspapers know? Melvin Lasky is at home in the world of journalism as well as in the literature of three cultures. Karl Kraus once undertook a similar task, but this work is different, lacking as it does any malevolent anger and having a touch of resignation about it. The relationship between the language of journalism and the general critique of our culture and civilization is drawn very loosely, to the great benefit of the general reader....Thus, we are offered an incomparable mix of wit and wisdom, of scholarship and attention to present-day troubles, of a twinkle of the eye and a furrowed brow of deep concern...and all in a sparkling and transparent prose, an almost wastefully rich vocabulary, and a spirit which keeps on tilting at the windmills of the Zeitgeist without losing its sense of humor....In their day Goethe, Heine and Nietzsche were indeed among those who were newspaper addicts. And Goethe suggested that he was saved -- from the bad, the mediocre, the self-destructiveness of newspapers always chasing the new -- by playing to great profit the pedantic reader. (Das mach mir denn zum reichen Gewinn/Dass ich getrost eine Pedante bin.)...." Wolfgang Schuller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 March 2001