Customer Reviews

The Language of Journalism: Newspaper Culture

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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