The Future of News

Looking back and looking forward on a mainstay of democracy

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

“How is journalism to be judged? How do we recognize distinguished journalism? Is it the wonderful writing?...Is journalism to be judged only by how accurate it is? Is it to be judged by its impartiality? Or by its partiality?”[i] At a time when these questions seem most salient, longtime journalist Lance Morrow poses them in his newest book The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism. With its vignettes, impressions, questions, and contemplations, his wistful, meandering memoir considers the institution at the heart of his long career. It is part biography, mainly of media magnate Henry Luce although other characters—editors, publishers, journalists, presidents, dignitaries, and celebrities—come and go, personal memoire, essay on 20^th Century American media, and epistemological discourse on truth, deceit, and myth.   

The Noise of Typewriters is at once penetrating and curiously languid in its pace. In writing his memoire, Morrow adopted a style similar to that of the 14^th century poet and Buddhist monk Kenko whose Essays in Idleness muses about topics commonplace and profound much like the more well-known European writer Michel de Montaigne did two centuries later. Kenko wrote down ideas as they entered his mind, a method called zuihitsu in Japanese, translated “follow the brush” for the stylus used in Japanese writing. 

Though I am nowhere near Morrow’s league as an essayist and thirty years his junior, I shall endeavor to do the same in this essay taking my own calligraphic excursions from Morrow’s insights.