Book Review : Messengers Under the Microscope

A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite by Mitchell Stephens (Viking: $24.95; 401 pages, illustrated)

“We have become a country of news junkies,” one celebrated White House correspondent has quipped. The metaphor is accurate enough, but we could go even further--journalism is more nearly a cult with its own myths, its own rituals, and a priesthood of anchors and correspondents and commentators. Even so, as Mitchell Stephens points out in “A History of News,” the phenomenon is nothing new: “A master-passion is the love of news,” wrote an 18th-Century English poet, “Not music so commands, nor so the muse.”

Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, justly bemoans our ignorance of the history of journalism--an affliction that extends even to those who proclaim themselves to be experts: “Sometimes journalism critics seem like drama critics who have never read Shakespeare or Sophocles.” His book is an appropriate remedy--Stephens has produced a study of the concept of “news” from prehistoric times to our own, and the book succeeds as thoroughly accessible about the history, anthropology, economics, psychology and practical techniques of journalism.

Ancient Forerunners

No aspect of contemporary journalism, Stephens insists, is without a precursor in the near or distant past. The ancient forerunners of today’s war correspondents or network anchors, Stephens points out, were the bards and balladeers, the town criers and the royal couriers, even the gossips and “busybodies” of what he calls “oral” societies.

The newspaper evolved from the wall posters of ancient Rome (and ancient China, he notes); the wire services began as the private news services of merchants and bankers. Even the electronic media are not genuinely revolutionary: “News would grow substantially more plentiful, timely and reliable,” he muses rhetorically, “but would the nature of news be significantly ‘improved’ (or corrupted, for that matter) by the telephone, radio or television?”

Stephens coolly debunks what Balzac called “the veneration of the fact” and the corresponding ideal of perfect impartiality. “The impossibility of journalistic objectivity has not prevented it from being elevated to the status of a commandment,” he writes. “As they tell their stories, journalists are encumbered with belief systems, social positions, workaday routines and professional obligations--all of which affect their selection and presentation of facts.”

The pretense of objectivity, Stephens insists, is not only “something of a sham” but has also resulted in the “defanging” of journalists who might otherwise “unsheathe their points of view and more vigorously prod and puncture.”

I was surprised to discover that Stephens gamely comes to the defense of what passes for journalism on television, which is the briefest and the weakest subject in “A History of News.” He actually praises television news for its blandness: “Television journalists rarely resort to the overheated prose . . . of the tabloid journalist.” To those who point out that television news is superficial, he rejoins that “journalists, whatever their medium, tend to swim close to the surface.”

And, as a rebuttal to those of us who believe that television has hopelessly debased and corrupted the political dialogue in contemporary America, he concludes that “our impatience with television’s view of politics represents, in part, a longing for an era when the news regularly achieved the depth, impartiality and seriousness of the civics lesson--an era that never was.”

Above all, what Stephens emphasizes--and what most of us overlook in the technological razzle-dazzle of contemporary journalism--is our profound need for the shared information we call news.

“The news is more than a category of information or a form of entertainment,” he reminds us. “It is an awareness; it provides a kind of security.” And it is a universal need: “We do not follow news because of anything unique or idiosyncratic about our society. This obsession can only be explained by qualities we . . . and the rest of humankind share.”