In the run-up to the presidential elections, a new quarterly helps us understand who we think we are
REVIEWED BY JOHN STOEHR
The decade’s latest journalistic scandal involves a tiny community newspaper on the outskirts of Houston. The Montgomery County Bulletin was exposed nearly two weeks ago by a comprehensive article in Slate that showed the paper plagiarized hundreds of sources from around the world. The publisher has since sacked the writer, Mark Williams, and shuttered operations for good.
Though the Bulletin’s ethical lapses are hardly as scandalous or deleterious as Jayson Blair’s fabrications or Judith Miller’s gullibility, the hack publication does raise questions about the media that we in the media don’t often like to think about, or admit — that we obscure truth about as often as we reveal it.
In an insightful and curmudgeonly essay called “Mind Blindness and the Decline of Hitchhiking,” travel writer Paul Theroux asks us to reconsider our normal mode of information dispersal — that is, the get-it-first mentality.
“What we get — what we are still getting — is foreground, not background,” he writes of the media’s Iraq War coverage.
Theroux essay appears in a new quarterly that hopes to provide more background about the world and less foreground.
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