Reviews for Hugh Byas, a British Editor Who Became a Leading Expert on Japan Between the First and Second World Wars: A Biographical History in Newspaper Journalism

The average rating for Hugh Byas, a British Editor Who Became a Leading Expert on Japan Between the First and Second World Wars: A Biographical History in Newspaper Journalism based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-01-19 00:00:00 Paul Dold Marcus Daniel is on a mission to rehabilitate (or at least better situate) a group of five major newspaper editors from the America of the 1790s from the dismissive attitudes of several generations of historians who bought too much in to that whole press objectivity thing. But here's the cool thing: he's doing it in such a way that us general interest readers can follow along just fine. And he's doing it at a time when a lot of the same handwringing that was going on back then is going on now. Now before I go any further let me state right out that this book would bore many people to if not tears at least reddened, watery eyes. But I really enjoyed it. What I liked most about Scandal and Civility is that Daniel takes his six journalists -- Benjamin Franklin Bache, William Cobbett, Philip Freneau, John Fenno William Duane and Noah Webster -- and sets up their entry in to the field, moves in to their back story and then digs in to their role in the journalism and political battles of the 1790s. The result is that the deeper in to the book you get, the better you understand the issues they were writing about and the more you can contextualize their editorial stances, political ties, reactions to and participation in the discourse of scandal and scurrility, etc. And in the end, Daniel makes his point, I think. That is: partisan journalism wasn't just some ridiculous sideshow, but rather was an important part of the political debates of the time, of the education of both politicians and voters, and of the (still debated) meaning of a free society with a free press. In the end, even one doesn't fully like each of the six men, one at least has an understanding of and perhaps even some admiration of them for sticking to their guns in the face of opposition (including politically-motivated legal action). It also totally explodes the whole model of objective journalism preached (if not actually practiced) for so many years in America. Yeah, these guys could be totally over the top, but at least they weren't trying to cloak their partisanship. As Daniel writes near the end of the book: "They lived in a time of political passion and intense partisan conflict. Like our own. And it was from this conflict that their own great acts of collective political creativity emerged: the Declaration of Independence, the founding of the American Republic, the establishment of the Constitution, and the federal government, the Bill of Rights, the creation of the Supreme Court, and the federal judiciary, and the invention of new institutions to express and organize public opinion, including political parties and a free press. Without such conflict, the political triumphs of the early Republic would have been impossible and even unimaginable. "... As Americans today grapple with the problem of creating a democratic and publicly accountable media, they need to embrace political conflict and difference, the clash of divergent ideological perspectives, and the problems of political interpretation they impose on us all, not yearn for a simpler time when the press was 'objective,' when all honest, civic-minded people agreed, and when political differences could be resolved by the exercise of impartial rationality. Such a time never existed, and certainly it did not exist in the early American Republic." Understandably, the passage of time and the writing of history puts a patina over certain epochs. Daniel argues that the Republic succeeded in part because of the partisan writing of national newspapers not in spite of it. The Founding Fathers were not noble creatures who had to rise above the journalistic hackery of the time in order to form the great institutions that have stood the test of time -- they were in the mix (sometimes financially even, very much part of that ferment of debate and political maneuvering. Here's the thing though: this book is an important corrective. But as one gets to know these six men, one realizes that even with all the scandal, they brought with them a certain learning and passion for issues. Sure, there was a lot about character and personality. But one wonders how these six outcasts would feel about the emphasis on celebrity (even in political circles) today.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-08 00:00:00 Elson Ros This sucked but it wasn't because of the author, it was the subject. F*ck Horace Greeley