The Quotable Financial Times
Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the news media — often without the love.
Being of that gentle generation that never witnessed the greatness of print news, I grew up with no innate reverence for the broadsheet. My generation did not see the Times, in clear invitation of great ire from the Nixon administration, publish the Pentagon Papers in ‘71. We had no Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to inspire in us a faith in print journalism which did not lie, did not distort, and did not cower in fear of repercussions from the powerful.
But we were there when Patricia Smith resigned from the Boston Globe in ‘98 after fabricating people in her ASNE award-winning columns, and when Stephen Glass lied in The New Republic the same year, Jay Forman in Slate in ‘01, and Christopher Newton in the Associated Press in ‘02. We were there for the Gropegate mess in the LA Times in ‘03, and when Reuters ran fraudulent photographs in 2006.
We were there for Jayson Blair’s shameful resignation from the Times for plagiarism and fabrication in ‘03. We were there when a month later, both the paper’s managing and executive editors resigned for their part in the matter, amidst what an internal committee discovered was “a series of management and operation breakdowns” and “a stunning lack of communication within the newsroom.”
Cable news did no better. Living in my home Croatia during the ‘91 war, I watched in disbelief as CNN — the purported beacon of on-air objectivity — ran segment after segment about the war that omitted key facts and distorted yet others, many at the hands of Christiane Amanpour who later faced various allegations of editorial bias. More recently, there was the ABC News election memo screwup in ‘04 and the incredible mess that CBS went through with Rathergate the same year.
It would be easy to say that my recollections are naturally biased towards recent events, that journalism always had its share of bad apples, and that it’s just business as usual. After all, lots of people remember at least the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke in 1980 and Walter Duranty in the Times some fifty years before then. But it’s also true that the rise of attention-deficit culture and the dizzying speedup of the news cycle greatly agitated the industry, increasing both the frequency and gravity of journalistic transgressions. And while there’s always a tendency to romanticize the days of old, to remember the Bernsteins and the Woodwards with a rosy nostalgia that’s half merited and half flight of fancy, it’s just as true that these folks are a vanishing kind. Where is my generation’s Bob Woodward? Where is our Walter Cronkite?
It is a sad reflection on the state of affairs when the most iconic newsman of my day is Jon Stewart, whose fake-but-not-really news show on a comedy television network was found in an Indiana University study to be just as substantive in its news coverage as mainstream news networks. “You’re on CNN,” Stewart charged during a visit to the political TV show Crossfire, “[and] the show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” Stewart attacked the hosts for being “partisan hacks” who are “doing theater, when [they] should be doing debate.” Mere months later, CNN’s chief executive decided to cancel the long-running show, citing agreement with Stewart’s sentiments.
So it’s 2008, and it’s getting increasingly hard to find a decent news source. No, I genuinely don’t care about what or whom celebrities are doing this week, or the seemingly endless stream of oddball “look at these strange people” personal interest stories littering the mainstream media. Where’s a man to find some great writing and whip-smart coverage of what’s going on in my country and the world?
I did a lot of exploration to answer the question for myself. As a result, a number of years ago I pared down my news intake to four basic sources: National Public Radio, the Financial Times, The Economist, and The New Yorker. None are without fault, but all are among the few remaining bastions of world-class journalism. And particularly dear to my heart, all four know from time to time not to take themselves too seriously.
I’ll spare you a dystopian prophecy of the death of print. Instead, I’ll share a few paragraphs from the last Financial Times Weekend magazine that, in between great articles on thorium-fuel nuclear generators and the CDO-inspired global credit crunch, gave me a good chuckle while I flew from Boston to München yesterday.
Writes Sue Norris, in “Winning smiles”:
The Times reported that the professor found that the British used the classic Duchenne [smile], “producing a more sincere, hard-to-fake smile”, “restrained, but dignified”. Americans, said the paper, tended to use the “far-less expressive ‘Pan-Am’ smile, named after the defunct airline’s gesture of welcome.”
Enter The New York Times Magazine, fighting. Keltner, it reported, found that Americans “simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford.” It noted how the English smile “can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face.”
Was this a fair fight? Not at all. The Americans cheated. They said that the eminent professor’s experiment had failed to control for bad British teeth.
Gerrit Wiesmann in “Can we get an M to go?”:
Because as un-American as [McDonald's new burger, "the M"] might want to be, the centralised mass-production it requires relies on the same processes that have been bringing us Big Macs for 40 years. In fact, you could argue that the M is only pretending to be European — a subterfuge that [McDonald's European Food Studio head Chris Young] and team happily worked on for two-and-a-half years. The M might be the product of barbarian taste, but it is less the symbol of an empire’s malaise than capitalism’s power to reinvent itself. Tired of the mass-produced? We’ll mass-produce the hand-made. Young, I should point out, is American.
John Griffiths in “Road test: The BMW X6″:
The exchange of stares — between those whose potential for future relationship could at most be confined to barbecuer and barbecuee — stretched from seconds to perhaps half a minute. Then, making a startling, explosive and echoing personal contribution to global warming, this hirsute chieftain of the ungulate race turned its rear on me and shambled away. As an expression of that much-vaunted disdain of the Highlander for the Sassenach, it had a bizarre eloquence all its own. …
Skye is also a dog walkers’ paradise. But be warned … if you really are hell-bent on buying one of these [BMW X6] beasts, you must do one of two things: teach Rover to use crampons and climbing ropes. Or swap him for a kangaroo.”
Lucy Pinney in “Try this: Aerial assault course”:
“Failure to follow the safety rules could lead to a serious — even fatal — injury.” As my 13-year-old-son, Nat, and I listened, I began to wish we hadn’t decided to “Go Ape!” after all. An aerial assault-course built into the tops of pine trees in Haldon Forest Park, Devon, Go Ape! opened in March. The course began with a safety talk and practice session so long and comprehensive that Nat attached his climbing karabinas to his nipples to break the tedium.
Mayhaps print isn’t doomed just yet.
