Insider language
I was just reading an essay by Joan Didion, cryptically titled ‘Insider Baseball’ and even though it was written at a time when she was following the Dukakis-Bush election its points are worth considering. Perhaps that’s the point about really good writing. It stays relevent.
It is a piece in which Didion shows us how (during elections especially) the media tend to develop their own language of hype, which they certainly don’t believe themselves, as they try to sell us on their stories. In fact it shows the media acting just like any other bunch of dishonest used car salespeople (and that’s an insult to my friends in the motor trade, I realize, many of whom are decidedly honest). In the end their journalistic desire to make a ’situation’ out of a non-situation does sell papers, but at the cost of misleading the public shamelessly. And that’s what I can’t forgive.
If you can find it, give it a good look. The version I read was in “Ten on Ten” (Bedford St. Martin’s) edited by my friend Bob Atwan. If he hadn’t collected that essay I’d probably never have bothered to look at it. But he did, and so I read it, and became wiser.
Which brings me to my second point: In a world of way too much print, so much of which is misleading, corrosive garbage, we need those who can sort out what is good for us to consider, and who do so with intelligence, integrity, and good humor. Hats off to Bob, says I.
Oh, and the ‘Insider Baseball’ of the title? It refers to the time that Dukakis was filmed throwing a baseball to various members of his staff after his campaign jet had landed in Texas. For twenty minutes in heat way above the 100 degree mark he threw a baseball around. This had been specifically requested by the press, who wanted to be able to show him as ‘a regular guy’, and who then proceeded to take their manufactured incident and turn it into ‘news’ about the former Governor’s character, showing ‘the real man’ behind the supposedly spontaneous incident.
If that’s not dishonest, then what is?
A free press is one thing. This is something else. And just for the record, yes, I did vote for Dukakis.
