Illustration by Joshua
Barlow
|
We founded this
magazine 30 years ago as part of a revolution in
journalism. The new journalism sought to cloak bare-bones
objective reporting with novelistic flesh. The
Monthly also tried to add explicit analysis and a
search for solutions to replace what was sometimes a
concealed or unconscious bias underlying the old
objectivity. By the 1990s, however, the revolution had been
perverted: even lead stories in newspapers and the network
news shows were being loaded with the reporter's point of
view or his desire to appear clever. This problem concerned
us enough to make it the feature of our 30th anniversary
issue. We asked former Monthly editor Jonathan Alter
to review the book "Just the Facts", which traces the
origins of "objective" reporting. And we asked our
contributing editors and alumni for their opinions on the
obligations of journalists to their readers.
~The
Editors
NEXT-->
CONTRIBUTORS:
Jonathan
Alter -- Gregg
Easterbrook -- James
Fallows -- David
Ignatius -- Michael
Kinsley -- Susannah
Lessard -- Art
Levine -- Matthew
Miller -- Timothy
Noah -- Joseph
Nocera -- Walter
Shapiro -- Scott
Schuger
|
