The New Journalism

Historical Context of New Journalism

The standard of 'objectivity' in journalism as we know it only ever achieved its popular commercial status because news wires depended on the legitimacy of their stories in order to sell them on to newspapers. The Associated Press would go out and gather information and found that the only way to make it profitable was to present it quite blandly, which gave individual news organisation a blank slate to put their own spin on it. To put any slant on it themselves would make it really hard to sell to a wholesale market.

The 'first' new journalism was the Yellow Press - so named because of the bidding war between two papers for a popular cartoon called 'The Yellow Boy'. The Yellow Press was the name given to the sensationalist tabloid style newspapers owned by Hearst and Pulitzer in the late 19^th century. They were often emblazoned with huge, emotive headlines with big striking pictures, which doesn't sound all that different to what you'd see at a newsagents today. 

The agenda was driven by exclusives, sob stories, dramatic stories, romance, shock and crime. Many people called this first wave of New Journalism the 'New Journalism without a soul' because all the stories were about sin, sex and violence.

The era in which Wolfe and Truman Capote did some of their best work was during a time of incredible change. America in the 60s and 70s was similar in this way to the day of Hearst and Pulitzer – there was a great deal of political and social upheaval, and fighting in foreign lands with ever more serious military threats. It was an extremely fearful and paranoid time; young people had the military draft for the Vietnam War constantly hanging over them and everybody else lived in fear of nuclear annihilation from the Red Threat.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was a massive blow to the collective consciousness of America and any hopes they had had riding on him. Kennedy was handsome, young and intelligent. He was essentially the President Obama of the day – someone symbolic of the hope for change. The war in Vietnam was a disaster and nobody really seemed to know why they were there. Muhammed Ali refused the conscript, and was quoted as saying: “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

Among all this darkness, people everywhere were understandably feeling rebellious. Protests were happening worldwide for civil rights, both for women and different ethnicities. The advent of the contraceptive pill, coupled with the publishing Reich's work which completely refuted Freud and said that sexual desires must be expressed freely without recrimination, led to the sexual revolution that carried on throughout the decades. There was a general anti-establishment feeling and this very much began to seep in to journalism, breaking the bland narrative style of non-tabloid newspapers of the day.

Most journalists at the time tended to report in a very formulaic way, but the New Journalism was an attempt to record things in a way that mirrored the language and the style of the events. It allowed the feeling of a place and time to bleed in to the copy, rather than keeping it at arm's length and doggedly attempting to stay whatever their interpretation of 'objective' was, in the face of telling a story.

It was then that journalists started to question whether relying on press releases, official statements from the establishment and bought-in stories could ever really be called objective, or a true reflection of the events. They began to experiment with interpretive reporting, focusing on setting, plot, sounds, feelings, direct quotes and images, while still making sure that the facts were straight.

This sort of journalism was much more personal, and expressed an individual's point of view as opposed to that of a faceless, seemingly all-knowing mass. It was due to this highly personal nature that it irritated a lot of people and was regarded as quite controversial.

New Journalism: Show and Tell, Gonzo Journalism

Think of a very old newspaper article or a BBC News Bulletin around the time when radio was cutting edge technology, and you'll think of a posh old man dryly reading out events in an 'impartial' tone. Tom Wolfe, a journalist who influences the way in which we tell a story even to this day, highlighted this and said that it was just plain wrong. Tom Wolfe literally write the book on 'The New Journalism.'

Tom Wolfe speaking at the White House

Tom reckoned that since we're only human, we're not infallible; but to adopt this boring, beige narrator voice is almost to claim that we're somehow omniscient in our coverage of a certain event. He asked why a situation shouldn't influence the reporter – if the reporter is reporting on something exciting, then why should it be a crime to affect an excited tone?

He was a great fan of Emile Zola, the famous French photojournalist, saying that Zola had “crowned himself as the first scientific novelist, a “naturalist” to use his term, studying the human fauna.”

It is this obsession with people and interesting details that made Tom Wolfe himself such an engaging writer. He would set the scene with small details that would help a reader to get a feel for what the reporter was seeing and feeling – details like the colour of the curtains, the smell in the air, what shoes somebody might be wearing.

He outlines how journalists and indeed all writers can improve their writing through these four points:

Scene by scene construction.

Never rely on second-hand information and sources. Writing is much easier if you go out and actually experience an event first hand to then relay back to the reader.

Dialogue.
Dialogue is important, therefore it should be recorded and subsequently reported as fully as possible. It sounds more real, engages the reader more, and gives the speaker character.

The third person.
Treat the people involved in an article as if they are protagonists in a novel. Ask them how they are feeling, why they are here and what they are thinking so that you can report without speculation what their motivation is and what they are thinking, but without it being 'in their voice.' It gives the reader a feeling of the people and the events involved and is much easier to digest than vanilla facts.

Status details.
The “social autopsy” - comment on what people have chosen to surround themselves with, how they treat their peers, their children, their subordinates; the colour of the curtains and what kind of shoes they are wearing as mentioned before. Allows to reader to get even more of a feel of the person's character.

So: whenever you read a newspaper article where the author spends a paragraph introducing the scene rather than launching straight in to the classic inverted pyramid of who, what and when, they have taken a leaf out of Tom's book. One article I read recently was describing the poor conditions of a council flat in Southampton. Although the journalist did include pictures of the damage and decay, the words he used gave the reader an even more succinct feeling of the bleak situation the protagonists (those unfortunate enough to live in that flat) found themselves in.

The 'new' journalist will, apparently, sacrifice objectivity in the face of subjective experience. Performance journalism is entertaining to watch; it's in the name. It includes people like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, the bloke who did 'Supersize Me'. The enjoyment of their programmes doesn't really stem from any controversial facts that they might uncover, but just from watching them going out and physically doing stuff, whether its Moore shouting at a building or Spurlock chundering Big Mac slurry all over the side of his car.

'Gonzo' journalism is a highly prized sort of performance journalism. Those attempting it have no pretence of objectivity: Gonzo favours personality and 'grit' over a polished end product. It has a fly-on-the-wall, authentic sort of quality to it.

Hunter S. Thompson penned the famous novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was also adapted in to a film. Thompson believed that journalists shouldn't separate themselves from the action, but actively participate in it. He wrote a book about the Hell's Angels after living and riding with them for over a year, a true Gonzo journalist in every sense of the word. He did copious amounts of drugs and wrote about drug use extensively in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Louis Theroux is a good example of an incredibly good modern gonzo journalist. If he decides to do something about Neo-Nazis, he will literally rock up to a Neo-Nazi camp and spend some time with them. People find other people fascinating, even if those people in question are hateable, and following them around with a camera gives a viewer an insight in to these people's minds that they won't be able to get anywhere else.

New journalism is, in essence, all about people. While doing a load of drugs and driving down the road at 90 miles per hour isn't really my cup of tea, I'm definitely a believer of at least one of the core tenets of New Journalism. That if you want to write about something convincingly, go out and experience it for yourself. How can anyone argue with that?

Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein

"Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, final chapter of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Wittgenstein is known as an Austrian philosopher, but he was first and foremost an engineer. He wasn't classically trained as a philosopher and because of this and his engineer background, he brought a fresh outlook on philosophy and logic; he was not not bound up in the same ideas which had been taught for the last thousand or so years.

Wittgenstein was a contemporary of Russell, Einstein and Freud. The philosophy espoused in the Tractatus was the foundation of the Vienna circle's beliefs - a collection of eminent minds who would meet regularly at the beginning of the 20th century and discuss their attitudes to philosophy, science and mathematics. They were all logical positivists, were great proponents of scientific method and analysis, and rejected metaphysics and the idea of perfect Platonic forms. Incidentally, this gave them some quite robotic ideas about 'beauty' and what made something beautiful; beauty to them was something that is perfectly designed to complete a certain function. If you were to look at that in terms of architecture- out go fancy houses, in come tower blocks.

It was Wittgenstein's training as an engineer could have influenced him to look upon human beings and elements of language as cogs in a machine. He initially thought (before coming pervasively pessimistic of his own life's work) that language could be taken apart and studied in this manner, rather than looking at language as an organic whole. One of his claims was that words in themselves have no intrinsic or therefore metaphysical worth but are merely parts of a 'language game' that all participants agree to play. He likens language to a game because the meaning behind an arbitrary collection of sounds or marks on paper must be agreed upon before they have any worth. A language game can be found at any level - where anyone meets and begins to speak about specific things, they are playing a language game. There is the language game of a certain religion (words like 'rapture' take on a very definite and emotive meaning where to a layperson it might not); the language games contained within actual games (vocabulary within card games, for example, like hit, stick, twist, flop that must be learned to effectively play the game); and so on.

Entire languages themselves are language games at a macro level as stated before - everyone who speaks English is implicitly agreeing to the rules of English; the grammar, the vocabulary, the idioms, etc.

Idioms (such as "It's raining cats and dogs") are another example of a language game - it is a meaningless and nonsensical expression which is given meaning simply by consensus.

Wittgenstein also held a belief that language 'infects' you, and influences you and everyone around you in ways that you don't even realise. Previously it was thought that language is just a transparent medium, a means to an end of purely expressing whatever was in your head. He also believed that reality was bonded by language: that you can't have a idea of something without some means of describing that idea, and that means is language.

George Orwell was clearly greatly influenced and inspired by the above when writing his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four - throughout the book, a dictatorship only known as the Party is constantly screwing around with language, working to transform Standard English in to the pared down 'Newspeak'. A government branch is even dedicated to the destruction of words, where in the aim is for every new edition of the dictionary to be thinner than the last; the idea is if you destroy dangerous or 'rebellious' words, then you destroy the ability to even conceive of rebellious thoughts, or 'thoughtcrime' as it is called in the book. This ties in exactly with what Wittgenstein was saying - if reality and language are inexorable, then you can mould the shape of reality by changing or restricting language.

Another key point in the book is where the Party issues a correction that only the main character Winston seems to notice - all of a sudden a speaker changes mid-sentence from saying 'Oceania is at war with Eurasia' to 'Oceania is at war with East Asia' and it goes on to say that it has always been at war with East Asia; so overwhelming is the propaganda and the complicit response of everyone around him at the rally that Winston begins to doubt his own sanity.

Verification Principle - Freddy Ayer

Freddy Ayer was a logical positivist. He was deeply inspired by the Vienna circle and their wholesale rejection of anything that was not, to put it simply, 'scientific.' He thought that anything that could not be verified in some way or another was meaningless; in his book Language, Truth and Logic he says religious discourse is meaningless as all religious language is non-verifiable quacking of the duck (see below.) To this end, even though he himself was not a religious man, he rejected the staunch atheist claim of 'There is no God' with the same vigour as a fanatical 'There is a God and he loves me' - both cannot possibly be verified, so both are nonsense.

The Verification Principle sorts statements out in to the following:

• Statements that can be verified as provably true (i.e. non-contradictory) e.g. The sky is blue
• Statements that can be verified as definitely false (contradictory) e.g. The sky is green
• Statements that cannot be verified (non-verifiable - gibberish, quacking of a duck) e.g. Tea is nice.

This last one is effectively nonsense, it's just people emoting. And incidentally that's what a journalist should be looking for in a good, solid quote. You don't want someone to write in to your show or newspaper and dispute the truth of a quote - 'Nope, that's not true, I can prove it with logic' - you just need a person's opinion for linguistic 'colour', as Frege might put it.

Ayer also said: "The method of verification IS the truth of a statement." This means that a statement is only as truthful as the means of testing it are reliable. Scientific method has been axiomically established as reliable, so therefore by studying the behaviour of light the sky can be shown to be verifiable blue, and the statement "The sky is blue" has meaning.

The Tractatus

Technically one of the 'shortest' books ever written, consisting of seven one-sentence chapters. Of course, (and we all saw this coming from a mile away when we were assigned to read this for a seminar) the book comes complete with a few thousand miles of footnotes to accompany the complex ideas expressed in each chapter. This has the overall effect of visually breaking each idea down to increasingly less complex bits of information in a sort of logic tree form - 'atoms of thought.'

Here, sans footnotes, is the Tractatus:

1. The world is everything that is the case.

2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

4. The thought is the significant proposition.

5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)

6. The general form of truth-function is: [, , N()]. This is the general form of proposition.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Atomic facts are those which cannot be broken down any further - atoms of thought, as mentioned above. These atoms are all chained together and each object illuminates another - the totality of all of these facts gives you reality, which is the idea expressed in 1. By studying a facts relation to other facts, you can determine which objects are actually true or not true. The existence of an atomic fact is a 'positive fact', and the non-existence is a 'negative fact.'

So essentially Wittgenstein is saying that the universe is made up of things which are true, and things which are not true. The 'negative facts' fill in logical gaps created by propositions such as 'There is nobody on the road.'

He also staunchly believes that you cannot conceive of an object without first relating its existence to other things.