Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
The Psychopathology of Journalism
By Alexander Cockburn
Hope and Fear in Washington (The Early Seventies): The Story of the Washington Press Corps
by Barney Collier, with photographs by Maggi Castelloe
Dial, 254 pp., $8.95
We're Going to Make You a Star
by Sally Quinn
Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $7.95
The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam—The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker
by Phillip Knightley
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 465 pp., $12.95
The First Time
by Karl Fleming, by Anne Taylor Fleming
Simon and Schuster, 319 pp., $7.95
Early in his memoirs the great Victorian journalist Henri de Blowitz refers to his 'uncontrollable desire to get at the bottom of sensational reports.' He was trying to explain why he became a journalist, instead of remaining a sober businessman in Marseilles. This was the best he could do. In a later chapter he discusses what was in 'universal opinion, the greatest journalistic feat on record,…the publication, in the Times, of the Treaty of Berlin at the very hour it was being signed in Berlin.' Needless to say, de Blowitz was the person responsible for this triumph. But plainly he felt some puzzlement about exactly why it was such a feat.
Review, 3950 words
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