Tom Brokaw writes for the WSJ:
1. "The Boys on the Bus" by Timothy Crouse (Random House, 1973).
The five books I’ve chosen to write about reflect my own attitudes about the craft I’ve practiced for 45 years now. They’re a mix of the triumphs of journalism, the absurdities, the vanities and the importance of a free press in any society. For its revelations in the absurdities and vanities category, "The Boys on the Bus" has yet to be equaled. Timothy Crouse’s breakthrough book about the press pack covering the 1972 presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and George McGovern was the journalistic equivalent of Jim Bouton’s locker-room view of major league baseball in "Ball Four," published two years earlier. Crouse punctured reporters’ big egos and stripped away the self-righteous cover of objectivity. He also skewered the "womblike conditions" of pack journalism–operating, in this case, from the blinkered perspective of life on campaign planes and buses, in airport press conferences and at restaurants in the company of spin doctors.
2. "All the President’s Men" by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Simon & Schuster, 1974).
Recently I attended a Washington dinner honoring, among others, a brave young journalist from Burma who told the audience that her determination to become a reporter began when she read about Watergate. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, backed by Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, were of course the reporters who drove the story of the Watergate burglary engineered by the Nixon White House in 1972. Even though we know how it turns out, "All the President’s Men" is a suspenseful crime story in the tradition of Dashiel Hammett or Elmore Leonard. More important, it is a timeless textbook on the value of sheer doggedness to investigative reporting.
3. "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown, 1938).
"Scoop" is Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious take on a mythical British press lord; his tabloid, the Daily Beast; and the fortunes of a nature writer, William Boot, who is mistakenly sent to East Africa as a war correspondent in the 1930s. It’s all here–the pomposity and boorishness of publishers, the devious ways of preening, world-weary reporters, the wild improbability of many dispatches from the front. Whenever I reread "Scoop," I find myself cringing, laughing out loud and cheering on the hapless Boot. I try to keep him in mind whenever I step off a plane in, say, Somalia, Iraq or Afghanistan.
4. "Murrow" by A.M. Sperber (Freundlich, 1986).
Ann Sperber’s voluminous biography of Edward R. Murrow, the George Washington of broadcast journalism, is a richly detailed, if sometimes dry, study of how Murrow became a demigod not only in journalism but also in America’s wider culture. His Quaker, abolitionist ancestors in North Carolina, his growing-up years in Washington state, his side-door entry to journalism (he was first an interview-wrangling "director of talks" for CBS), his heroic reporting from London during the Blitz, and his ability through language and demeanor to come into your living room as a wise and caring friend: that was the full-dress Murrow whom I worshipped as a young man. Later, I had reservations about his theatrical style–the cigarette as prop, the ascot, the "Person to Person" celebrity-interview infotainment show he hosted. But Sperber’s book is a chronicle of a great man and how he came to be a national treasure.
5. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (Viking, 1985).
Neil Postman’s polemic is at once provocative, exaggerated, insightful, myopic and instructive. Instructive because Postman does raise appropriate warning flags about relying wholly on television as a medium for serious inquiry about ideas. Myopic because he fails to acknowledge television’s role as a catalyst for learning. Favorable attention for a book on television spurs many more sales than a newspaper’s positive review. He is right, however, when he observes that TV’s entertainment values can smother rational discourse if the two are not kept in balance. As for his claim that the medium’s "form excludes content," it is an exaggerated judgment. Take the subject of global climate change. Scientific arguments are of course essential to making the case, but it would be hard to deny how much the images of shrinking ice caps, rising sea levels and parched landscapes reinforce the arguments. Nonetheless, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," a cautionary tale, should be required reading for all broadcast journalists–and perhaps for their viewers as well.
