{"id":687,"date":"2007-11-06T01:45:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-06T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=687"},"modified":"2007-11-06T01:45:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-06T07:45:00","slug":"journalism-writing-as-a-call-to-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/11\/journalism-writing-as-a-call-to-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism: writing as a call to action"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>\u2019ve written before<\/a>, with no great originality, about the tension between the desire of journalists to inform and the competing desire of many of them to see that information produce action.<\/p>\n

Of course, it isn\u2019t just journalists who feel this tension. Ancient orators felt it too: <\/p>\n

When Aeschines spoke, they said, \u201cHow well he speaks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, \u201cLet us march against Philip.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That particular classical example comes from David Ogilvy<\/span>\u2019s Confessions of an Advertising Man<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ogilvy is offering advice on copy writing, a literary sub-genre whose highest purpose is to prompt a purchase.<\/p>\n

There ought to be a term for this often frustrated desire on the part of rhetoricians, reporters and writers to produce action. (The very fact that they choose a reflective medium, rather than action itself should, I suppose, contain a warning as to the chances of success.)<\/p>\n

Demosthenes Syndrome sounds a little pretentious. In business schools it would probably be labelled \u201caction-oriented communication.\u201d I always think of it as \u201cthat Barton Fink<\/span><\/a> feeling,\u201d in homage to one of my favourite movies.<\/p>\n

Now, Benjamin Schwarz, reviewing some Hollywood history in the Atlantic<\/a>, has reminded me why Barton Fink<\/span> is so appropriate, although Schwarz is rather dismissive of the idealistic screenwriters from the 1930s and early 1940s who laboured unsuccessfully to script calls to action.<\/p>\n

And oddly enough, in Hollywood, it was journalists not dramatists, who were able to step into the screen writing breach, setting aside political and artistic concerns to get the job done.
<\/p>\n

[Marc Norman in What Happens Next<\/span>] advances the familiar tale in which the moguls and \u201cthe system\u201d are cast as the heavies, constantly thwarting the artistic ambition and vision of the witty, politically engaged screenwriters who, lured by easy cash (MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS, Herman Mankiewicz famously wired Ben Hecht, one of his New York chums), took the Sante Fe Super Chief to the Coast.<\/p>\n

The studios, Norman insists, had devised \u201ca system to defeat caring,\u201d and \u201cthe moguls did not understand [the writers]; they knew of employees\u2019 pride, but pride in their attendance record, years of service, not the writer\u2019s pride that came from making something never before seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leaving aside the fact that it was the moguls, not the writers, who rightly experienced the pride of \u201cmaking something never before seen,\u201d the film historian Thomas G. Schatz offered a more convincing explanation of writers\u2019 discontent in The Genius of the System<\/span>:<\/p>\n

Few eastern writers made it as screenwriters. The most successful transition was made by journalists like Ben Hecht and Robert Benchley, who were accustomed to deadlines and copy editors and writing for an anonymous public that liked its information meted out in economical and dramatic doses \u2026 Journalists shared with veteran screenwriters a tendency to think of their work more as a craft than as an art. They rarely considered what they wrote their own, and put little stock in creative control \u2026 They understood the movie business\u2014and that it was a business.<\/span><\/p>\n

More important, what would the screenwriters have offered in place of the studio system\u2019s slick \u2014 and at their best, smart and chic \u2014 entertainments? Norman approvingly tells the story of one of those dreary, self-congratulatory, politically progressive evenings that Hollywood is all but genetically predisposed to organize. This one, in support of the Loyalist cause in Spain, featured the reading of \u201ca bitter antiwar play,\u201d after which Donald Ogden Stewart speechified, \u201cexhorting those there to make movies with meaning: \u2018Let us have no more million-dollar revolving staircases \u2026 but let us have some simple truths, as we have had tonight \u2026 on a bare stage, against nothing but a plain background.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The anger of the frustrated writers was always easy to understand, but why was everyone else in Hollywood so despondent? It has to do, I think, with movies\u2019 promise and their inevitable failure to reach it fully.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve written before, with no great originality, about the tension between the desire of journalists to inform and the competing desire of many of them to see that information produce action. Of course, it isn\u2019t just journalists who feel this tension. Ancient orators felt it too: When Aeschines spoke, they said, \u201cHow well he speaks.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}