Wolf a journalist<\/a>? He video’d a protest and posted it, then got busted. Sure, why not.<\/p>\n* * *<\/p>\n
Don Imus may not be a writer or journalist, but many commentators have been guests on his program. Imus has been popular in part because of his outrageousness. Borderline humor expands and contracts every so often, in what is acceptable or even funny. It’s a shtick, and any broadcast personality, from caustic Howard Stern to sweet Arthur Godfrey (on the air, that is), were hired and fired throughout their careers. It’s in the job description. Writers have been publishing their thoughts about Imus far out of proportion to his importance or that of his most recent racist remark. How few million listen to Imus on CBS radio and how few million see Imus on MSNBC.<\/p>\n
I mean, outside of New York and D.C.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
A writer for CBS anchor Katie Couric uses a Jeff Zaslow column from The Wall Street Journal.<\/em> Broadcast takes copy from print all the time. No one should complain here, any more than radio talents about getting fired. The borrowing is nearing its century mark. The horse left the barn, the horse and generations of foals have lived and died, and high wind took out the rotting, vacant barn in 1974.<\/p>\nRip-and-read is an accepted practice. But how many seconds would it take for Katie’s kommentary to state, “according to a piece in The Wall Street Journal<\/em>.” That’s sufficient attribution for a brief broadcast\/blog anecdote. Timed, the clause takes two seconds.<\/p>\n* * *<\/p>\n
Do we let Imus in the writers’ tent, the journalists’ tent? How about Couric as well as her staff? Big tents are better, as they set current events in a circus atmosphere, which most of them deserve.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Dinitia Smith of The New York Times<\/em> is not a journalist. How could he write in his obituary of my first literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, “Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were … prone to one-sentence paragraphs.”<\/p>\nWe cut that paragraph from our paper for being factually incorrect. The only punctuation Vonnegut eschewed was the semi-colon, I read in an interview. I said to fellow copy editors that Vonnegut wrote like Hemingway, just in the sense of preferring direct, usually short sentences. Both spent part of their early adulthood in Midwestern urban newsrooms, which shows in their later writing.<\/p>\n
Smith says Vonnegut mixed fiction and autobiography, used exclamation points and italics. That’s neither unique nor wrong in today’s “narrative journalism” shtick. You can’t even claim that Vonnegut was ahead of his time on any of these counts. Norman Mailer comes to mind. (I’m a big-tentist: C’mon back, Dinitia.)<\/p>\n
Kurt was of his time. He expressed his time! What better praise can be given to an artist? Uneven? Heck, yeah!<\/em><\/p>\nLet’s bring Kurt into the journalists’ tent. 1969’s Slaughterhouse 5<\/em> after all was dominated by his eye-witness account of the Allied firebombing of Dresden 25 years earlier. OK, small-tentists, Kurt was a P.O.W. in the basement of the slaughterhouse and did not directly witness the bombs, which would have killed him. You probably don’t believe planet Tralfamadore exists, either. “So it goes.”<\/p>\n-30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Can a fortnight’s worth of writer topics fit together, and should they? Why, it depends on the size of your tent. Preferrers of small tents closely define their parameters. A writer must have New York-based publications to his credit. A journalist must be a full-time employee of a news factory. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course-of-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":88,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2004\/07\/nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-palahniuk\/","url_meta":{"origin":303,"position":0},"title":"Nyuk nyuk nyuk Palahniuk","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock July 5-6, 2004 July 6, 2004. Addendum to the 7\/5 Brick below: I downloaded the Palahniuk interview and listened to it twice. The NPR reporter did open her piece with a warning that the writer spoke provocatively and that some comments were edited out. Sorry\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5200,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2015\/08\/revisiting-postal-katrina-mae-west\/","url_meta":{"origin":303,"position":1},"title":"Revisiting ‘Postal,’ Katrina, Mae West","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"August 29, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Shy of a Load Let's not go postal, it's not a trend, according to the Poynter Institute on Aug. 26-27 in \"Before Today, 8 Journalists Have Been Murdered While on Assignment, at Work or for Their Work in the U.S. Since 1992.\" Writer Kristen Hare states: \"The on-air shooting deaths\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Shy of a Load"","block_context":{"text":"Shy of a Load","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/items\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"0512 brick logo","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/Solebrick-logo-2-300x300.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":132,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/07\/a-block-is-not-a-brick\/","url_meta":{"origin":303,"position":2},"title":"A block is not a brick","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 13, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, July 13, 2005. So what I do is just admit my fear. Look at this gap in time: days since the last Brick, feels like a month. Why? A lack of topics as well as a lack of opinions? No. It was the feeling\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Technical Difficulties"","block_context":{"text":"Technical Difficulties","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/briefs\/technical-difficulties\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":273,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/02\/good-words-to-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":303,"position":3},"title":"“Good Words to You”","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"February 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Fishing around for a headline to this, I remembered the above. It's the outcue for the audio column on NPR's Morning Edition that the late poet John Ciardi used to do in the early to mid-1980s. He considered origins, histories and roots of words in them. Posthumously, in 1987, Harper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":766,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/12\/friendly-fire\/","url_meta":{"origin":303,"position":4},"title":"Friendly Fire","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"December 27, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The shoe bomber, that is the shoe thrower, launched his attack 13 days ago, Dec. 14, and the story still has news legs. It should be ignored but the \"attention must be paid\" (A. Miller), then it might go away. The success of the attack by Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6906,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2020\/12\/arse-recipes\/","url_meta":{"origin":303,"position":5},"title":"Arse Recipes: Why Kook Cooks Writes","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"December 28, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Or: Why Kook Cooks Is Written In recent years, more Bricks have been about food. Why? Brick started in 2003 as a continuation of themes of columns I'd written for newspapers \u2014 contemporary life, personal reflections, and local and national issues \u2014 oh, let's call the last two politics. These\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Kook Cooks"","block_context":{"text":"Kook Cooks","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/kook-cooks\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Illustration of alphabetized dividers for index cards, from from \"A Textbook of Filing\" by James N. McCord, 1920","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/index-divider-cards-openclipart.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/index-divider-cards-openclipart.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/index-divider-cards-openclipart.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/index-divider-cards-openclipart.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/index-divider-cards-openclipart.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/index-divider-cards-openclipart.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}