Some folks are addicted to tobacco; some to heroin and cocaine. My addiction, I confess, is to books. Fortunately, Charlotte, my wife, shares my clearly incurable literary addiction.
Being a bookworm has many pluses—not the least of which is that we are never bored. Unlike most folks, we never begrudged the hours spent in doctors’ waiting rooms. They were simply welcome opportunities to crack open a book. Too bad our present GP is a model of efficiency!
There are downsides, however. When we moved from New York to Baltimore, for example, we had to hire an engineer to check our new house to make sure the walls and floors were capable bearing the weight of the thousands of books in our library.
Trouble is our collection has continued to grow. It doesn’t seem to matter how many books we give away—you simply can’t throw away old friends—the total never seems to decline.
To be fair, 25 years or so ago, Charlotte did try to put the brakes on. But it didn’t work terribly well. Somehow I just couldn’t stay away from bookshops.
“Where’s daddy?” she would ask the children.
“He’s out committing books again,” they would cynically reply. Recently we both acquired electronic books (Kindles or whatever they call them) in an effort to curb our ravaging of the rain forests. But somehow they don’t seem to have reduced the inflow of hard copies.
It is possible, at least in theory, to store thousands of volumes in one electronic book. But in practice, the blasted batteries tend to run out at the most inconvenient times, which does little to enhance the reading experience.
What’s more, buying books electronically just isn’t the same as
browsing the stacks in a real bookshop. By “real book shop” I don’t mean one of the big chains, the shelves of which increasingly stocked with volumes of politically correct mush.
Secondhand bookshops are the only ones that truly qualify as “real.” The eclectic collections of volumes lurking on their dusty shelves can keep the average bookworm enthralled for hours.
John Calvin brushes shoulders with St. Thomas Aquinas, Charlotte Bronte with Edgar Wallace, Jane Austin with Raymond Chandler, not to mention loonier musings of Marx, Mary Baker Eddy, and L Ron Hubbard.
Sadly, however, the Internet, Google, and the lamentable state of American liberal arts education are combining to make secondhand bookshops pretty well as extinct as the woolly mammoth.
Another regrettable consequence of the rise of the Internet, Google, and the like, is the decline of the research library. And it is not just that the research sections in our public libraries are rapidly disappearing. Student access to college and university libraries is also becoming increasingly restricted.
No less unfortunate, newspaper libraries (and, of course, those of magazines, as well as the TV and radio networks) have all but vanished. Why spend hours plowing through inky clippings when more or less the same thing can be accomplished in just a few minutes at a computer keyboard?
The trouble is that the Internet is a far less reliable tool than a good clippings library. For starters, the Internet material is generally unfiltered. The information dredged up from it has not been sifted and screened by an experienced news librarian.
It is, moreover, difficult, if not impossible, to find detailed information on the Internet about all but the most earth shattering events of recent history that took place prior to the Internet age. Thus the demise of the clippings library has resulted in a grievous loss of “institutional memory” in the nation’s newsrooms.
In short, the advent of the Internet has done a graver disservice to journalism. The unreliable nature of so much of the information on the Internet is evidenced in the print media’s ever expanding “Corrections” columns.
Worse, the demise of the clippings libraries and the rise of the Internet is arguably largely responsible for the recent irritating spate of plagiarism allegations in the nation’s newsrooms.
There is, in truth, something inherently ludicrous about the notion that the folks who write the news can actually commit plagiarism. After all, they are not writing “literature.” Rather their work’s primary purpose is to hold the advertisements apart. Its ultimate destination is to line the bottom of tomorrow’s parrot cages.
In the days before the Internet, much of the background material that followed the opening paragraphs of a news story was gleaned from the clippings library, affectionately known as the “morgue.” Today such background details are often the product of an Internet search.
In practice, no journalist claimed ownership of the “copy” in the clippings in the morgue. It was regarded as the property of the news organization. Some journalists—often egotists who imagined themselves more talented than the original writer—rewrote the material.
But more often than not “morgue jobs” tended to echo the original text verbatim, especially when the reporter or rewrite-man or woman was up against a deadline. And nobody bitched about it.
But, of course, back in those days reporters were usually former “copy boys and girls” who had learned their trade from the hardened professionals who had graduated to the newsroom and copy desk. Today they usually come direct from journalism school, brandishing journalism degrees.
To earlier generation of media moguls, a journalism degree would have seemed an odd concept—a bit like a degree in plumbing or janitorial services. Lord Beaverbrook, a legendary Anglo-Canadian newspaper tycoon, claimed the qualifications a journalist needed were “shorthand, typing, and a sort of low animal cunning.”
“By-lines” back then were earned—not wantonly distributed to every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in the newsroom. This, doubtless, explains why the news stories of yesteryear seem so crisp, concise, and easy to understand, unlike the column upon column of turgid, self-indulgent prose that so often passes for news today.
And, then, in those days, professional journalists—no matter their personal convictions—shrank from giving a political twist to their reportage. Politics, they believed, should properly be confined to the editorial and op-ed pages. Allowing it to seep into the news pages would debauch the product and lose readers.
Lamentably, that—along with shorthand and low animal cunning—is among the lessons conspicuously absent from the modern journalism school curriculum. GPHX✠
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