The Movie-Based Legends of Journalism

M ovies are the through line for Lance Morrow’s The Noise of Typewriters (Encounter Books), a journalist’s memoir recalling that profession before it rotted. Because I grew up reading Morrow, a Time magazine essayist, during “the golden era of magazines,” I am fascinated by his recall of that phenomenon. But his book is also full of surprising movie references. That’s how Morrow organizes his thoughts on Time’s founder Henry Luce, examining Luce’s ethics, the profession’s ideals, its actual history — and its misleading mythology.

Morrow’s flashback comes at the right time — especially following the Fox/Dominion settlement and the Tucker Carlson fallout that reveals the secret motives of the media empire, cloaked in fake honesty and intrepidness. Morrow, by instinct, evokes the era when journalism was mechanically noisy (“the sound of someone engaged in the hard and actually physical work of thinking”), rather than intellectually raucous and morally discordant. And movies — from It Happened One Night, The Front Page, and His Girl Friday to Citizen Kane, Woman of the Year, Ball of Fire, Casablanca, Zelig, and even All the President’s Men (consider that Morrow was personally given the book’s galleys by his colleague Carl Bernstein) — help him break apart the journalistic myths that keep us deceived and naïve about our information sources. The book is subtitled “Remembering Journalism” because Morrow knows that the profession’s Lucean integrity is gone.

“It was not an accident that Citizen Kane, the greatest American movie according to many critics, sought the meaning of the country by telling the life story of a newspaper tycoon,” Morrow declares. Fair enough, until he romanticizes the film’s final image to mean that “the truth of anything is ultimately inaccessible.” Playing with the modern confusion about “truth” leads Morrow to make the same mistake.

Morrow, son of journalist and speechwriter Hugh Morrow, who was a political adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, now works as a contributing editor of City Journal but here performs the self-examination that most working reporters and essayists refuse. He achieves this investigation through a roundabout cultural analysis of journalistic legend — as when Steven Spielberg spoke at Time’s 75th anniversary ball in 1998, a beckoning of powerful, famous people who had appeared as cover stars. Spielberg paid tribute to John Ford and the vaunted quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”

Ford “believed that without legends to inspire us, we cannot be our best selves or fulfill our promise as a nation,” Spielberg claimed. That sounds good as an explanation of Ford’s complicated popular art, but Spielberg’s implicit politicization of art (as in his disconcerting recent films) won’t do when it comes to validating the institution of journalism, and Morrow knows it. Instead of printing the legend of journalism as its monied practitioners would like it, Morrow scrutinizes the legend of the profession he has called his own.

The grand tradition of newspaper movies has been betrayed by contemporary media (in which journalism functions within entertainment conglomerates, arbitrating ideas and power), but Morrow’s remembrance of Luce and John Hersey, and his tallying of such preceding historians as William Cobbett, forces him to confront the legend. The book’s most intriguing moments examine how journalists operate, their vanity and presumed authority. Morrow describes the temptation felt by reporters “young enough to enjoy the scruffy mystique and a winking intimacy with big shots — with history itself (which, up close, was apt to look like a bit of a fraud).”

Today, we all can see fraudulent journalism if we care to look, but corporate media reinforces its own legends persistently — part of the 24/7 news cycle. Morrow details this habit when assessing how “mass-circulation American journalism joined American politics and American religion and American movies in the restless project of making and remaking — or, eventually, unmaking — the national myth.”

Is this confession or concession? It’s the crux of Morrow’s thinking about his profession, the big institution created by men in the mold of Charles Foster Kane, the William Randolph Hearst figure of Citizen Kane who, in Morrow’s imagination, was not so far from Henry Luce. Morrow asks, “Which was the priority of a mythmaker like Luce — the hard facts of the case or the storyteller’s interpretation of them, the narrative line? Is journalism inevitably engaged in the working up of myths, whatever its pretensions to objectivity?” Few dare raise that question.

Morrow’s shrewdest criticism: “I sometimes think that the leftist tendencies of twenty-first century media have their origin in the myths of Frank Capra.” He realizes, “In the twenty-first century . . . journalism would find itself plunged into the metaverse . . . the floating world of a trillion screens. There might come to be no agreed reality at all.”

That’s how Morrow’s slim volume catches up to the perfidies of modern hyper-politicized journalism in which “the technology and the very metaphysics of journalism would change.” Its decline from different styles of reporting into leftist egotism is traced in Morrow’s observation that “reporters by inference were irresponsible children . . . talented, perhaps, but wayward.” He alleges that “supercilious [H. L. ] Mencken . . . taught bright Americans an idiom of contempt that would come back to haunt the country a hundred years later. ”

Looking back, Morrow laments, “In its dreams, good journalism longs for an honest mind at either end of the transaction.” That holds for journalism as well as cinema, especially now when both forms offend our trust and distort how we view the world. A disappointing digression glancing at the proxy war in Ukraine at least produces a useful language lesson: that Pravda means “man’s truth” vs. istina, meaning “God’s truth.” Exploring journalism’s movie-based myths and legends as indivisible from its history is a crucial distinction now that mainstream journalism is the corporate elites’ political party.