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Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media

by Renata Adler

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351692,677 (4)11
"In this new collection of essays, spanning three decades, Adler's wide-ranging reflections remain centered on two increasingly fused areas of interest: the politics by which we organize our common and public world, and the media, which now actually distort our information about that world."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)
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Renata Adler is a savagely acute journalist and commentator on politics and media. (Or was. I'm not sure if she's still active, as she's now 81.) She wrote for The New Yorker for a long time (in 1999 publishing Gone: the Last Days of the New Yorker about what she, obviously considers the magazine's demise), reviewed movies for the New York Times for several years, and has published two novels, as well. The essays in these collections date from 1976 to 1980, with a final piece added in from 2000. She is a fierce critic of what she sees (and makes an excellent case for) as the demise of American journalism, criticizing particularly the rise of the celebrity journalist and the now-ubiquitous practice of using unnamed sources. Perhaps more impressively, she is a deep diver into facts and sources. For example, the first two essays, from the late 1970s, are about Watergate, for which Adler spent innumerable hours going through the bewildering maze of committee reports and testimony to come up with some conclusions of her own about "the real Nixon scandal." Her scathing denunciation of the Starr Report and the conduct of the investigators whose work led to the Clinton impeachment make fascinating reading, as well. The collection also includes a description and history of the National Guard which isn't that interesting until Adler starts describing the ways in which the ineptitude and panic of Guardsmen deployed during the civil unrest of the 1960s led directly to many civilian deaths. In addition, the book includes Adler's infamous attack on famed movie reviewer Pauline Kael. All in all, this collection is fascinating, and I highly recommend it. If I were teaching a class on American political culture of the 60s and 70s, or a class on the history of American journalism, I would assign this. ( )
  rocketjk | Feb 15, 2019 |
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"In this new collection of essays, spanning three decades, Adler's wide-ranging reflections remain centered on two increasingly fused areas of interest: the politics by which we organize our common and public world, and the media, which now actually distort our information about that world."--BOOK JACKET.

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