{"id":9775,"date":"2019-01-23T17:42:47","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T17:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=9775"},"modified":"2020-09-02T14:16:35","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T14:16:35","slug":"russell-baker-a-gift-for-fooling-around-with-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=9775","title":{"rendered":"Russell Baker: a gift \u2018for fooling around with words\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 The great New York Times columnist Russell Baker, who has died aged 93, was one of my journalistic heroes and when I interviewed him in 1989 he turned out to be everything I\u2019d hoped. He was an old-time newspaperman who never cared about scoops.<\/p>\n

When we spoke, he was promoting the second volume of his memoirs, \u2018The Good Times\u2019, in which he relates his early days as a police report in Baltimore, his time covering the United States Senate and his stint as a foreign correspondent in London. He was a top reporter at the New York Times in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies covering federal politics and then a three-times a week columnist. He also succeeded Alistair Cook as host of \u2018Masterpiece Theatre\u2019 from 1993 to 2004.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was never interested in the hell of a big story,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat was a nuisance to me very often. I didn\u2019t think scoops were important. I was interested in being a story-teller. I was interested in the kind of event where if you could bring it to life for people, you could a make a story of it in the paper.\u00a0 <\/span>It didn\u2019t matter to me that you were one day ahead of the opposition. It just didn\u2019t matter. What mattered to me was telling the audience clearly what happened yesterday, making them understand it. I thought that was the real mission of journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

He became known as a humorist, and he was a top-notch one. His tale of seeing a spud fall from a high rise onto a pedestrian \u2013 potato mashes man \u2013 was a classic. But he spent much of his life as a serious reporter. \u201cCovering the Senate, I thought it was really important to make people understand why a certain piece of legislation was important and what was going on. I spent a lot of my time covering the various civil rights bills, which were going nowhere but I thought were important and people ought to know about that. The reason more people don\u2019t care is that it\u2019s not presented in a way than interests anybody. People don\u2019t read it. I was interested in finding ways to get them interested.\u201d<\/p>\n

He bemoaned the lack of competition in newspapers in America. One of the flaws in American journalism \u2026 \u201cand there are many\u201d \u2026 and one that always irritated him peculiarly, he said, was the \u201cso-called passion for what we call objective journalism. It assumes that we have tablets down from \u2026 where do tablets come from, Sinai? \u2026 wherever, every morning. You know: This is the truth! Our editors have not polluted it in any way: This is what happened! And that is a fraudulent way to come on. You get that because of the loss of competition.<\/p>\n

“The reporter is trying to conceal what feelings he has, the judgments he\u2019s made. It\u2019s a terribly distorting, suppressing kind of theory to operate under. American journalists always say that they\u2019re trying to get to the truth. Well, that\u2019s absurd. If you want truth then go and study philosophy, why don\u2019t you. What we\u2019re doing is a mishmash of facts and probably getting most of them wrong. I\u2019ve been a reporter long enough to know that you\u2019re out there on a shoeshine and a smile a lot of the time. You\u2019re working on three facts trying to pretend you know 10,000.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baker said that he wandered into journalism without any real sense of direction. \u201cI knew very early that if I had any talent whatever it was for doing things in writing, for fooling around with words. I was terrible in science. I couldn\u2019t become a doctor. I was not a systematic thinker. I could not become a lawyer. I had no interest whatever in business. I had very few talents but the one thing I recognised was some skill, some ability, to work with words.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he wasn\u2019t dismayed that most people had started to get most of their information from television and perhaps now he would have said the same about the internet. \u201cMost people? It doesn\u2019t matter, does it? I mean, in the Dark Ages a handful of monks kept civilisation alive. Those others who were all pillaging and plundering, murdering the men, raping the women, stealing the cattle, their modern counterparts are people who get their information about the world from local TV. It doesn\u2019t matter. Civilisation is preserved and forwarded by a small number of people, and they read newspapers.\u201d<\/p>\n

What did matter to him, as a great believer in Anglo-Saxon as opposed to Latinate English, was the way the English language was deliberately mangled, especially in Washington, DC. \u201cThe kind of English spoke n Washington is designed to conceal your thought to often to conceal that you have no thought. Nothing is ever \u2018done\u2019, things are \u2018implemented\u2019. You don\u2019t \u2018use\u2019 things in Washington, you \u2018utilise\u2019 them. It sounds very learned. My God, it sounds important to utilise something and then implement it. Then you finalise it. What does that mean? It doesn\u2019t mean anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the New York Times obituary<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 The great New York Times columnist Russell Baker, who has died aged 93, was one of my journalistic heroes and when I interviewed him in 1989 he turned out to be everything I\u2019d hoped. He … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,9],"tags":[4987,908,4986],"class_list":["post-9775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-interviews","category-news","tag-masterpiece-theatre","tag-new-york-times","tag-russell-baker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9775"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10086,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9775\/revisions\/10086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}