Agee on Journalism: ‘…a broad, successful form of lying’

 by Gary Larson  

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Bowing to the fateful 'temptation to invent' makes journalists fair game for withering criticism.  Things haven't changed a great deal from the heyday of news media critics James Agee and George Orwell.

Shake to life a long-dead critic of journalism, ask him how today’s “interpretative” style compares with “straight” reporting of his era.

Little has changed, he’d grumble, if the dead man talking was celebrated critic James Agee (1909-1955). Lies, lies, lies, he’d swear, make his former vocation not only untrustworthy, but to some, a joke. Polls tend to validate this view.

“Honest journalism," Agee said half joking, “is a paradox.” Oxymoron, the term, had not been coined in his heyday.

Agee’s criticism of American media mirrored views of a young George Orwell in Great Britain. Both then unknowns, and unknown to each other, later they would produce masterpieces of commentary that took swipes at journalism’s soft, exposed underbelly.

Appalled but not shocked, Agee would find little progress in his vocation in the half century since his death. He’d find still no overriding passion for accuracy, for getting it down precisely, right, rather being “popular,” politically correct, even unabashedly partisan.

He understood why the shoddy reporting — namely, human fallibility, thus beyond redemption. Bias is inevitable, he’d contend, not at all cynically. (Bringing “objectivity” to journalism would draw a chuckle. His style was immersion, steeping his subjects with his subjective poetic voice.)

Journalism is forever plagued, Agee asserted, because (1) “words…can be made to tell anything within human conceit” and (2) “words…are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums [sic].” Abused in their meanings (Orwell’s theme, too), ill-chosen words promote “fraud, compromises [and] artful dodges.” Words, he said, can only suspiciously “describe,” never “embody.”

To expect otherwise, he kidded, was to expect a cow to be a horse, or to do horse-like things, not fooling anyone. Agee said “the blood and semen of journalism…is a broad, successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying, and you no longer have journalism.” Touché!

As critic meaner than a junkyard dog, Agee is a delightful read, especially if you share his views. I read him first in the Fifties. (For young pup readers, that’s the 1950s. Ike led then.) I stumbled across Agee’s genius during a brief stint — read, fling — as a fill-in “movie reviewer” for an Upper Midwest newspaper. (Free theater passes persuaded me to this extra duty. Date bait, too.)

Agee had been Time’s film critic, plainly brilliant, a model for this wet-behind-the-ears kid. (“Film criticism” is too lofty a term for what I did.) I relished his brashness, his insights. His collections, Agee on Film, became my dog-eared work companions, profusely pen-underscored (in pre-Highlighter days). His dying so young, so troubling me, occurred only a couple years earlier.

Looking for more of Agee’s genius brought me innocently to his magnum opus, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Quotes from this gloomy critique are found sprinkled below, in Italic type, rather gratuitously. (Agee suggested unhurried reading, and reading aloud for a reason I could not fathom.)

(More on Agee: His other works are the posthumously Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in The Family, (1957); early poetry; his Hollywood scriptwriting (The African Queen, with John Huston) and The Night of the Hunter. The man could flat-out write. He died at 45, in a taxi en route to a New York City hospital, after a hard-driven life, if you must know.)

Agee held that reporters and editors succumbed gladly to “the temptation to invent.” Jason Blair’s halcyon run at the New York Times would not have surprised him. Nor Dan Rather’s and Mary Mapes' attempt at CBS-TV to bring down a president with forged documents. And then, to be shameless about it.

Agee’s first stab at journalism-on-the-run was a series to be done for Fortune, his first real job after his Harvard graduation. It was the summer of 1936, deep into the Depression. A job then was a valued thing. For socialist Agee, it was appropriate that his effort was funded, in part, by FDR’s New Deal, the (make-) Works Project Administration (WPA). Sometimes the stars align right.

On assignment to rural Alabama, with ace photographer Walker Evans, the team tried to capture in words and on film, as if a living snapshot, the lives of three dirt-poor sharecropper families. The result was a milestone at first unrecognized.

Fortune editors rejected it. Perhaps it was early PC, not fit for their see-no-evil pages. The manuscript went untaken for four years. Then Houghton Mifflin took a gamble, rescuing it from the slop pile in 1941. It was re-named Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (nee, “Three Tenant Families”) as a tribute, actually, to the book’s non-famous subjects.

The book was a flop commercially. It sold fewer than 600 copies in the first year. Reviewers paid it no attention. Rare copies got passed hand-to-hand, as if in a literary underground. Later it became a sort of cult classic, but never a best-seller, such were Orwell’s Animal Farm and  1984.

Agee held reporters and editors responsible, not “the system,” not any vast conspiracy, not their capitalist bosses’ diktats, for diminishing “the value and integrity” of journalism. In two central ways the working journalist transgressed:

(1) falsification — through inaccuracy of meaning, as well as inaccuracy of emotion; and, (2) inability to communicate simultananety [sic] with any immediacy.

If prone to falsification, Agee said, the journalist-writer “is not aware that truth is more important than any pretty lie he may tell.” Pity them, for they know not what they do?

About the five famous Ws, Agee was downright fatalistic:

Who, what, where, when and why (or how) is the primal cliché and complacency of journalism; but I do not wish to appear to speak favorably of journalism. I have never yet seen a piece…which conveyed more than the slightest fraction of what any even moderately reflective and sensitive person would mean and intend by those unachievable words…

My Take: “Slightest fraction” is likely the best we can get, or expect to get, from at least mainstream media. To be fair, as Agee was (to a fault?), ethical journalists try valiantly, with shining success at times, to convey (impart?) reality faithfully, sans personal bias. But darn those prisms! Infernal filters, they keep getting in the way: Life experiences; growing up; parents’ views; what teachers taught you.

“News” can be made fictional, as we’ve seen, made to suit partisan ends (ditto), and reporters' whims: Justifying means? Agendas? PC? False premises? A few recent examples, in my view (disagree if you will): Histrionic reports of what happened, but did not, in the Super Dome during Katrina. “Domestic spying” that’s not. Saddam Had No WMDs (and forget the bodies). They Misled Us Into War. Insurgents, not Terrorists or Thugs. Kerry in Cambodia. Ambassador “Joe” Wilson portrayed as honest, his wife a “victim.” Big Oil’s “price gouging.” Et cetera. But really, what can top that peddling of forgeries to sucker-punch a president on election eve? Priceless!

The list could go on, validating Agee’s Complaint: “. . . the temptation [of reporters] to invent.” Why is another question, for another day.

Realist Agree saw no reason to assault journalism for its (unavoidably?) “complacent delusion…that it is telling the truth.” In his typical Thirties’ prose:

Journalism is true in the sense that everything is true to the state of being and to what conditioned and produced it…which is also, but less so perhaps, a limitation of art and science: but that is about as far as its value goes. This is not to accuse or despise for anything beyond its own complacent delusion, and its enormous power to poison the public with the same delusion…that it is telling the truth.

Below, in his widely-quoted “cow-is-not-a-horse” analogy, Agee slips into his copy (here in brackets, in his text, at page bottom) a sardonic two-word footnote, just for fun I think:

Journalism within its limits can be ‘good’ or ‘bad,‘ ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth. Again, journalism cannot be blamed [footnote: ‘Why Not?’] for this; no more than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse.

Orwell, like Agee a socialist, scolded reporters for “manipulating words,” a theme to emerge full blown in the Ministry of Truth in his 1984 (1949). In Orwell’s hard-edged, brilliant little-known work, Homage to Catalonia (1937), he heaps criticism on fellow Spanish Civil War correspondents for being “not only inaccurate in their facts, but intentionally misleading.” (Churchill said practically the same about his Fleet Street adversaries. London journalists had portrayed a benign Hitler as savior of modern Germany. Not getting it right by, ah, just a wee bit?)

Severely wounded in combat, Orwell castigated reporters scribbling from the safety of their hotel balconies in Barcelona. They were “inherently unable,” he wrote in Catalonia, to report “with any degree of authenticity.” Same as, say, reporting today from Baghdad’s hotel balconies?

For the last word, period, let it be James Rufus Agee’s, a credo worth being framed and hung somewhere, possibly in a news director’s office:

It is probably never really wise, or even necessary, or anything better than harmful, to educate a human toward a good end, by telling him lies.

Enough wisdom to last a lifetime I say.

Culture: Media, Features

Read more articles by Gary Larson