Copyright 2000 The National Journal, Inc.
The National Journal
May 27, 2000
SECTION: MEDIA; Pg. 1704; Vol. 32, No. 22
LENGTH: 905 words
HEADLINE:
Style as Substance
BYLINE: William Powers
BODY:
Have you ever noticed that when our
elected rulers are facing a
big, meaningful decision, something with a true
earth-stands-
still quality, the media commentary often feels kind of drab
and
dead?
I'm not talking about factual
substance or reportorial
reliability. Here on the information assembly line,
we're quite
skilled at placing fact A next to fact B and screwing them
together nice and tight before they're boxed and shipped off to
market.
The current national vogue for finger-wagging about our-
shameful-media has
obscured the fact that this business is full
of trusty Gradgrinds who seldom
make serious factual errors.
In fact, our
Gradgrindism may be the source of what I am
talking about, which is style:
the web of words and sentences
that the media's anointed deep thinkers spin
around a subject
like this week's China trade vote. Though deemed an utterly
"momentous" and "crucial" event by all the best news outlets, and
covered in the most impressive factual detail, the China story
was
debated with a noticeable lack of stylistic verve.
On the day before the vote, for instance, I turned to The
Wall Street
Journal's editorial page-home to some of the verviest
opinion writing in all
of modern journalism-to see what it was
serving up. A clueless newcomer to
the subject, a China virgin
who had read little until this week, I wanted to
know exactly
what made this vote so "momentous" and "crucial." In short, why
I
should care. Naturally, I figured The WSJ would be full of
stylish
passion on a subject straight up its free-market alley.
If Peggy Noonan and
Mark Helprin can produce so many singing,
stinging phrases on Bill Clinton's
character, which is with us
for only eight years, surely there would be rich
reading on the
China trade question, which will matter for decades.
There were two op-eds. I licked my lips and dove in.
The
first was by Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan trade negotiator,
and
it began thus: "Tomorrow, Congress will decide whether to
grant permanent
normal trade relations (PNTR) to China in
conjunction with
China's bid to join the World Trade
Organization. As a former U.S. trade
negotiator, I have often
been too critical of U.S. trade deals that gave too
much and got
too little. But in the case of China, careful review can lead
to ..."
Okaaaaaaay, not exactly the aria I was
hoping for, so I
moved down to the other entry, a piece penned by former
Clinton
adviser Rahm Emanuel and headlined "Free Trade Is a Winner for
Democrats." "As a Democrat," it began, "I am proud of the
tradition of
global leadership exerted by Franklin Roosevelt and
Harry Truman at the end
of World War II. They secured the peace
abroad with bold vision and decisive
action. Their international
agenda was complemented by strong domestic
programs like the GI
Bill. Today we need a similarly far-reaching plan to
secure the
peace in the wake of the Cold War...."
I'm sorry, my head fell on my chest for a moment there,
and I think I
was drooling. I dreamed I was back in Mrs.
Sherman's fifth-grade classroom,
where all of us wrote in the
very same toneless, row-row-row-your-boat style
employed by Mr.
Emanuel.
What is it about
serious policy questions that drains the
life out of the public
conversation? I think a couple of factors
are at work. One is that the best
and most engaging stylists are
not much interested in the topics that
animate (so to speak) the
good folk who dwell in the cold, lightless depths
of the think-
tank world. You don't see Maureen Dowd or many other of the
verbal exotics swimming around down there, and they dart away
from any
subject requiring the use of multiple abbreviations (in
the case of China,
let's see, we have PNTR, WTO, AFL-CIO, to name
a few). Who
can blame them? The panel-speak proclivities of the
policy monks can rob any
discussion of all its drama, and much of
its meaning, quicker than you can
say "interagency process."
Thus, op-eds on these subjects are likely as not
to come from
nonscribes like Prestowitz and Emanuel, long on insider
expertise
but short on flair.
The second factor
grows out of the first. There's an
unspoken assumption in the policy world
that truly serious
subjects are demeaned by stylish writing, that heavy
questions
require heavy prose. This is the Henry Kissinger school of
composition, and it's easy for any of us-insecure souls that we
are,
eager to seem intelligent-to buy into it. What we overlook
is an ancient
truth about writing and all communication: Style is
a form of intelligence,
and vice versa.
There are exceptions to the drear.
National Journal's own
Clive Crook churns economics into chocolate cream for
the mind,
without any loss of seriousness.
But
Clive doesn't count-he's British.
On China trade, I
did come across one memorably written
piece, an essay in The American
Prospect magazine by Los Angeles
Times columnist and China expert James
Mann. It opened simply,
with the sentence "America is in the midst of a
supposedly great
debate over China policy." And that word
'supposedly'-weary,
deadpan-set the tone for the rest of the piece, which
was smart
and quietly stylish. Or, rather, smart because it was quietly
stylish.
LOAD-DATE: May 29, 2000
