All the News Unfit to Print: How Things Were and How They Were Reported.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: Book review

ALL THE NEWS UNFIT TO PRINT How Things Were and How They Were Reported

BY ERIC BURNS

WILEY PUBLISHING CO., HOBOKEN, N.J.

2009, 249 PAGES, $25.95

The former host of "Fox News Watch" and veteran of NBO's "Nightly News" and "Today," Eric Bums has written about the media for several magazines and newspapers. The American Library Association gave his three books of social histories the highest award bestowed in the category. In All the News Unfit to Print, Burns traces the evolution of American journalism, from its "undisciplined beginnings" when newspaper readers expected little concerning truth or accountability to the standards of objectivity and veracity today's readers demand.

Burns divides the history of American journalism's errors, omissions, pranks, and downright lies into four periods: early period (late 17th and most of the 18th century) when journalism was a novelty and reporting, riddled with opinions, vituperations, and foibles, often was unattributable; second period (beginning in the 1930s) when readers demanded newspapers present facts and articles stripped of "verbiage and coloring"; third period (mid to late 1960s) when journalists and prominent newsmakers, especially presidents, played on "the same team"; and, finally, the period of the Vietnam War and Nixon Administration, when political and military figures produced so many lies that the press grew wary of politicians at all levels. During this last period, the relationship between public officials and the press became "virtually a war of its own"

The "first collection of journalistic lies to survive" dates from the 1740s, when Samuel Johnson, without leaving his home, "reported" dally debates of the English Parliament. In America, Benjamin Franklin was creating "Silence Dogood" letters in his brother's New England Currant, the New York Sun produced a six-part series concerning the discovery of men on the moon; and Edgar Allan Poe reported on men crossing the Atlantic in three days. Journalistic malfeasance intensified over time. William "Boss" Tweed took control of the New York press; William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal "furnished the [Spanish-American] War"; and Henry Louis Mencken described the final battle of the Russian-Japanese war in "throbbing detail" two weeks before the actual conflict took place.

In "Hiding the Truth," Burns details how Walter Durany of The New York Times hid the truth about Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plan and the effect it had on...