'Midnight clangs from all the city-steeples;one precious hour has been spent so;most mortals are asleep.'
These two lines are quoted from Thomas Carlyle's 'The French Revolution (1837). This is in fact a tiny excerpt from a long passage that describes the flight of the infamous queen Marie-Antionette with her children and of course with her equally infamous husband Louis xvi.
When you read the lines do you feel it is written by a historian? I am sure you never. Because in 'The French Revolution, Carlyle writes more like a novelist than a historian. 'The French Revolution' is often held up as a classic example to highlight the cross-fertilization between the novel and historiography in late nineteenth century before a truly scientific historical method was born.
Lately Carlyle's 'The French Revolution ' keeps coming back to my mind when I tend to do a little introspection into the state of affairs of journalism-both print and visual-in our state. Every so often I delve into the issue, I come out convinced that the seeds of what 'new journalism' that we expose ourselves to day in and and day out contained in Carlyle. It is without doubt that Carlyle engaged himself with the documents of The French Revolution like a historian; but he 'dramatized and synthesized' these like a moralizing novelist.We must not forget that literature too started with journalism and the history is replete with examples to that effect. How can a simple journalistic narrative become a great novel? The answer is Marquez's 'The Story of a ship wrecked sailor'.
Before I am off the rail too much , let me come to the point.
I have referred to Carlyle and his book just to show how 'new journalism' has internalized the style and technique of fiction writers.
Tom Wolfe enumerates certain techniques that 'new journalism' has borrowed from fiction writing:
A)Telling the story(Remember everything in news is story now)through scenes rather than summary.
B)Presenting events from the point of view of a particular rather than from some impersonal perspective.
C)Preferring dialogue to reported speech.
D)Incorporating the kind of detail about people's appearance,clothes,possessions , body language, etc that act as indices of class ,character,status and social milieu in the realistic novel.(The Art Of Fiction by David Lodge,Penguin)
O' my esteemed reader just see if you find all these elements in today's news in particular and in journalism in general!
But why all these elements became necessary? Also with this question is bound up the inevitability of 'yellow journalism'.
These elements generate excitement, intensity,sympathy(often misplaced) and emotive power that orthodox reporting fails. These elements inform all the aspects of 'Yellow journalism' too,however, the single- track- aim of 'Yellow Journalism' is character assassination.
In recent days our state has witnessed a storm of a sort involving two television channels. Their verbal fisticuffs have shown how journalism has become self-reflexive. Journalism referring back to itself.For a channel a particular individual is a genius.Whereas for the other an impostor.A magnificent fraudster.One lauds him and blares out he is a victim of 'yellow journalism'.
One of these channels must be right and in a round about way it has admitted that 'yellow journalism' does exist.
Carlyle,Tom Wolf,New Journalism,journalistic fisticuffs-a concoction. Is this short piece of writing referring back to itself?
