An Aristocracy of Critics

My recent reading includes AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020), by Stephen Bates. I won't say much about it today: but I will give you some bibliographic particulars. Let's do this is question-and-answer form.

Who is Stephen Bates?

An associate professor at the University of Nevada, in Las Vegas, teaching journalism and media studies.

Is this his first book?

No, it's his fifth. Perhaps his best known before this was THE POISONER (2014) about a notorious Victorian-era serial killer, William Palmer.

Okay. What is the new book about?

Chiefly it is about the Hutchins Commission and its report. This was a Commission created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, at the behest of his friend Henry Luce, then a press baron with roughly the power and wealth of a Hearst or a Murdoch. Hutchins collected some renowned philosophers, theologians, and Big Thinkers to think about the issue of a free press -- what it means and how it should be nurtured. It produced its report in 1947, entitled "A Free and Responsible Press."

Did the report have a lot of impact?

Not really. It made a bit of a splash, and provided some ammunition (as its title indicates it should) to the then-evolving "social responsibility" theory of journalistic ethics. But its policy recommendations were quite modest, and even so were widely ignored at the time.

So why a book now about that book?

Bates believes that the report, and even more so the history of the commission and debates the members had with each other that didn't get into the report, has a lot to say to us about our own time.

Does it?

Maybe. But that will have to be the subject for another post.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog