Kraft's reaction to the press's anger in Chicago is shame. As a journalist schooled in the myth of objectivity, he seems to feel guilty after showing his feelings. And justifies his action by turning to still another meaningless journalistic cliche--that the reporter is the "agent of the sovereign public."
Justifications like that are unnecessary. A journalist is a man writing about events. He does not have to develop medians of fairness; he only has to convince himself that what he is writing is true. That is a very hard thing to do, and that is enough.
NO JOURNALIST seems to be more at ease in justifying his writing than Norman Mailer. Mailer shows us the event by showing us how he reacts to the event. This style of personal reporting cannot be applied to all journalism, of course, but it is at least the direction that journalism should move now that objectivity has been exposed at Chicago.
There is an important prerequisite for any journalist who is showing us his feelings about an event--he must understand those feelings sufficiently to tell us where they come from and where they are going.
In the current (November) issue of Harper's Mailer deals with himself and with politics brilliantly in a 90 page piece on the conventions, Miami Beach and Chicago, which could serve as a model for journalists who are wondering where to go now that the protection of objectivity has been stripped away.
What Mailer feels most of all is fear, first simply fear of being arrested or beaten and not being able to write his story to meet Harper's deadline. Then another layer is peeled off: And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he [Mailer] looked into his reluctance to lose even the America he had had, that insane war-mongering technology with its smog, its super-highways, its experts and its profound dishonesty ... he was tired of hearing of Negro rights and Black power--every Black riot was washing him loose with the rest, pushing him to that point where he would have to throw his vote in with revolution--what a tedious perspective of prisons and law courts and worse ... No, exile would be better. Yet he loathed the thought of living anywhere but America--he was too American by now: he did not wish to walk down foreign streets and think with imperfect nostalgia of dirty grease on groovy hamburgers, not when he didn't even eat them here.
Like the university and most other non-governmental institutions in this country, the press is undergoing the turmoil of self-analysis. The result can be the hopelessness of Kraft or the joy of Mailer. In the prying loose, something very fine may appear--but only if the journalist remembers that he is a man with feelings (all the time, even on duty), and that those feelings are some of the most important things he can write about.