Originally published in AFJ Update, the newsletter of the Association of Freelance Journalists, Little Silver, New Jersey, September 1997.
For many years a staff writer for the pre-Tina Brown New Yorker, Jonathan Schell is best known for his 1982 bestseller, The Fate of the Earth, described in those days as the bible of the nuclear freeze movement. (Some freezers might have insisted that the Bible was the bible of the nuclear freeze movement, but that is another matter.) Schell surprised book reviewers everywhere; a journalist who can think evidently ranks with Dr. Johnson’s singing dog in the cabinet of modern curiosities. In fact, Schell not only thinks, but thinks about political philosophy. He is a careful student of Hannah Arendt’s writings, and a generally literate and civilized fellow.
This spring, Schell turned up as a guest at a graduate seminar at the New School for Social Research, where Arendt taught for many years. The seminar, titled “Truth, Deception, and Self-Deception in Politics,” ranged from Plato’s Republic to Machiavelli’s Prince to the inevitable Jacques Derrida. To this theoretical fare, Professor James Miller added some journalism, perhaps under the impression that editors at news organizations do not as a rule instruct reporters to go forth and construct their own reality, no matter what some philosophers say.
Schell talked not about nuclear weapons (agents of deconstruction, to be sure) but the ‘Watergate’ scandal, which led to the collapse of the Nixon Administration and served as the subject for Schell’s first book, The Time of Illusion. Following the argument of some Arendt essays from the late 1960s—essays directed at the machinations of the previous Johnson Administration—Schell charged that the Nixon White House blew so much smoke and flashed so many mirrors that it lost its bearings in its own maze, jolted back to reality only be a hail of subpoenas from a disenthralled Congress.
Schell left many students in a state of salutary discomfiture. Two decades of ‘deconstructionism’ and lit. crit. ‘theory’—and probably of MTV—have convinced a generation of apprentice academics that Oakland is everywhere: There’s no ‘there’ anywhere, no real world out there to know. The journalistic inclination to check facts and doubt ‘image’ has for them the faintly old-fashioned odor of leatherbound volumes and lilacs. But what if the original constructionist/deconstructionist was none other than the bad boy of postwar American politics, Richard Nixon? Was he entitled to construct his own reality? The assembled bien-pensant grad students didn’t want to go quite that far.
As for Schell, he too had to think again. Fact-finding is one thing; the significance of the facts found is another. How does a journalist frame the facts to make them signify” Schell answered that the frame derives from the question the journalist wants answered. The fact of the existence of a gap on a tape recording of a conversation in the Oval Office signifies differently if the question is ‘Do we need a complete record of this conversation for the purposes of historical curiosity?’ or if it is ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’ Very well, but who is the journalist and why does he want one question answered and not another?
As usual, no one was quite convinced of anyone else’s argument. Those who participate in graduate school seminars tell themselves that such exercises are nonetheless valuable. Lest they deconstruct.
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