Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (review)

Now that Random House is willing to reimburse customers who mistakenly purchased James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" thinking it was a work of non-fiction and the tragic effects of Judith Miller's spectacularly inaccurate and misleading reports about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction for The the New York Times are being felt in our national foreign policies, one would think that a work such as Roggenkamp's would be timely. That is not exactly the case and it is not because most of her study concerns the 1890s. Rather, the study seems somewhat awkwardly outdated because the thrust of current events makes Roggenkamp's nuanced discussion of how period audiences understood both facts and fictions seem self-evident more than prophetic. While valuable insights are certainly to be found in this study of New Journalism, the larger arguments the author makes about media history seem unsurprising and a bit wistful.

Narrating the News not only examines in thoughtful detail the ways in which fact and fiction have intertwined in urban news coverage of the 1890s, but also, far more significantly, pursues questions about how audiences engaged in what Roggenkamp calls a "constant dynamic conversation" with the periodicals they encountered. Since, then as now, few people read imaginative writing in the form of short stories, novels, or poetry compared with the numbers of people who primarily read newspapers, it should not be surprising that newspapers and periodicals of every sort sought to shape their narrative styles in forms that were familiar to their audiences: melodramas, thrillers, medievalist romances, detective stories, comic operas, and even adventure tales. What Roggenkamp sees as a specific aesthetic of composition that became manifest in the New Journalism of the 1890s is hard to define both for herself and for the reader. And thus even as Narrating the News succeeds in providing meaty cultural context for how fiction and fact were delineated during the 1890s, its specific examples, while nonetheless examples that are far more than mere anecdotes, still do not truly constitute case studies that prove a more general rule.

The opening chapter profiles famous hoaxes of the 1830s and 1840s featuring false reports about Moon settlements and Balloon voyages that were reported in the press (several of these hoaxes were perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe). Later chapters respectively focus respectively upon the adventure narrative concocted to frame the stunts of Nellie Bly who circled the globe in less than 80 days, and the sensational trial reporting of the Lizzie Borden case. The last of the turn-of-the-century chapters features truly original and insightful analysis of the "yellow" journalism surrounding the imprisonment and contrived rescue of Evangelina Cisneros—a young Cuban jailed by the Spanish authorities—by a reporter for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The final chapter focuses upon Janet Cooke, the Washington Post journalist who, in 1981, won a Pulitzer Prize for her fabricated story about Jimmy, an eight-year-old heroin addict.

The framing of the three late nineteenth-century studies with the early and the late does not sufficiently demonstrate that the early hoaxes and the later Cook scandal were so profoundly different from those of the 1890s to suggest significant evolution. The general comfort level audiences had in reading about Moon settlements in the New York Sun does not seem demonstrably different from that of those who read about the constantly changing versions of the Cisneros narrative, for example. As Roggenkamp herself argues by citing the example of P. T. Barnum, the knowing acceptance of these hoaxes indicates a cultural appreciation of the hoodwinking.

And while the modern professional standards for how journalism should function as based on information and not entertainment are used effectively by the author to highlight the differences between contemporary journalism and New Journalism, the point seems rather self-evident and...