peter beinart essay on journalism post 9/11

Peter Beinart (formerly of my college paper, now czar of the New Republic) has an interesting column on how journalism has changed since 9/11. His theory: everybody’s gotten more serious and substantial, but in different ways. Magazines have become more dry and newsy, and newspapers have become more (in his words) “moist” and emotional.
It’s an interesting point, but I’m not sure how much I buy the details. His main evidence for the newspaper end of his argument is the New York Times, particularly its acclaimed brief obituaries of all the WTC victims, which certainly are more narrative-driven, experimental, and emotional than normal NYT obits (which are, of course, deeply wonderful in their own way). But remember that September was also when the NYT gots a new top editor, Howell Raines, who has a reputation as being more of a fiery, emotional type than his predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, so it might not be a 9/11 thing. And I haven’t seen that same shift to emotion in other, non-NYT papers.
And on the magazine end, he cites the New Yorker’s recent Bernard Lewis essay that served as a very dry, clear-headed, almost pedagogic primer on Islamic history. But that’s more the exception than the rule; the New Yorker’s investigative Sy Hersh stuff has been better and more prominent.
And if you think the media’s too serious now to report of silly fluff, I don’t believe you.
Anyway, probably what annoyed me most about Beinart’s piece is that it claims that 9/11 will be a blow against what he calls anthropological journalism, particularly of the type done by my hero mentioned below, Malcolm Gladwell. “The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell attained journalistic stardom by exposing the intricate mechanisms of everyday life–how fads begin, how information flows, how neighborhoods change…But it quickly became clear that this kind of writing didn’t work as well after September 11.” I doubt it — I’d bet that, if anything, the fact that the world seems a lot more confusing and complex than it did on 9/10 would make that sort of wonderful explanatory journalism more useful, not less.
Actually, I’d bet that, if anything, there’s no impact at all, and that Beinart’s just another member of that most common journalistic tribe, a writer in search of a trend that doesn’t exist.