The rise of style - liberal slants of 'Style' sections in the Washington Post and New York Times - Special Section: The Decline of American Journalism

National Review, June 21, 1993 by Joseph Sobran

MOST people in Washington read the news sections of the Washington Post each morning. But everyone reads the Style section--a joyous daily bundle of gossip, personal profiles, essays, reviews, short pieces on psychology and family life, and Doonesbury. Did I mention humor? It's there too. Not as a separate feature (unless you're old enough to count Art Buchwald as humor--and why not Herblock while you're at it?) but a sauce to all the dishes.

The Style section has talent galore. Tom Shales writes brilliant TV reviews, Henry Allen super essays, Jonathan Yardley book reviews, and there is a strong lineup of critics and reporters: Lloyd Grove, Rita Kempley, Hal Hinson, Megan Rosenreid, Joseph McLellan, Lloyd Rose, Charles Truehart, and, of course, Miss Manners.

But the best features of the Style section are its long, long profiles of the successful, controversial, or somehow interesting man or woman du jour-- politicians, writers, actors, activists, or just people with peculiar obsessions, like the impecunious amateur Shakespeare scholar who slept on grates in Washington just so he could live near the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library.

All the people the Post profiles are studies in contemporary manners and attitudes. But their political views are nearly always part of the picture. As Henry Allen wrote in one especially fine and funny essay, politics has ceased to mean fat guys smoking cigars in the back room: today, everything is political--what you wear, what you eat, even how you make love. Politics has become inseparable from style, fashion, entertainment, etiquette, and general self-presentation.

"Any man of education would rather be called a scoundrel than accused of deficiency in the graces," said Dr. Johnson. Hence the Style section, as true a part of the Ben Bradlee legacy as the famous victory of Watergate.

A successful newspaper should delight and instruct. But until Bradlee, who launched the section in the late Sixties, a "serious" paper was supposed to stick to instructing, and leave delight to the tabloids.

The forbidding exemplars of serious journalism in those days--the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor--didn't carry features like comics, horoscopes, gossip columns. If they found it necessary to refer to popular culture, they'd make a point of explaining who "Mr. Presley" was, on the flattering presumption that he was beneath the notice of the Times reader, who might not even own a TV. (Conversely, you might feel slightly sheepish if you did know. If you happened to be dining with a Times editor, you'd be careful not to refer familiarly to "Elvis.")

A chief source of the pleasure of the Style section is its tone of intimacy with its readers, of Baby Boomer Gemeinschaft. The assumed "we" of its writers is a generation united by a rock-and-Hollywood, Vietnam-and-Watergate patrimony. It is taken for granted that "we" have all been to college and are liberals--probably liberals who work in government.

You'd have expected the Style section to originate in New York City, not Washington. But the many New York papers (now down to four) had traditionally divided the labor of reportage. The Times was the "official" paper, while rags like the Post and the Daily News catered to disreputable interests the lofty Times wouldn't even acknowledge, and in a slangy tone the Times avoided like the plague (the News headlined an account of a rape by an escapee from an insane asylum "Nut Screws and Bolts").

Now, though, the Times is trying to catch up with the Washington Post in sassy New Journalism. Not only has it added its own Style section (billed as "Styles of the Times"), but even its front page has begun to feature once-unthinkable "soft" stories, such as Maureen Dowd's brilliantly catty rundown of Kitty Kelley's Nancy Reagan bio two years ago. But the Times has not yet got the knack, which the Post's Style section has brought to perfection, of maintaining a tone of cheery irony about everything.

Well, almost everything. You can't be ironic, or even less than reverential, about abortion. When the city was invaded by Hollywood actresses for an abortion-rights march in 2989, the Style section interviewed them about their own abortions. The tone was one of moral envy. You got the impression that anyone who carried a child to term was missing one of life's central experiences. It goes without saying that no pro-lifer could qualify for Style-section empathy.

Hillary Clinton is a more surprising object of reverence. She is, after all, a politician as much as a politician's wife, and thus a proper recipient of the Style section's ironic condescension. But a May profile by Martha Sherrill went ga-ga over the First Lady's "politics of meaning" speech, quoting with primitive awe such deep thoughts as "It's not going to be easy redefining who we are as human beings in this postmodern age." The piece was packed with such grad-school words as metaphysical, evolution, transcendental, dichotomy, dialectic, and of course meaningful.