Morning Miracle. Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life. Dave Kindred. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2010. 266 pp.
Dave Kindred’s book about his former employer fits a predictable story line: Heroic Journalists Strive for Greatness Despite Money-Grubbing Bosses. As a result, the book is fun to read, yet short on erudition.
To be fair, Kindred telegraphs his loyalties in his title. The book’s focus is on the print version (the “morning miracle”) of the Washington Post, which he sees as a “great newspaper” struggling to survive. He begins the book by admitting to being “a hopeless romantic about newspapers,” and ends it by interpreting an intemperate newsroom punch thrown by a crusty editor at an unsuspecting reporter as a morality tale of rage against the dark powers enveloping newspapers.
Let us further stipulate that insiders have a difficult time writing fair-minded books about their former employers. (So, too, may book reviewers. I worked for the Post financial desk for four years, including a stint for one of the primary characters in this book, Tony Reid.)
In that context, Kindred’s book is surprising. This is no Volunteer Slavery by ex-employee Jill Nelson, a narcissistic diatribe that Kindred omits in his bibliography even though he seems to have read every other book about the Post. But it is not a vainglorious bonbon, either.
Although the book praises Ben Bradlee, Kindred also observes that Bradlee’s newspaper was “too often self-indulgent, overreaching, sensation-seeking.” Kindred is clearly partial to former publisher Donald Graham, yet holds Graham responsible for the departure of perhaps the newsroom’s brightest light, managing editor Steve Coll, in a painful retelling of a pivotal meeting that alone is worth the price of the book.
And in one of the book’s most lucid paragraphs, Kindred undercuts Len Downie’s platitudes about the glorious opportunities afforded by the Internet. Kindred writes that a modern editor would know the Web the way Downie knew print. Zing!
Kindred slings arrows at several executives. He describes the ham-handed way the brass informed Downie his days were numbered under a new publisher, Katharine Weymouth. He catches Weymouth and her new editor, Marcus Brauchli, in double-talk about the infamous “salons” that would have traded private access to Post journalists for cash, and he details Weymouth’s chilling request for happy magazine stories to placate advertisers.
Yet such finger-pointing is less an exposé than an affirmation of the dominant narrative of journalists as found in books like Davis Merritt’s Knightfall and Tom Fenton’s Bad News: It’s always the fault of the suits in the corner offices.
Weymouth earns her brickbats, but she’s a symptom, not the cause, of the death spiral that inspired the book. Morning Miracle, however, offers no insight into the systemic economic issues affecting metropolitan newspapers such as the Post, issues that pre-date the Internet and involve a fundamental shift of advertising dollars away from mass-media to niche-media and me-media. Nor does the book acknowledge how the Post let its franchise in national political reporting slip away in 2007 to a pair of employees who jumped ship to create Politico. Instead, the book relies on familiar journalistic canards such as blaming Craigslist.
Economics is not Kindred’s forte. When he wants to know whether the financial contribution of the Kaplan education consortium is critical to the Washington Post Co., he turns to an anonymous source, an unnecessary crutch and a weak spot in a book that is otherwise on the record: He could have found the answer in any quarterly income statement.
The trouble is that the book’s stated purpose is to describe “a great newspaper doing its damnedest to get out of this mess alive.” Because the book is unable to describe the source of “this mess,” it spends most of its pages celebrating the paper’s greatness.
Some of that celebration is deserved. Kindred offers enlightening chapters describing how the Post’s Dana Priest and Anne Hull uncovered horrific conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the bravery of foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, who jumped ship to the New York Times.
At the same time, the emphasis on “great” creates stock characters. Shadid writes “the most beautiful, harrowing stuff you’re ever likely to see in a newspaper.” In overlooking a small part of an illustration that may have been obscene, Mary Hadar “made the single greatest editing decision ever.” Gene Weingarten’s work is “magical.” Henry Allen is “a craftsman whose stuff made the hair on your neck quiver in applause.” More than one staffer is an “old-school” journalist who practices “shoe-leather” reportage.
In short, Morning Miracle is exactly what it claims to be: a valentine to a profession and its practitioners. It is an enjoyable book written by a good sportswriter who interviewed players from both teams and tried his best to describe the game to a hometown audience. Just don’t expect the book to discern how the rules changed or critically evaluate whether the players were adjusting to a new ballgame.
NORMAN P. LEWIS
University of Florida