Erik Barnouw's Close-Ups

Abstract

When scholars turn to their memoirs, readers usually get shop talk. But the story of good fights on committees for the soul of the profession is not the only model for the academic's autobiography. Henry May's Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (1987), for instance, probed character rather than curriculum. Media Marathon is personal scrapbook that says little explicitly about the writing of history, but much implicitly. Erik Barnouw offers vignettes of the powerfully influential people in the life of a white-collar vagabond (p. 1). He covers his precocious success in theater at Princeton in the 1920s, his improvised career as director and writer for network radio during the Depression and World War II, and his later appointments as teacher and custodian of media at Columbia University and the Library of Congress. Part performer, part journalist-documentarian, part archivist, Barnouw is fully honored member of the historian's guild. Before his three-volume History of Broadcasting in the United States (1966-1970), writing on this subject was an apologia, recent scholar has noted. The trilogy broke this industry stranglehold and provided the entree for future critical explorations.1 Barnouw's other histories of film, television, and commercialism are standard works for everyone who seeks to understand the media landscape. Heavy with honors (including the Bancroft Prize and the annual award in his name from the Organization of American Historians), Barnouw's story should be combed for clues as to what it takes to practice media history at top form. Barnouw is case study in the synergy between the skills necessary to work in the media and to write serious history. Work as journalist has, of course, been preface to many scholarly careers. This is memorialized in the Allan Nevins Prize, honoring the outstanding dissertation in American history. (Nevins did not leave the newsroom for academia until he was 37 years old and he trained generation of historians at Columbia without bothering to get his own Ph.D.) Reporters and editors have sometimes