Over here, Brooke Gladstone is an unknown quantity. But in liberal America, where she presents a public radio show called On the Media, she is something of a star: Kirsty Wark with extra frizz. Gladstone's exuberant curls are a neat physical expression of her presentational style, which is wry – and sometimes a little frisky. Her trick, I gather, is to balance scepticism and idealism in such a way that her listeners' rising outrage never cancels out their sense that what she and her guests are telling them might be extremely important.
Her graphic book, The Influencing Machine (she has done the words; Josh Neufeld, an illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, is in charge of the pictures), has been billed as a media manifesto. Alas, this does it no justice at all. Gladstone would rather nudge than shout, drop hints than scrawl bullet points on a whiteboard. Even better, she puts the 21st-century media cleverly into context, cramming her book both with history (she takes the story of the press right back to ancient Rome, when Julius Caesar decreed that the activities of the Senate be posted on a handwritten sheet) and the latest scientific research (her analysis of the "Is the internet destroying our capacity to concentrate?" debate is compelling). Subtle, interesting and comprehensive, I only wish her publisher had thought to send Lord Justice Leveson a copy before he began his now concluded inquiry.
Gladstone's central thesis is that we get the media we deserve: it doesn't control us so much as pander to us (her title is a reference to the delusion suffered by some schizophrenics that an outside entity is putting certain dark and possibly shameful thoughts in their heads when, in fact, those thoughts originate in their own minds). So it's up to us to acknowledge our own complicity. This isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for those who work in the media. Journalists, she believes, are too prone to running with the pack and sometimes craven and afraid (not for nothing did the US authorities decide to embed reporters during its adventures in the Middle East; terror and gratitude made the early headlines better than they should have been). Human beings are all prey to unconscious prejudices, and reporters no more or less than anyone else.
I'm not half so optimistic as Gladstone. When Neufeld draws her looking all cheery and engaged, an "Intel Inside" sticker on her forehead – the future of information technology lies, apparently, in brain implants – I can only shiver, and reach for another hardback. And it's hard to see how journalism of the kind she praises (Morley Safer and Michael Herr in Vietnam; Woodward and Bernstein in Washington) will prosper in a digital, and therefore perilously under-funded, future. But I loved her chipper book all the same. As she notes, the word "reporter" is as much a diagnosis as a job description. I guess I enjoyed being in the company of a fellow sufferer.
