Movies are the through line for Lance Morrow’s The Noise of Typewriters (Encounter Books), a journalist’s memoir recalling that profession before it rotted. Because I grew up reading Morrow, a Time magazine essayist, during “the golden era of magazines,” I am fascinated by his recall of that phenomenon. But his book is also full of surprising movie references. That’s how Morrow organizes his thoughts on Time’s founder Henry Luce, examining Luce’s ethics, the profession’s ideals, its actual history — and its misleading mythology.
Morrow’s flashback comes at the right time — especially following the Fox/Dominion settlement and the Tucker Carlson fallout that reveals the secret motives of the media empire, cloaked in fake honesty and intrepidness. Morrow, by instinct, evokes the era when journalism was mechanically noisy (“the sound of someone engaged in the hard and actually physical work of thinking”), rather than intellectually raucous and morally discordant. And movies — from It Happened One Night, The Front Page, and His Girl Friday to Citizen Kane, Woman of the Year, Ball of Fire, Casablanca, Zelig, and even All the President’s Men (consider that Morrow was personally given the book’s galleys by his colleague Carl Bernstein) — help him break apart the journalistic myths that keep us deceived and naïve about our information sources. The book is subtitled “Remembering Journalism” because Morrow knows that the profession’s Lucean integrity is gone.
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