JOSEPH MITCHELL. A bondade da L.G. fez-me chegar um livro de um dos jornalistas mais notáveis da América, Joseph Mitchell, My Ears Are Bent (Pantheon Books): «Except for a period in 1931 when I got sick of the whole business and went to sea, working on a freighter wich carried heavy machinery to Leningrad and brought Soviet pulp logs back, I have been for the last eight years a reporter on newpapers in New York City. In the summer after I left the University of North Carolina in 1929 I had an appendix operation and while getting over it I read James Bryce's American Commonwealth, a book which made me want to become a political reporter. I came to New York City with that idea in mind. The first story I remember covering was a Jack the Ripper murder in a apartment house; an old woman had been strangled with a silk stocking and cut to death in her bedroom, the walls of wich were virtually covered with large, lascivious photographs.»
Mais à frente:«Politicians, as a rule, make work easy for the reporter. Some of them are so entertaining you can write about them under water. (Herbert Hoover is not in this class. He is the gloomy kind.I have interviewed him twice and both times his face kept reminding me of the face of a fat baby troubled by gas pains.) It is perhaps an ugly commentary on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light.»
Pensem na imprensa portuguesa: «An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head.»