Book Review: Finding the News
Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter. Peter Copeland. Louisiana State University Press, Oct. 1, 2019, Hardcover, 280 pages.
Reviewed by Dennis Hetzel.
For most in the general public, Copeland is an unknown hero of journalism. You didn’t see him on the nightly news or in the pages of the largest newspapers such as the New York Times or his hometown Chicago Tribune. But his byline appeared in hundreds of newspapers and at other media outlets as a foreign correspondent when he covered everything from the drug war in Mexico to the first Gulf War and the U.S. presence in Somalia. His influence continued to grow when he became the Washington bureau chief for the Scripps news service. Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter is a chronological retelling of Copeland’s growth as both a journalist and a person, followed by an epilogue that takes the well-traveled road of assessing the considerable challenges to modern journalism and its advertising-dependent business model.
Copeland, a Chicago-area native, started his somewhat-accidental career at the city’s legendary City News Bureau, where generations of journalists went on to bigger things after getting seasoned in a place where nothing mattered more than getting it first—but only if it was right.
The book opens with a great anecdote involving Copeland’s first job. He was sent to cover a fire with the advice that the firefighter with the white helmet will be the chief. He ends up trying to interview the chaplain by mistake. He finally finds the chief, who basically tells him to “f” off. Welcome to journalism. Memorable anecdotes like these provide the energy that will keep you reading Copeland’s memoir. Along the way, the reader will also discover Copeland’s fundamental decency and the traditional values of a journalist who came of age before the Internet seemed to change everything.
His early days at City News reinforced lessons he learned well: Reporters are supposed to have an unrelenting dedication to accuracy and stuff both their egos and opinions into places where readers wouldn’t find them.
Covering the Gulf War, he describes why it was so important to have the specific names of the soldiers in the stories. “We had to remember that these were people from back home in mortal danger, not characters in our dispatches.” He also displays a compelling eye and memory for detail, as in this dispatch from Iraq: “The helicopter was so low it looked like a dragonfly gliding above the sand. It dipped its nose and fired, sending out a string of white pearls of light that settled on the Iraqi armored vehicle and turned it into a ball of fire.”
When memoirs build into something rich and fresh to say beyond someone’s personal story, you have a special book. As journalist memoirs go, NBC reporter Richard Engel’s And Then All Hell Broke Loose comes to mind as a book that combines compelling tales of a reporter’s adventures with broader insights that reveal the roots of conflict in the Mideast.
Copeland’s book doesn’t land quite that high, but Finding the News will reward any reader interested in public affairs or the reporter’s craft. Copeland epitomizes the strengths, core values, and the limitations of correspondents who parachute into breaking news and fiercely try to cover complex events with context and fairness. The contrast to most of today’s cable news, with its “talking heads” who pontificate based on McNuggets of information they haven’t bothered to confirm, couldn’t be stronger.
Apparently, that’s what gets ratings and makes money. If the decline in both public interest and the commitment of media executives to support the strong reporting that Peter Copeland dedicated his career to achieving doesn’t make you sad and worried about our country, it should.