All the King's Men

"This is a great mix of politics and journalism. It shows the way the two work together in a symbiotic relationship where they both need and hate each other. The newspaper guy is Jack Burden and he goes to work for Willie Stark – who starts off as a fresh-faced, incredibly idealistic and very ambitious man-of-the-people politician. Yes, he was a great populist politician. The narrative is his rise and inevitable fall. Again, it is a story about power and how Willie Stark changes as he gains it – his values corrode so that by the end of the book he is as bad as the politicians he initially decried. Exactly. You see the corruption of Jack Burden as well. He starts off wanting to use his journalistic skills to help Willie Stark, but then as Willie becomes a powerful politician Jack also becomes corrupted and turns his reporting skills to digging up dirt on Willie’s enemies. At the end he, too, questions his own integrity. That is always a danger for journalists, particularly when you cover powerful people. In order to get access you start making compromises. You forget who it is you are working for. You are meant to work for the public at large, but what you are possibly doing is working for the interests of the powerful – because they give you the stories. That is the crisis point where we find journalism today. “That is always a danger for journalists, particularly when you cover powerful people. In order to get access you start making compromises” Most media organisations today are big corporations; the editorial staff is thinly resourced but their production quotas are high. You just can’t do good journalism if you have to produce three or four stories a day. So journalists end up rewriting what is given to them. They don’t do what a journalist needs to do, which is verification – finding out if what is said is actually true. Good journalism is about taking nothing at face value, being intensely sceptical, finding from outside sources whether or not what is being said is true."

"my first read in college helped draw me to journalism"

""All the King's Men," by Robert Penn Warren, which I read for the first time only very recently and enjoyed very, very much."

"Populism — lawlessness in the service of curdled envy and resentment — has returned, so readers should return to "All the King's Men" (1946). Robert Penn Warren's roman à clef about Louisiana's Huey Long still resonates."

"I reread "All the King's Men" every few years, and I think it's more relevant in this surreal historical moment than it was in the late 1940s, when it was written and Huey Long was still fresh in the American mind."

"I’m halfway through “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren. I haven’t read it since college."

"Robert Penn Warren, "All the King's Men." A Southern demagogue gets himself elected governor to battle the elites, but gradually surrenders his principles."

"All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren."