Kesusasteraan dan Kewartawanan Berpisah Tiada

Pelopor kewartawanan baru
SHAHAROM TM SULAIMAN


DUNIA persuratkhabaran, kewartawanan dan kesusasteraan saling berkait antara satu sama lain. Hubungan antara kewartawanan dan kesusasteraan bertambah ketara apabila masyarakat mempersoalkan kebenaran dan fakta pada sesuatu berita atau laporan yang ditulis oleh para wartawan.

Demikian juga para wartawan yang berusaha menulis sesuatu berita atau laporan seobjektif mungkin menghadapi masalah apabila sesuatu berita itu ditentukan oleh pihak berkuasa. Hal ini menyebabkan kebenaran sesuatu berita itu bukan lagi ditentukan oleh para wartawan yang menulisnya sebaik mungkin berdasarkan pemikiran mereka.

Gejala ini berpunca daripada pelbagai kelemahan yang terdapat dalam dunia kewartawanan dan penulisan jurnalistik itu sendiri.

Akibat fenomena ini, muncul di Barat khususnya di Amerika Syarikat (AS) sekitar tahun 1960-an yang mendorong golongan wartawan untuk meminjam unsur-unsur sastera, seni dan keindahan untuk menghasilkan suatu bentuk gaya penulisan dan pemikiran yang diberi nama new journalism atau kewartawanan baru yang menggabungkan teknik penulisan fakta dan fiksyen secara harmoni hingga menghasilkan laporan berita yang lebih kreatif, segar dan hidup berbanding bentuk laporan biasa.


Teori Wolfe

Penulis yang mencetus gerakan dalam dunia kewartawanan new journalism ialah Tom Wolfe yang juga menghasilkan karya penting dalam bidang ini iaitu The New Journalism.

Tom Wolfe dalam bukunya telah mengemukakan empat ciri penting gaya penulisan new journalism iaitu pemerian kejadian demi kejadian dengan sedikit cerita sejarah (imbas, balik), dialog yang penuh, sebagai sebahagian daripada suatu kejadian penuh, penyampaian kejadian melalui mata pengamat yang tertentu, meletakkan pembaca ke dalam watak itu dan merakam sikap, perangai, pakaian, gaya, alat rumah tangga dalam kejadian tertentu.

Ia mengemukakan cara-cara dia menyatakan dirinya. Teori yang diperkenalkan oleh Wolfe ini telah menerapkan penggunaan dan pinjaman teknik-teknik sastera khususnya novel dan cerpen dalam melaporkan berita secara kreatif.

Teori new journalism Wolfe ini akhirnya mendapat sambutan para sarjana dalam bidang kewartawanan seperti Michael Johnson menerusi bukunya New Journalism: The underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction and changes in the Established Media, Ronald Weber melalui The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the new Journalism Controversy, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh melalui bukunya The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the new Journalism Controversy Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel.


Kontroversi

Keterpesonaan terhadap gaya penulisan new journalism dan kekuatan pengaruhnya bertambah nyata apabila karya Thomas Keneally berjudul Schindler's Ark yang menggabungkan teknik fakta dan fiksyen memenangi Hadiah Booker di Britain pada tahun 1982. Golongan wartawan menganggap Schindler's Ark sebagai karya dokumentari (bukan fiksyen) atau karya (kewartawanan) sedangkan pengkaji dan pengkritik sastera sebagai sebuah karya sastera berdasarkan gabung jalin unsur-unsur sastera, tekniknya dan kekreatifan fakta sejarah yang diungkapkan dalamnya.

Kontroversi kemenangan Schindler's Ark dan penggunaan gaya new journalism yang dimanfaatkan oleh Thomas Keneally menyebabkan gaya penulisan new journalism bertambah terkenal dan diminati ramai di seluruh dunia.

Akhirnya karya ini difilemkan menjadi Schindler's List yang diarahkan oleh Steven Spielberg dan seterusnya memenangi anugerah filem terbaik (Academy Awards) yang juga kontroversi.

Kontroversi ini wujud kerana golongan wartawan menyifatkannya sebagai karya dokumentari, pengetahuan dan bukan fiksyen kerana sifat dan kandungannya yang banyak menerapkan fakta-fakta sejarah Perang Dunia Kedua, perangkaan mereka yang terbunuh dan keterangan sebenar tentang kekejaman tentera Nazi Jerman terhadap orang-orang Yahudi Poland.


Pengkritik

Sebaliknya, golongan pengkritik sastera menyifatkan karya Thomas Keneally ini sebagai sebuah karya sastera dan fiksyen. Ini kerana unsur-unsur sastera yang terdapat di dalamnya seperti penggunaan unsur cereka seumpama penerapan unsur-unsur kemanusiaan, psikologi, estetik dan teknik novel atau cereka yang menghidupkan perjalanan cerita dengan halus dan menyentuh perasaan.

Hal ini diperkukuhkan oleh Keneally dengan unsur dialog dan penceritaan yang mengindahkan lagi persembahan buku ini dan benar-benar mendekati ciri sebuah karya sastera.

Falsafah gaya kewartawanan baru ini berkembang subur kerana ia menerapkan sebanyak mungkin unsur-unsur kemanusiaan, kejiwaan, kebenaran dan sejarah, keindahan dalam laporan kewartawanan dan penulisan. Penerapan dan penggunaan aspek-aspek kesusasteraan dan kesenian cuba dijadikan tonggak kekuatan untuk memperindahkan penulisan berita atau laporan sesuatu peristiwa yang dialami oleh manusia.

Kegagalan penulisan kewartawanan hanya berpaksikan formula 5W 1H belum cukup memberi kesan yang menyeluruh dan menyentuh hati nurani manusia tentang sesuatu peristiwa atau musibah yang terjadi yang ingin dilukiskan dalam tulisan atau berita.

Golongan pelopor gaya new journalism baru menyedari bahawa pembaca tidak akan berhasil ditakluki emosinya atau diajak terlibat sama dalam sesuatu peristiwa yang ditulis dan berlaku jika penulisan difokuskan dengan menonjolkan berita berbentuk laporan yang padat dengan fakta semata-mata tanpa diselitkan unsur-unsur kemanusiaan dan kesenian.

Ini tentu sekali menjadikan berita yang dihasilkan lebih mendekati psikologi dan minda pembaca yang sebenarnya lebih tertarik dengan sesuatu berita atau karya yang disampaikan secara kreatif, dramatik dan dinamik

Sumber : Kosmo


About Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington and Lee (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957) universities. In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. This was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most of it spent as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba.

In 1962 he became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (Jimmy Breslin was the other) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald-Tribune's Sunday supplement. While still a daily reporter for the Herald-Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism.

In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970 he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second portrayed the inner workings of the government's poverty program.

Even more controversial was Wolfe's 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word. The art world reacted furiously, partly because Wolfe kept referring to it as the "art village," depicting it as a network of no more than three thousand people, of whom about three hundred lived outside the New York metropolitan area. In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening."

In 1979 Wolfe completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award.

"The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero."

Wolfe had been illustrating his own work in newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, and in 1977 he began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper's Magazine called "In Our Time." The book In Our Time , published in 1980, featured these drawings and many others. In 1981 he wrote a companion to The Painted Word entitled From Bauhaus to Our House, about the world of American architecture.

In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987. A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million.

In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter-as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.

In 1996 Wolfe wrote the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States. An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, A Man in Full, was published in November 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year-old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.

A Man in Full headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid gloves-along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one-provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving.

In October 2000 Wolfe published Hooking Up, a collection of fiction and non fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled Hooking Up. It included Ambush at Fort Bragg and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets." His new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, is now available in paperback from Picador.

Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.

Sumber : Tom Wolfe



The New Jornalism

New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others.

Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan's Monthly.
Various people and tendencies throughout the history of American Journalism have been labeled "new journalism". Robert E. Park, for instance, in his Natural History of the Newspaper, referred to the advent of the penny press in the 1830s as "new journalism". Likewise, the appearance of the yellow press, papers such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the 1880s, led journalists and historians to proclaim that a "New Journalism" had been created. Ault and Emery, for instance, said "Industrialization and urbanization changed the face of America during the latter half of the Nineteenth century, and its newspapers entered an era known as that of the 'New Journalism.'".  In 1960, John Hohenberg, in The Professional Journalist, called the interpretive reporting which developed after World War II a "new journalism which not only seeks to explain as well as to inform; it even dares to teach, to measure, to evaluate."

During the sixties and seventies, the term enjoyed widespread popularity, often with meanings bearing manifestly little or no connection with one another. Although James E. Murphy noted that "...most uses of the term seem to refer to something more specific than vague new directions in journalism", Curtis D. MacDougal devoted the Preface of the Sixth Edition of his Interpretative Reporting to New Journalism and cataloged many of the contemporary definitions: "Activist, advocacy, participatory, tell-it-as-you-see-it, sensitivity, investigative, saturation, humanistic, reformist and a few more."


The Magic Writing Machine—Student Probes of the New Journalism, a collection edited and introduced by Everette E. Dennis, came up with six categories, labelled new nonfiction (reportage), alternative journalism ("modern muckraking"), advocacy journalism, underground journalism and precision journalism.[6] Michael Johnson's The New Journalism addresses itself to three phenomena: the underground press, the artists of nonfiction, and changes in the established media.

Journalists recognized as using the style include Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, P. J. O'Rourke, George Plimpton, Terry Southern and Gay Talese. Hunter S. Thompson was a major practitioner of new journalism and gonzo journalism, his own particular style. Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, is a more conventional piece, and shows the beginnings of a more memoir-based approach to reportage. Gay Talese's 1966 article for Esquire, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, was an influential piece of new journalism that gave a detailed portrait of Frank Sinatra without ever interviewing him.

New journalism writers brought new approaches to areas already covered by the mainstream press. The psychedelic movement was something that many of the writers of the period covered, such as in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Vietnam War was another common topic, as was the political turmoil on the homefront. Terry Southern's Grooving in Chi documented the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention for Esquire in new journalism manner. New journalism's techniques were also applied to less obvious subjects, such as financial markets (by George Goodman under the pseudonym Adam Smith, in essays originally published in New York magazine and later collected in a book called The Money Game.)

Some authors of conventional fiction switched to writing in the style of new journalism, such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. However, neither author ever agreed to their style's comparison to Wolfe's school of narration, nor did many others who have been retrospectively promoted as being members and therein associated. Much to the contrary, many of these writers would deny that their work was generically relevant to other new journalists at the time.

Sumber : Wikipedia


Comments

Post a Comment