Me in the Media (among others)

The title of the programme Agenda earlier tonight on Danish FM-station P1 was Me in the Media ("Well, not ME in the media," as host Jacob Rosenkrands took the opportunity to point out). I was there on tape - interviewed by reporter Pernille Bach in my office last Friday - and in the studio with Rosenkrands were Camilla Stockmann from Politiken and Leonora Christina Skov from Weekendavisen, both of them writers and columnists and well-known users of the first person singular.

It was a good setup, and I was listenening carefully, especially when they too discussed the curious fact that there are no women represented in the textual material that I've been studying. Stockmann and Skov were reproachful on this account, and they brought up names like Martha Gellhorn and Åsne Seierstad, both good examples of bold female reporters appearing in the first person. Norah Vincent came up too, and she's an even better example in terms of being personal and spectacular in my sense of the words. None of those are Danish reporters though, and that's what I've been looking for: Danish reporters - in recent years - who carry out their somehow spectacularly conceptualized reporting on their own and consistently report from the process in the first person singular. Their rhetoric must be striking - on the level of invention and/or on the level of style - and not simply personal which means, for instance, that Anne Knudsen's report from Iraq doesn't really belong in the category.

Of course, questioning the category as such is still legitimate (and appreciated).

Leonora Christina Skov pointed to confessional literature as a highly feminine text format related to the one that I've designated as masculine, and generally the discussion took a broad scope as regards genres and rhetorical functions of self-centered media appearances.

At one point Stockmann and Skov readily agreed that appearing in the media in the first person has a price in terms of never knowing when you'll be called names in furious letters to the editor next - or when you'll be receiving excrements in your mail next: 'You too? It may be the same guy ---- '