First, a disclaimer: having read [b:Slouching Towards Bethlehem|424|Slouching Towards Bethlehem Essays|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266447868s/424.jpg|1844], [b:The White Album|421|The White Album|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917257s/421.jpg|682500], and [b:Where I Was From|423|Where I Was From (Vintage International)|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156917257s/423.jpg|1371028] before, I skipped those sections of the anthology and read the parts I hadn't seen before.

[a:Joan Didion|238|Joan Didion|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1294506024p2/238.jpg] is a first-class writer and journalist, so much so that even reading today about the behind-the-scenes intrigues of a 25-year-old Los Angeles mayoral race remains gripping.

Her best journalistic virtue is not that she gets the scoop that nobody else gets, but that she reports the interesting things that all the reporters know but that they keep concealed because they would embarrass the reporters' fraternity or they wouldn't fit the formula or the reporters aren't savvy enough to know that what interests them would also interest their readers if only they knew how to convey it.

Not for her is "the genuflection toward 'fairness'"

...a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. ...[W]hat 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

Didion doesn't passively report "what was said" at the press conference, but how the press conference came about, how the reporters came to be there, what they said amongst themselves, the things they decided not to report. She has an eye for the telling moment, against those who are content to be an amplifying or distorting medium for the message, who "prefer the theoretical to the observable, and [who] dismiss that which might be learned empirically as 'anecdotal.'"

If she has a fault, it's that the sophistication and ironic distance that give her the depth of field she needs to brutally criticize modern political campaigns or the bland hagiography of a Bob Woodward puts her out of her depth when she encounters a situation where earnest simplicity is more called for -- something she noticed when she tried to cover the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s:

I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illustrate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a "story" than a true noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.