MixedBookforumIn The View from Somewhere, Wallace responds...with a thoughtfully researched series of essays on journalistic objectivity, placing himself squarely on the side of the concept’s malcontents ... his book paints an often damning picture of a news industry that uses the rhetoric of neutrality to serve the powerful ...When it comes to the work of individual journalists, though, Wallace is too quick to treat \'perspective\' as something self-explanatory, emanating directly from a writer’s social position. In reality, a writer’s point of view consists of more than her relationship to structures of power; she crafts her ideas through her prose ... . Ironically, the neglect of texture homogenizes the very diversity the book is meant to champion. Even a chapter on \'Public Radio Voice\' has almost nothing to say about voices, beyond basic observations about NPR’s whiteness; indeed, much of the book is itself written in public radio voice, sometimes lending it the quality of a podcast that has become sentient and begun to inquire into its own origins.
