|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Ink-Stained Ethics: Response to Smith and Maitre
| Article
# : |
10325 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
894 Words |
| Author
: |
Sander Vanocur
Sander Vanocur started his career in journalism at the
Manchester Guardian forty years ago. He worked for the New
York Times and Washington Post and as a correspondent at CBS
radio, NBC News, PBS, and finally ABC. He will soon be a
visiting scholar at the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center
at Vanderbilt University. |
The two articles have this in common: Both deal with distortion of the news. But there is this most important difference. Joachim Maitre attributes this to a liberal bias in the press. Ted Smith attributes this tendency, in the main, to "enhancement" of the news. I think Professor Smith has made the better case.
I say this because I have reached that stage in life where I think it is very difficult to understand motives, especially in journalism. Why did I wind up in journalism when I had a scholarship waiting for me at Northwestern University Law School? It may have been because the first article I ever wrote wound up on the editorial page of the London Observer and, once I saw my byline, I was hooked forever.
But I probably took up journalism because it was, in the immortal words of Martin F. Nolan of the Boston Globe, "inside work, and there was no heavy lifting." As to an agenda or an ideological bias, my generation abided with the job description once offered by the late Eddie Lahey of the late Chicago Daily News: "Every good general assignment reporter ought to have the depth of a one-pound box of candy."
But whatever my original motivation for getting into what has proven to be a rather prolonged form of adolescence, or whatever intellectual baggage I did or did not carry as I made my appointed rounds, I have always been mindful of the fact that I was not just telling the news, I was also selling it. There I was, initially an ink-stained wretch and then a cathode-ray wretch, a journalistic Willy Loman, out there on a shoeshine and a smile, selling the news--first to my editors and then to the customers, the people who read newspapers or listened to radio or watched television.
It was a lesson drummed into me early on. In 1952, when I was working on the London staff of the Manchester Guardian, I also moonlighted on weekends at the London bureau of United Press (UP). It was a typical magnanimous UP arrangement. I was to work for six months at no pay, study Spanish at Berlitz at my own expense, and, if things panned out, I would be No. 3 man in the UP bureau in Madrid.
Gene Patterson, the UP London bureau chief--later to become managing editor of the Washington Post, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize--wasn't quite sure I understood that the UP was in competition with the AP and Reuters for customers. (He also didn't like the fact that I typed slowly and badly.) One day, however, I offered Patterson
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
