A Few Words on the Highs and Lows of the Media

Along with lawyers and bookmakers, journalists are held in generally low esteem by the public, being regarded as little higher on the evolutionary scale than leeches.

A Walter Cronkite may be elevated to godlike status, but his lesser colleagues, who grovel in the fields of news-gathering, are regarded with suspicion and distaste.

This view of the press (an estate now generally referred to as the media, a more inclusive word that I dislike and tend to think of as singular) is hardly softened by “If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism” (St. Martin’s Press) by Stephen Bates.

The book is an excellent collection of journalism’s facts and fables, its heroics and charades, its giants and its scalawags. Indeed, Bates shines his light on the nobility of the profession, and reports on the fulfillment of its high mission in our democracy, but the stories that illustrate its venality, irreverence, irresponsibility and weakness for high jinks are more fun and perhaps no less representative.

He reports that Bob Considine once wrote a column that I have often been tempted to write.

It said, in its entirety: “I have nothing to say today.”

I am also tempted to emulate the Baltimore Sun’s curmudgeon, H. L. Mencken, who sent post cards to all his critics with the printed message: “Dear Sir or Madam: You may be right.”

Bates also cites numerous definitions of news, including the classic attributed to John B. Bogart, city editor of the New York Sun: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news.” Stanley Walker, city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, said news concerned “wine, wampum, and wrongdoing.” Lord Northcliffe, owner of the London Times, came closest: “What somebody somewhere wants to suppress. The rest is advertising.” Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, might have been speaking for today’s press: “Whatever Divine Providence permits to occur I am not too proud to report.”

In matters of taste, newspapers have come a long way since this Seattle Times rule: “The physiology of conception and childbirth and all matters relating thereto will not be discussed in the columns of The Times.”

(When I came to work for The Times the words abortion and rape were taboo in its columns. The acceptable synonyms were illegal surgery and criminal attack . (“Police said he kicked her downstairs and beat her with a club, but did not criminally attack her.”)

Bates reports many deceptions employed by reporters to get their stories. Nellie Bly of the New York World pretended insanity to get herself admitted to an asylum, worked in a sweatshop, danced as a chorus girl and got herself imprisoned, all for story material.

More reprehensible: When survivors of the Titanic reached New York City piers, reporters got through police lines by pretending to be doctors or priests.

Several stories are told of Charles Chapin, the terrible swift sword of the Evening Herald city desk. When a reporter wrote of a body in “the melancholy waters” of the East River, Chapin praised the phrase. It then began turning up repeatedly. Chapin banned its use and said the next reporter who used it would be fired. One did, with reference to the Hudson, and was duly fired. Curious, Chapin asked him why the waters of the Hudson were melancholy.

“Perhaps,” the reporter said, “because they just went past Yonkers.” “Not bad,” Chapin responded. “You’re hired.”

I do not find my favorite story in the book. It concerns a young reporter who was sent by his paper to do a story on the Johnstown Flood. He wired back a story that began, “God sits on the mountaintop tonight, while death and destruction lie in the valley below.”

His editor wired back: “Forget flood. See God. Get interview. Rush pictures.”

My own feeling for my profession was best expressed by the New York wit and critic, Alexander Woollcott.

“I count it a high honor,” he said, “to belong to a trade in which good men write each piece, each paragraph, each sentence, as lovingly as any Addison, and do so in the full knowledge that by noon the next day it will have been used to light a fire or served, if at all, to line a shelf.”

I have nothing to say today.