Cutthroat Newspaper Competition Enough to Make a Grown Man Cry

Masterpiece Theatre has done up Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel about newspapers, “Scoop.”

If you missed it Sunday night, it shows again at noon today on KPBS.

Waugh has two main propositions: One, that for reporters, covering the competition is equally as important as covering the story.

Two, that when it comes to deciding what is news, sometimes something that is true must be false, and something that is false must be true.

I offer my own experience as City Hall reporter for the San Diego Union during Pete Wilson’s final days as mayor of San Diego.

A quick review for newcomers: Wilson was elected to the U.S. Senate in November, 1982, ending an era and setting off a mad scramble among would-be successors.

At Wilson’s last regular City Council meeting, his colleagues poured forth with fulsome praise. I noticed Wilson dab his eye gently.

I interviewed everyone, honest-to-God: Was that a tiny tear in the mayor’s eye? Nope, came the reply.

His honor had just sneezed. His nose had been tickled by dust, some pepper left from his luncheon salad or maybe a cobweb from a bureaucrat.

With the sneeze came moisture to the eye, I was assured. I skipped the whole thing.

My competitor from The Times did not. Next morning he had a splashy front-page story, complete with pictures: “Wilson Chokes Up as Dynasty Nears End.”

Before I could sit down at my desk in the City Hall pressroom, the city editor was on the phone. A senior editor was furious that I had missed the “Wilson Weeps” story.

This was the first of several such calls. As each senior editor arrived, he expressed his anger to the city editor, who incubated it and passed it on to me.

Explanations were unavailing.

By midafternoon, a grotesque legend was born. The mayor had spent an hour bawling to the sky, pulling his hair and rending his garments, and I had missed it.

I started to feel chest pains (it proved to be a double-load of pasta carbonara ) . My wife sent me to a cardiologist in La Jolla.

The cardiologist asked what I did for a living; foolishly, I told him.

“Did you read about Pete Wilson crying?” he asked.

I vowed to do my own Wilson-in-tears story.

I got my chance a few days later, Jan. 2, 1983, at an extraordinary Sunday council session as Wilson gave his farewell State-of-the-City address.

This time, Wilson really did have a tear in his eye and a lump in his throat. My story reflected this in copious detail.

I saw one of the senior editors the next morning.

“Wasn’t that something about stoic Pete going blubbery?” I ventured.

“Old news,” the editor grumped. “The Times had that last week.”

I never discussed all this with my Times competitor. I never talked to competitors.

I doubt he would have discussed it with me anyway. He had drawn some nasty inferences after finding the cord to his electric typewriter cut.

By the time I switched employers, my nemesis had left San Diego.

My hunch is that his Wilson tear story was in retaliation for a big story of my own a week earlier: Bill Kolender deciding not to run for mayor.

And how had I broken the Kolender story?

By overhearing a conversation (“eavesdropping” has such a bad connotation) between the City Hall reporter for the Evening Tribune and a source.

A little confirmation and I was in business. Of such things are scoops made.

Frankie, Johnny and the Trashmen

The big city.

* America’s Finest Trashmen?

City of San Diego trash collectors and supervisors will go en masse to “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” at the Hahn Theatre on Saturday.

Pam Grier, the play’s star, will be made an honorary refuse collector.

“I think exposure to the arts is good for us, in terms of the way we work,” says a trash supervisor. More cultural excursions are planned.

* Rancho Santa Fe had hoped the string of two-dozen burglaries of occupied homes had ended when a suspect was arrested.

Wrong. The suspect is in jail, but there have been three more “hot prowls.”

* San Diego animal activists are waiting for Pete Wilson to mention a key issue in his inaugural address as governor: Legalizing ferrets as pets.

It may be a long wait.