There were street protests happening all the time about all kinds of things. Anti-War, Civil Rights, Free Speech, etc. You name it and there were 30 million passionate young people out there screaming for justice. And the amazing thing was that even though the society was polarized, even those trying to maintain the status quo knew right from wrong. The last straw for me came when there was a protest about a park, People’s Park in Berkeley , California . There was a dispute going on over who and what was permissible in the park and the California National Guard was called in to restore order. This happened a year before the Ohio National Guard killed several students during a famous anti-war protest at Kent State University . Anyway, the soldiers were ordered to use force to restore order and John Kifner (NYT Reporter) led off his story with the fact that this was the first time in US History that a large unit of guard soldiers had refused to obey an order. I watched as the story was filed, sent to the editing desk and ultimately looked nothing like what he had sent in. It was clearly the most important story of the day and deserved to be placed on the front page. His filing went to a copy editor who rewrote his lead paragraph to simply relate the protest and put the Guard’s refusal to obey down into the 4th or 5th paragraphs. Then, when the story was placed on the front page, those paragraphs were too far down to be there but were to be included in the continuation of the story inside the paper. Now… remember that the news divisions are allotted a specific amount of space in the paper each day. They always sent more than they were allotted and what wasn’t used was regarded as ‘overset’ and discarded. Guess what wound up as ‘overset’ and never even made it into the paper?
Although I loved the job for its excitement and meaningfulness, in the end, I left. I’m not sure if I left cause I was too high, too moral, too young, or just too full of myself but I spent a lot of time thinking about the casualty lists, the life I was seeing every night in Manhattan , and the opportunity to do something ‘completely’ different.
More on that later…
3 comments:
Very interesting reading, I'm looking forward to the next installment!
Are you still out there?
Think I'm gonna like this blog Stephen
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