All The News That's Fit To Print, Part II

It was both a sad and a glorious time. On one hand, countless friends were being drafted into the Vietnam War and more than a few came home in coffins. One of my jobs at the Times was to edit the casualty lists for the nightly paper and several times I found people I knew and would never see again. I was ‘on the inside’ of the establishment journalism and got to see firsthand how slick the censorship was engineered. I also got to send the daily cables off to each foreign reporter to tell them how their stories were handled, where they appeared in the paper, and what the competition (like the Washington Post, Newsday, and other papers were running with. At 5PM each day, the editors held a meeting where they decided on the placement of each story in the paper and how much space would be given to each of the news divisions. The main groups were Metro, National and Foreign News and they always competed for the best spots and most column inches in the day’s paper. My job was to write a summary of each reporter’s story in their own writing style and send them to the Foreign Editor who would bring them to the meeting to support the request for placement and size. This was actually not an easy job since many of the reporters were given their jobs based more on their ability to get the news than on their ability to write about it. We had a reporter in the Middle East named Dana Adams Schmidt who couldn’t write a complete sentence if his life depended on it. Whenever he filed, the word went out… “…another load of Schmidt…”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E1DD1039F935A1575BC0A962958260

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 4^th or 5^th 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…