I was born a bastard and I have remained one throughout my life. I became a journalist.
A bastard in the vulgar sense of being unpopular or disagreeable is not a serious handicap in that sometimes unpleasant and too often poorly paid profession.
Most of us have watched movies or television shows portraying journalists as drunks, headline-hunting sadists, crime solvers, self-seekers and lady-killers, but never have I seen one portrayed as a comic, a role both reporters and editors sometimes inadvertently play.
Never, for instance, have I seen a film showing a reporter accidentally plunging his hand into three-foot high, uncut 100th anniversary cake at a formal dinner as one Buffalo Courier-Express reporter did when I worked there later in my career.
For the most part, newspaper stories are written hurriedly by an overburdened journalist with no time for reflection or rewriting. As a result, sometimes reporters and their editors are embarrassed by what appears in print. I have in mind a correction of a story when I worked on New Haven paper. The original story was about a local man who had been hospitalized on returning from an African safari.
Thousands of readers the next morning read the following complete account:
“Yesterday’s edition incorrectly stated that John Mitchell has returned to his home on Orange Avenue. Mitchell, who was bitten by a dragon, is recovering in New Haven Hospital.”
Startling as the statement was to readers, given time to reflect, the reporter might have added that the dragon in the story was the African name for a particular insect. Or, perhaps, she did and the sentence was cut for space.
There are many stories told among newsmen about the foibles and eccentrics of their fellow journalists. When I began my career as a journalist, the profession was still peopled by older reporters who lacked a college degree and pounded out stories with two fingers on manual typewriters. They were often colorful people and the best of them could write a good story. The lack of a degree often meant that reporters instinctively wrote in the lively vernacular of the mass of their readers. They wrote about, instead of the wordy and awkward “in reference to.” They knew the use of active verbs make a story fly. Fleeing men or women ran, they didn’t escape on foot; they hoped, they weren’t hopeful.
Today, newspapers too often are less readable and interesting because reporters and editors increasingly use the dull and awkwardly worded language of official reports and bureaucrats. Even the atrocious and nonsensical description of “preowned” rather than used car is creeping into news stories. If a car isn’t owned why not just take it?
And with important news instantly available to the average person over the air waves or the internet, the major original purpose of a newspaper —to provide news of an event before the reader is aware of it — has gone. In fact it began to be supplanted nearly 100 years ago when Pittsburgh radio station KDKA announced the news that Warren G. Harding had beaten James Cox for presidency of the United States. Long before their newspaper is delivered, people know that airplanes have struck the Twin Towers, that a hurricane has devastated New Orleans, a local or national figure has been elected or that a celebrity has been convicted or found innocent by a jury. And yet newspapers often read as though they are surprising readers with news that everyone has heard over and over.
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