Publishing Industry Including Newspapering – Page 4

A Good Life

The Book of the Week is “A Good Life, Newspapering and Other Adventures” by Ben Bradlee, published in 1995.

The author was a descendant of a prominent Boston Brahmin family. Unsurprisingly, his older brother and he both graduated from Harvard; never mind their grades. Then, in the middle of WWII, he was stationed on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific.

After surviving the war, Bradlee and the first of his three wives moved to New Hampshire. He was an integral part of a small, regional Sunday-only newspaper until its demise. Subsequent to that, the Washington Post hired him the first of two times at the tail end of 1948.

Bradlee was at Newsweek when John Kennedy was elected president. Kennedy got along with the press famously, like an old, dear friend. In August 1965, Bradleee became managing editor of the Washington Post. “The newsroom was racist… the mind-set of the Post made the editors ask how much an assignment cost, instead of how much the paper needed the story.” Case in point: The Post was (inexcusably) nearly a week late in reporting on the Watts riots.

Newspapermen at that time had five deadlines a day– in determining which stories would be printed in the morning and evening editions, which story would be on page one, etc. Needless to say, Bradlee’s never-ending work meant he never saw his family. Especially after the Washington Post continued publishing installments of the Pentagon Papers in the summer of 1971, after the New York Times was legally banned from doing so. Not that the Post wasn’t banned, but it was willing to go to the mat for the principle of a free press.

Political turmoil was next on the agenda, with the Watergate break-in, on which the inimitable pair Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did a thorough investigation and engaged in bold, ongoing disclosure. Bradlee wrote, “The denials exploded all around us all day like incoming artillery shells.” Bob Dole accused the Democrat, liberal-leaning Post of knowingly helping George McGovern’s campaign by alleging that Nixon committed crimes as part of his reelection campaign. The president was a bit resentful of the intrusion on his activities. Just a bit. Bradlee thought it likely that personally and professionally, his own phones were being tapped and he would be subjected to a rigorous IRS audit.

In May 1973, not to be outdone in pettiness, vengefulness and meanness of spirit, Nixon insinuated to the author and others that their lives were in the balance for turning the screws on him. “All of these lies were on-the-record lies, before television cameras, before reporters, on the telephone, before large audiences, in a generation of Washington reporters generally considered by every generation of editors to be the finest reporters in the land.” People complained that the Post would never have investigated JFK the same way it did Nixon, because the liberal media always went after Republicans only, never Democrats. In recent decades, that changed, but the lying has increased, too.

Read the book to learn more about Bradlee’s families, of a dishonest Post employee, and other challenges the author faced. In sum, “…there is really no protection against a skillful liar, who has earned the trust of his or her editors. That is equally true of business, law, medicine, all professions.”

Partisans

The Book of the Week is “Partisans” by David Laskin, published in 2000. This book describes the soap-opera lives of a few of New York’s literati from the 1930’s into the 1970’s; specifically those associated with the left-wing publication “Partisan Review.” The relationships of the people described therein were like those of tabloid celebrities. They had alcohol-related physical fights, breakups and reconciliations with their multiple significant others. However, they considered themselves superior to others because they were literate.

This included promiscuous Vassar graduate Mary McCarthy, who, for a spell, shacked up with Philip Rahv, the journal’s editor. In early 1938, she left him to wed Edmund Wilson, more than a decade her senior. “Philip Rahv and Allen Tate… had a gift for spotting new talent… and sleeping with the discoveries when they were attractive females (sometimes the same females…)” In his lifetime, poet Robert Lowell had to deal with the traumas of mental illness and his parents’ deaths.

The women writers in those days, for whom it was customary to attach themselves to men, being female– were forced to confront the issues of “… power, money, work, prestige, sex, domestic labor, body image and freedom.”

Read the book to learn more about the lives and times, books, articles and poetry penned by other “New York intellectuals” too, such as Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Caroline Gordon and Diana Trilling.

This Just In

The Book of the Week is “This Just In, What I Couldn’t Tell You On TV” by Bob Schieffer, published in 2003.

The author started his journalism career at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the dawn of the 1960’s. Later, he covered the overnight shift police beat. In those days, there was no security in the detectives’ office. He and people off the street could roam the station at will. Before Miranda Rights, reporters frequently recorded the confessions of suspects because they could type and the cops couldn’t.

Schieffer got his wish to go to Vietnam to cover the war in 1964, before it became controversial. During more than four months, he rooted out and interviewed all of the soldiers from Texas, hitching rides on military helicopters. President Lyndon Johnson was also from Texas, so the author trusted him when he initiated fighting in order to nip Communism in the bud and keep neighboring states from it, too.

The author later changed his mind when he saw how extremely inefficient it was to have tens of U.S. troops searching for one or two Viet Cong guerrillas per day in rural areas. He also saw how the teenage South Vietnamese would-be ragtag soldiers recruited by the Americans, refused to help the U.S fight. Stateside, he was sent to cover countless anti-war protests. At that time, protestors were expressing their feelings about a super-controversial situation in their country that was a matter of life-and-death.

In 1966, the author started to anchor TV news in Fort Worth. At the time, the screening of primitive newsreels was the norm. Next came CBS radio news in Washington, D.C. in 1969. Washington’s real beats consisted of the White House, State Department, Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Schieffer’s station chief expected his news gatherers to be on call 24/7, so CBS became the network that covered the government best.

However, President Richard Nixon held sway over the FCC. Negative news about the president was censored, because the agency had the power to revoke the licenses of TV stations.

In 1971, Nixon’s childish aides had nothing better to do than generate a blizzard of memos pouncing on every little negative thing that the press reported on the president, or memos on issues they failed to cover. Ironically, there was no security at the Pentagon– most of the building was open to the public. Anyway, the aides also did phony letter-writing to the networks with exaggerated complaints about slanted coverage, and had praise for the Nixon administration.

In 1972, during George McGovern’s presidential campaign, it was found that “Man-on-the street interviews are notoriously inaccurate gauges of public sentiment…” Broadcasting news on the traveling candidate was quite cumbersome. In those days, two reporters were at every campaign stop– one to get the story and the other to go get the film developed. Another fun factoid– the campaign plane served whiskey and food to the news crews, paid for by the networks.

THE AUTHOR HAD PEOPLE TELL HIM THEY THOUGHT A GOOD BUSINESSMAN COULD “… STRAIGHTEN OUT THE GOVERNMENT IN NO TIME…” The author disagreed. Sure, the positions of CEO and president both require leadership skills. However, a business and a government have different goals. THE GOAL OF GOVERNMENT OUGHT TO BE PUBLIC SERVICE, NOT MONEY-MAKING AND THE ACQUISITION OF POWER. All too often, elected officials forget what they were supposed to have been taught in high school civics class. They go astray. And a leopard doesn’t usually change its spots. Businessmen are usually once and always.

That’s why business leaders are less than ideal candidates for government. Besides, the 535 members of Congress make up a very diverse group of individuals who bear listening to, unlike a small board of directors- who are less likely to disagree.

Even when journalists are not under duress to slant their reporting, they have confirmation bias– hearing and seeing what they want to– which is “… the easiest and most destructive habit that a reporter can fall into and has probably caused more stories to be missed than any other single thing.”

Read the book to learn other pearls of wisdom from Schieffer. His decades-long career included experiences in the newspaper, radio and TV trenches covering crime, war and politics– which in some cases, were and still are, one and the same. 🙂

Iphigene

The Book of the Week is “Iphigene, Memoirs of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger of The New York Times Family” by Susan W. Dryfoos, published in 1979. This is the life and times of a New York Times heiress, as told to Dryfoos– her granddaughter.

Iphigene was an only child in a wealthy family. Her father was a highly successful newspaper publisher, having turned around The Times upon his purchase of it in 1896. “While the other New York papers fought a ruthless and unscrupulous battle for circulation by means of outrageous headlines and sensational stories, The Times sought to expand readership with sober and comprehensive reporting.”

In 1898, The Times faced stiff competition from the tabloids that sent their reporters on location to the Spanish-American war front. Iphigene’s father, Adolph Simon Ochs, dropped the price of his paper from 3 cents to 1 cent instead of making up inflammatory war stories.

The paper maintained its integrity and avoided conflicts of interest under Ochs . For instance, he claimed to refuse to accept gifts from, or print laudatory stories, about advertisers.

Iphigene was born in September 1892. Suffering from then-undiagnosed dyslexia, she was beset with poor grades although her schooling was the best that money could buy. Nevertheless, Iphigene studied for Barnard College’s entrance exams. At that time, the school had a two-year program for students whose academic abilities were less than stellar, but were eager to learn. She wrote, “I found the atmosphere of the school congenial, the students friendly and the teachers excellent…” Iphigene passed additional exams in order to upgrade to the four-year program, enabling her to graduate in 1914 with a degree in economics.

The Times went beyond the call in covering WW I. Its daily circulation between 1914 and 1919 rose to 170,000. Iphigene wed a man who eventually proved himself equal to the task of publishing The Times as competently as her father did. In 1944, he had the company purchase the New York radio station WQXR.

Read the book to learn much more information on what Iphigene did for various communities in New York City in various areas including parks and education; her global travels during which she met various politicians and dignitaries, and her impressions of them.

Rebel Without Applause

The Book of the Week is “Rebel Without Applause” by Jay Landesman, published in 1987. This ebook-autobiography has a few slightly distracting misspellings, but reveals the zeitgeist of Landesman’s generation.

Landesman was born in 1920. The talents of the author and his two brothers and sister differed considerably. Thus, he and his siblings got along well, as they weren’t in competition. However, his mother had control issues, so his parents opened separate antique shops; his mother in St Louis, and his father in Houston.

Landesman became distracted from the family business, and got into magazine publishing in New York. He co-founded “Neurotica”– launched in March 1948. The publication contained articles of famous writers’ anxieties to which readers could relate. Sex was a taboo topic of discussion but violence was all the rage.

In 1949, Landesman dared to ask for a divorce from his first wife. Describing himself as a “respectable Jewish boy” he later met someone new, who had looked up his family in “Dun & Bradstreet”– the keeper of the data in those days.

Landesman had two sons with his second wife, Fran. Their wealth allowed them to hire a nanny. “We were like any other ordinary American family enjoying the Ed Sullivan Show. Instead of a six-pack, we shared a couple of joints.”

Read the book to learn of what later transpired with the author’s second wife, about their collaboration on theater productions, his relationship with Lenny Bruce, and where the family moved to and why.

Daring

The Book of the Week is “Daring” by Gail Sheehy, published in 2014. This is the autobiography of an American writer best known for authoring the book Passages in the 1970’s.

Sheehy, a feminist, achieved great success in her life as a wife and mother with a career. That life was dripping with irony; in her 20’s, Sheehy attached herself to a powerful man– Clay Felker– co-founder of New York magazine. He initially provided her with the professional and personal life she would never have had otherwise. They had an on-and-off relationship for sixteen years prior to their marriage, during which she insisted on having a period of separation because she thought she needed time to grow on her own. She took advantage of numerous opportunities and worked hard throughout her life. However, she was still a product of her time, pressured by society to get herself a man in order to feel whole. As an aside, she established a credit history only in her late thirties(!)

Numerous people the author knew were experimenting with “open marriages.” She observed that those relationships usually erupted in “savage jealousies.” She had had a starter marriage with a doctor-in-training prior to meeting Felker. She was in her mid-30’s when she happened to hit upon a subject that struck a nerve– the different stages of life of American women. At the time, only men were examining the life stages of only their own gender.

Nobody showed up at the author’s first signing of Passages at the independent bookstore Brentano’s in Greenwich Village. In spring 1976, months later, the book hit #1 in the New York Times Book Review. Her friends and colleagues got jealous. “Writer friends now saw me as competition; if I was on the bestseller list, I had stolen their rightful slot.”

This book becomes a bit tedious at times, but the author’s descriptions of her life’s events and minutiae are part of her identity as a Northeastern elitist. For decades, she owned a summer house in the Hamptons, with a trampoline, swimming pool, herb garden, wisteria and linden tree. Her spacious New York apartment had a terrace. Through the years, she and her friends ate at fancy restaurants. She employed a maid and a nanny. She attended countless parties for philanthropic causes.

Nevertheless, read the book to learn how Sheehy coped with the passages in her life.

Prisoner of X

The Book of the Week is “Prisoner of X” by Allan MacDonell, published in 2006. This ebook is a career memoir of an employee of the pornographic media empire of Larry Flynt. It might be recalled that Flynt was a champion of free speech, especially when it came to the dissemination of pornographic materials.

The main publication of Flynt’s empire is Hustler magazine, introduced in July 1974. Flynt established his own distribution networks for his magazines. This did not sit well with an organized crime group, which allegedly pumped a few bullets into Flynt’s body, rendering him a paraplegic in March 1978.

In the early 1980’s, MacDonell finally got a chance to work for the esteemed Flynt. Early in his career, he admittedly had trouble with substance abuse, partaking daily of one or more of the following: “… social opiates, medicinal cocaine, recreational painkillers or mandatory alcohol.”

In the late 1990’s after former president Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions had been revealed, MacDonell supervised the research that was to expose the sexual indiscretions of the American politicians who had criticized the philandering Clinton.

Read the book to learn the details of why Flynt deliberately reveled in playing the role of attention whore, the kinds of characters who peopled his organization, and the author’s own love life, interspersed with unsavory anecdotes of the behind-the-scenes goings-on in publicizing the skin trade.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets

The Book of the Week is “Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets” by Laura Kasinof, published in 2014.

This ebook’s American author fell into a freelance journalism career. Fluent in Arabic, she is passionate about the Middle East. She had written freelance articles while witnessing unrest in Cairo in the single-digit 2000’s. She had cultivated contacts in the community in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, and was one of only a few correspondents in the country when anti-government violence erupted in the spring of 2011.

Although very suspenseful, this ebook (perhaps translated from Arabic?) was also edited sloppily. This blogger takes issue with a few misspellings (like “Marriot”), more than a few awkward prepositions and typos like “it” instead of “in,” misplaced words here and there, and sexist content. The author, in her mid-twenties, still calls herself and other grown women “girls.” She also uses the term “stewardess” (!) rather than “flight attendant.”

Read the book to learn about Yemeni culture in everyday life in peace and in war, the author’s appearance on a hit TV show, her abduction and other traumatic episodes, how she came to feel an exaggerated sense of self-importance, became desensitized and came to feel invulnerable to the bullets and shells flying around her, and the attitude of the people toward the installation of a new regime in Yemen.

The Zeroes

The Book of the Week is “The Zeroes” by Randall Lane, published in 2010. This is the author’s personal account of his adventures in the magazine publishing business in the single-digit 2000’s.

Lane describes in detail, his mostly bad experiences with some of the world’s wealthiest people. They were the subjects of articles and ranked in lists in the magazines published by his company, Doubledown. They were mostly greedy Wall Street traders. He was obligated to throw lavish parties for them (paid for by his company) to sell advertising and subscriptions. He was pressured to write nice things about them, or have them pull their ads.

The author and his business partner also got caught up in the spirit of the times, which valued material possessions and growth financed through a staggering debt burden. He started a wine-tasting club, and a wristwatch club. He writes, “Character, focus, patience– all get sacrificed when you’re starved for 100% growth.” He organized events to raise money for non-profits. When an event’s promotional materials stated, “… a portion of the proceeds will go to charity” that usually meant 1 or 2%.

Read this suspenseful, eloquently written book to learn how the author and his company fared when the financial services sector got its comeuppance in 2008. Here’s a hint: “In all, 1,471 hedge funds closed their doors in 2008, with dozens more failing in 2009.”

A Matter of Opinion

The Book of the Week is “A Matter of Opinion” by Victor S. Navasky, published in 2005. This tome details the decades the author has spent working at the more than 150-year old, politically left-wing weekly opinion journal, The Nation.

Typical for a publication of its nature, The Nation, as of the book’s writing, had turned a profit for only three fiscal years of its existence. It is supposed to have for-profit status. During their histories, all such journals that derive most of their revenue from subscribers and a little from advertising, consider becoming a non-profit organization. The major traits of non-profits include: the ability to accept tax-deductible contributions, lower postage costs, and the fact that they are prohibited from endorsing political candidates and are restricted in their lobbying of lawmakers.

The Nation has been a party to various lawsuits in connection with defamation, intellectual property and free speech issues. One of its goals is to expose the truth about the activities of the American government. Navasky wrote, “… claims of national security are all too often a cloak for government lies, cover-ups, and bureaucratic disinformation.” Started in 1979, one suit brought by Harper & Row dragged on for years over The Nation’s releasing a story on President Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon prior to the release of Ford’s new book; Harper & Row spent an estimated $250,000, but it was seeking damages of $12,500.

In 1989, the tiny, financially struggling Nation wrote a satirical letter to Time, Inc., the target of hostile corporate takeover offers by Gulf + Western and Paramount with an offer of its own. It said, “… we can do better than Paramount’s $175 per share offer… our plan is to pledge the assets of Time, Inc. as collateral on the loan we take out to buy you so cash will be no problem for us.”

Read the book to learn of Navasky’s stories on all the issues involving the running of an opinion journal in the Twentieth Century, into the early years of the Twenty-First Century.