| Description |
PAPERS AS SEEN BY PRO'S AND OTHERS was not apologetic, but attempting to explain in simplistic terms what confronts newsmen, both weekly and daily, as they write a late-breaking story: "A reporter on deadline is like a cook trying to prepare a complicated dinner that has to be on the table at precisely seven-thirty. Twenty-three ingredients are required to make the entree, but the cook has only nineteen of them, and six of those are wrong. It's no good telling the guests to come back tomorrow evening. Dinner will be served. As they say in the trade, 'Go with what you've got.' The surprise is not that the dinner is imperfect but that it gets to the table at all." Andrews follows with the admonition, "Readers would do well to develop a bit of patience with newspaper coverage. It frequently takes more than one pass to get a story nailed down properly." To which most practitioners of the art of news-gathering will add, Amen! Long ago ~ enough so that the treatise was reprinted in the program of Utah State Press Association's 1921 convention -- Dr. Frank Crane wrote a meditative analysis he titled The Journalist. His words: "/ am the journalist. I sit as the watcher upon the heights and look with calm eyes over all the activities of men. I do not judge. I record. I do not praise or blame. I tell. "I am the world become vocal. I am the utterance of humanity. I am progress self-conscious. I am as a white searchlight upon a tower. I run my gigantic eye to and fro above the city. My ray is unescapable. "When my beam is turned upon the doings of the wicked there is a mighty scampering, as when an old piece of plank is upturned in a summer field the myriad white insects scatter, seeking the protective darkness they love. "Wrongdoers dread me more than they dread courts, policemen and prison. For I do not condemn. I simply tell. "The ethics of my profession may be told in one word - truth. My integrity must be as the virtue of women - above price. No man can buy my light. No man can buy my silence. "I am not in the thick of affairs. I sit above them. I have nothing to do with your stock market, your business, your politics, your religion, your organizations and institutions - except to 405 |
