When Does Journalistic Self-Restraint Kick In?

1/18/2015

Copy desks are more inclusive today than in 1978, but they continue to keep herd on reporters.

As I sit here typing my little therapy blog – not in classic blogger underwear, I promise – I am supervised by a phalanx of editors.

They perch over my shoulder, the ghosts of deadlines past, monitoring my every whimsy.

Before I can push the “Submit” button on my site, I must satisfy editors who kept me tethered for all those decades.

They suggest temperate phrases like “alleged” and “so-called” and “was said to be” for assertions I cannot totally back up.

“You need to do this over,” I can hear Jack Mann or Bob Waters snarling at me in Marine patois when I was learning to play the game right at Newsday.

“Ummm, that doesn’t read like Vecsey,” I can still hear a Times national-desk editor named Tom Wark saying to me about a long profile of a bank robber who had earned a degree behind thick federal walls. “Could you run it through the typewriter again?” What a wonderful compliment.

“Ummm, could you make a few more phone calls?” I can hear Metro copy-fixers like Marv Siegel and Dan Blum, or Bill Brink in Sports, saving me more than once.

And early on Saturday mornings, right on deadline for my Sunday column, I would get a careful final read from the superb Patty LaDuca (about to retire, for goodness’ sakes.)

When I am talking to journalism students, one of my main points is that if you have an editor supervising your work, you are actually participating in journalism. But if you expect your precious words to appear in print just the way you wrote them, you are merely a blogger.

Editors keep you from making an ass of yourself. And sometimes the best editor is….yourself.

I was thinking about editors a month or two ago when a major movie studio allowed “The Interview” to come out with the premise of the dictator of North Korea having his head blown off. Charming. The self-indulgent director waved the “creative freedom” flag, and the studio heads folded, with predictable world-wide tremors.

Movie directors and producers could use a reality check from an editor – “Ummm, could you look that up?” -- when making films like “Selma” and “Lincoln,” as Maureen Dowd pointed out on Sunday.

More recently, a weekly satire magazine in France published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, touching off horrible violence around the world – violence that surely had been waiting to be fomented by opportunistic lunatics. Then the staff came back with another cartoon of the prophet.

Was any of that necessary? Journalists have this implanted in their brains at an early age, by editors. What are the consequences? What does the other side say?

Those of us who learned to present all sides – to make a few more phone calls – are lucky. So are the people who read (or watch, or listen to) those increasingly rare sources.

(I don't count Stewart or Colbert. I am talking about their sources. That is, journalists.)

* * *

One of the most rational posts on the Charlie Hebdo issue is by Omid Safi, the director of Duke University's Islamic Studies Center, for that great site, onbeing.org.

http://onbeing.org/blog/9-points-to-ponder-on-the-paris-shooting-and-charlie-hebdo/7193

And here are a few others:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/arts/an-attack-chills-satirists-and-prompts-debate.html?_r=0

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/charlie-hebdo-shooting

Steve Zivin

1/20/2015 03:31:48 pm

Hi George,
Great book. You discuss your heritage in the first few pages. You might be interested that you can spit in a vial and find out your ancestry (Irish, Hungarian, fraction Jewish, etc) for $99 these days. 23andme is the most well known company.

George Vecsey

1/21/2015 01:20:39 am

Steve, thanks, you mean my World Cup book?
Yeah, it is interesting to have half of my ancestry unknown (via my father's adoption)....
I get some great mail from Hungarians, some sending me novels in English or even mentions of the generals, violinists, etc. with my name. Very proud of that.
I'm good with my Irish EU passport (via my grandmother) and my mom's English upbringing and our Irish-Belgian relatives. I figure we all go back to common sources anyway. As the great Iris DeMent wrote in a song: "Let the Mystery Be."
Thanks so much,
GV

Altenir Silva

1/21/2015 09:18:37 am

Dear George,

I loved this sentence: "one of my main points is that if you have an editor supervising your work, you are actually participating in journalism. But if you expect your precious words to appear in print just the way you wrote them, you are merely a blogger."

I'll save it in my box of good thoughts.

Thanks!

Best - Altenir

George Vecsey

1/21/2015 10:13:03 am

Altenir, thanks, nothing wrong with being a blogger. One of the great developments of the new technology. A luddite like me can actually select photos....But the voice of an editor is what distinguishes.
thanks, man
GV

Altenir Silva

1/21/2015 11:32:04 am

Dear George,

Surely, my friend. The blogs are the main tools of freedom of speech. Here in Brazil some journalists say that only the owners of newspapers have freedom of speech.

Best - Altenir

Altenir Silva

1/22/2015 08:47:53 am

Dear George,

I know that this don't have nothing with the subject, but your sentence - that I love so much - remind me the movie of Alan J. Pakula "All the President's Men" written by William Goldman based in the book of Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward. I think this film has inspired many to follow journalism.

Have a good weekend, my friend.

Best - Altenir

George Vecsey

1/22/2015 10:55:49 am

Altenir, thank you. It's true. Having a powerful presence like Bradlee running the show gives a reporter confidence, but also the caution of knowing somebody is watching and will not allow rash words or ideas.
That is the voice -- maybe it's also called conscience -- that should guide everybody. Not just in journalism. Best, George

Altenir Silva

1/22/2015 11:09:50 am

Dear George,

Great thought about the theme. It's wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Best - Altenir

John McDermott

1/22/2015 11:01:58 am

What you said about the value of having good editors applies equally to photographers. I am a measurably better photographer-and journalist-for having had great photo editors like Jim Kenney, John Whelan, Dave Wyland, Karen Mullarkey and others at Newsweek, Ted Theisen and John Dominis at SI, John Durniak and Arnold Drapkin at Time and others I could name.

As for the whole Charlie Hebdo story, I can't help thinking this: that the France I know is a place I can't imagine without it's multicultural mosaic. The two murderous brothers, rather than being Islamic scholars, were more likely to be a couple of the guys you see sitting around outside cafes all over France, drinking coffee and smoking and looking lost, or pissed off. But France, the real France of today, is the country whose national team won a World Cup led by one of those children of Algerian immigrants, who also happened to be the best player in the world for a time. The rest of the team was a highly functioning mixture of all the ethnicities and religions that constitute what France is today. I remember many of the great people working in support of the World Cup in France looked very much like the guys who murdered the Charlie Hebdo staff, the police and the people in the Jewish supermarket. THAT France is the one that I believe will overcome this horrible chapter, that won't sacrifice its principles to the extent we in the USA did after 9/11, and will be an example to the rest of us, showing how people of different backgrounds can happily coexist if they just show each other love and respect instead of fear and hatred.

George Vecsey

1/23/2015 01:08:46 am

John, great to hear from you. Totally agree with you about France. Paris and Lyon and Marseilles have been layered as long as I've been going there. We have been saved from starvation driving through the countryside on a Sunday evening when a Vietnamese family kept their pho shop open -- and the many ethnic layers all around. That 1998 French team (despite what the LePens said) was a monument to an evolving country -- I delineate all the ethnic roots in my soccer book. France has to do a better job. So does Germany. Then again, so does the USA. As a friend of ours, who worked in Brussels and Rome, said the other night, if young men could afford a wife or a girl friend, they'd be a lot happier. She is right.
Best to you both, GV

John McDermott

1/23/2015 05:21:34 am

So true George. Just a little bit of personal success and recognition goes a long way. If Leo Burt had been four inches taller he'd have become an Olympic rower instead of a lifelong fugitive and one of the FBI's ten most wanted...(google Leo Burt, a guy from my hometown and a college classmate at Wisconsin).

omid safi

2/7/2015 01:00:13 pm

dear George, thank you so much for the kind words regarding my blog post which appears at OnBeing. You and I have a dear friend in common: your brother Chris, who was a much beloved colleague of mine for the years that I had the privilege of teaching at Colgate. Small world, indeed!

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

When Does Journalistic Self-Restraint Kick In?

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