How to Read Newsweek
Grant, James
"How to Read Newsweek" (Baltimore) JOURNALISM Is AN inherently imperfect craft. To write on deadline is to understand the elusiveness of truth. There is never enough time or knowledge, it seems. Facts, the journalist's...
...Competence is the newsman's standard, not perfection, and the most demanding test of competence is convincing those who know first-hand...
...The people of Baltimore would not let our city become paralyzed," proclaimed Mayor Schaefer, and the mayor was right, Newsweek's Mr...
...That vote bound every union member, including the sanitation men, The garbage, of course, .,was not "piled everywhere...
...In parts there should have been some qualifying words," he said, "but I'm not prepared to agree that it was all that inaccurate...
...These might have been flukes, but how can we be sure...
...Bruno, prior to my call and his own check with New York, had never heard of the incident...
...radical unionists spoke of 'shutting down the whole goddam city to get our demands,' and a protest rally at city hall triggered twelve arrests by policemen with nightsticks flailing...
...Bruno pointed out that Newsweek confessed its sins to inquiring reporters as soon as the article ran...
...It was also a proud city, having surviveu and functioned for two weeks in the absence of key government services...
...Lou Panos, a Baltimore Evening Sun columnist who first exposed the story, reported then that an explanation "is expected to be printed in the next issue in the form of an editor's note replying to a letter from a reader...
...Bruno, who that week directed the magaz'ine's reporting in Maryland, agreed that the story, in places, was exaggerated...
...There was no siege, of course...
...Facts, the journalist's bane and glory, pass from source to reporter to editor, from one sieve to the next, and so to the printed page...
...That stringer, Mr...
...It's just about crazy now.' Sanity returned at the weekend, with tentative settlements of both strikes...
...State police, who were called in as a show of force, assisted in quelling racial trouble (in an area that had experienced it long before the police strike...
...The claim "the streets were safe only for looters, muggers and the ever-burgeoning population of rats" is a fabrication...
...A magazine does not rise or fall on two articles...
...Baltimore was undoubtedly a shaken city as the strike reached a close...
...Sprawling heaps of garbage," which suggests a city awash in swill, is the phrase of an unbridled imagination...
...the strike lasted only two weeks...
...Most of Baltimore, including the downtown business district, was left unscathed...
...Even though about half the force remained on duty, looting and vandalism broke out all over the city, police bands were jammed by calls, one suspected looter was killed by a nonstriking policeman and on Friday state police had to be called in to quell an outbreak of racial violence, Jail guards,city zoo keepers, and janitors for the public schools were refusing to cross the growing number of picket lines...
...And when gross inaccuracy is joined by willful distortion, a journal no longer deserves to be read...
...The' correction never appeared...
...The hapless pederast, alas, was not in fact from Maryland...
...Indeed, no sickness has been directly linked to the strike...
...But, it does not explain why Newsweek proceeded so boldly with information it had not been able to verify...
...The next night," Newsweek concluded, "police themselves went on strike for higher pay...
...Garbage accumulated in parts of the city, but private enterprise and the public's cooperation kept much of Baltimore clean...
...It was the wrong thing to do," Hal Bruno, Newsweek's deputy bureau chief in Washington, conceded recently...
...Newsweek relied on a "stringer," a part-time correspondent in Baltimore, for most of its information on the strike...
...the streets were safe only for muggers, looters and the ever-burgeoning population of rats...
...If they had just said 'a politician' and let it go at that, it would have been okay...
...In the reader's eye, truth is indivisible...
...July 22) on the Baltimore police and garbage strike...
...the public-health officer warned of an outbreak of bubonic plague...
...That helps explain some of the errors...
...This city will go crazy,' said one East Baltimore woman...
...For these sound if provincial reasons, I have renounced Newsweek magazine...
...Robert E. Farber, ruled out the near-term possibility of plague...
...On June 30, the day before the garbage men bolted, Local 44 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO) voted to accept a one-year contract providing wage increases of 5'/z percent...
...That "about half the force remained on duty" seems to have been true for the first night of the police strike...
...It was a city under siege,"Newsweek began, "Sprawling heaps of garbage sent a sickening stench into the humid midsummer air...
...I don't think it was done for a malicious reason,'' he added...
...To this charge, the stringer—one of The Sun's best reporters —pleads guilty...
...But Baltimore was a shaken city, and a pall of smoke from the burning garbage still hung over the sweltering streets...
...Perhaps the reporters thought the Free State so corrupt that no one would notice...
...That story, which appeared on April 30, 1973, concerned male prostitution and included the following sentences: "One Maryland politician who had run for office on a law and order platform was collared recently while prowling for boys in the Times Square area...
...The mayor did not declare that negotiations had reached "the bottom line...
...It might be noted, too, that the gestation period for rats is twenty-five days...
...The city coped for a while: a volunteer squad of several hundred white-collar trash men supplemented private haulers, and the remaining heaps were sprayed with chlorine to keep the smell down and the rats away...
...A reporter and writer chose the wrong means to protect a confidential source...
...That, at least, is how the same quotation appeared in The Sun...
...the city's jails and schools were undermanned...
...Newsweek's account of the initial walk-out is inaccurate and incomplete...
...Sanity returned at the weekend," a phrase which appears in the final paragraph, directly contradicts the last sentence in the second paragraph: "And for the crisis-weary residents of Baltimore, there was no end in sight last week...
...Newsweek, however, did spell Mayor Schaefer's name correctly...
...And last year, in another article referring to Maryland, Newsweek deliberately distorted the truth...
...Accompanying the article was a dramatic picture of Negroes looting a store...
...Nor did the city's resistance perceptibly weaken as the strike wore on...
...The city had offered a wage increase of 5.5,percent, but it wasn't enough—and last week the garbage was piled everywhere...
...If a story about Baltimore is wrong, how can a Baltimorean believe what he reads about Watergate...
...Looting and vandalism did erupt after news spread of the police walk-out, but the damage was localized...
...Newsweek says it does not know...
...He once promised to build ^ boys' home in his state,' recalls Manhattan patrolman Anthony Mercaldi...
...A strike by some of the city's sanitationmen started it all three weeks ago, after Mayor William D. Schaefer declared wage negotiations had reached the bottom line," the story continued...
...The people responsible for this have had their error pointed out to them and have been warned it had better not happen again...
...It was with intense disappointment thatThe Sun (Baltimore) discovered the truth...
...one of them was intended that way...
...A week before Newsweek went to press, the public-health officer, Dr...
...Yet within eighteen months, two Newsweek stories I had firsthand knowledge about turned out to be false...
...Willful distortion is a grave charge to make against a journal that purportedly deals in fact, yet Newsweek itself admits the truth of the charge...
...A mistake was made...
...Newsweek again refused to qualify its claims...
...Bruno said, neglected to call the magazine prior to deadline in order to check the finished story against the facts he submitted...
...The confessions, however, were evidently offered sotto voce...
...They were not, however, summoned specifically for that assignment...
...But in last week's soaring temperatures, tempers also ran high...
...In two hours of reporting that night for The Sun, I did not see a single act of looting...
...Newsweek's most recent assault on Maryland was its story ("The Dump...
...Why any state...
...An account of the two-week strike by Baltimore municipal workers (July 1-15) was so sensationalized that it missed the point of what really happened here...
...As Newsweek explained it, the story's authors felt bound to protect the politician's identity, so they tacked the name Maryland to his, Why Maryland...
...The "East Baltimore woman" Newsweek quoted is probably a woman who happened to be standing on East Baltimore street...
...And for the crisis-weary residents of Baltimore, there was no end in sight last week...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
