Time, Newsweek, and Squeaky Newspeak
Methvin, Eugene H.
Eugene H. Methvin Time, Newsweek, and Squeaky Newspeak When Time and Newsweek both appeared with Mansonite "Squeaky" Fromme's face plastered over their covers, I thought, "Uh-oh. Those poor saps...
...Both magazines, indeed, re-examined thequestion in their next week's press sections...
...And you're the guys who put Patty Hearst on your covers two weeks after "Squeaky" and the very morning Sara Jane done her thing—arid you think you're not in the behavior modification business...
...In 1968, in the face of rising criticism after the Martin Luther King murder triggered an epidemic of outbreaks, news 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 editors did begin to "downplay" ghetto riots...
...those ten years old or older drew more often on idealistic fiction, history, religious literature, or public life...
...Hugh Downs of NBC's "Today" show elaborated the argument: "Social betterment is inherent in the journalistic goal of objectivity...
...and indeed, in modern America's case, that we have a relative absence of norms or moral standards...
...She really did not know who or what she was...
...We begin to wonder 'who we are.' " And if we happen to be Sara Jane, or "Squeaky" Fromme crying on Venicebeach after running away from home, we are ripe for any Charlie Manson or news-weekly cover that flutters by to solve our identity crisis...
...Failure to identify with some such group or groups condemns us to feelings of loneliness, alienation, and ineffectuality...
...Well, here's some hot news: Cinque and Miz Moon and that crowd did read Marighella —and they're really the ones editing your magazines...
...They're going to catch it for 'encouraging the nuts'—and then suppose somebody else really does take another crack at the Pride of Grand Rapids...
...What excuse can there be for supposedly sophisticated media managers to fail at this late date to realize their signal bombardments constitute crucial influences in the lives of a whole wandering tribe of ,"media freaks" ? And that these freaks' probable reactions should be weighed (perhaps not heavily, but certainly not lightly either) in decisions on editorial "play...
...Such liberals as St...
...She really did not know who or what she was...
...If you'd like to debate me on the point, first read Marighella...
...And intelligence officers for some foreign governments interested in subversion and social demolition realize it...
...You're just monkeys on the ends of their very long manipulation sticks...
...Hugh Downs of NBC's "Today" show elaborated the argument: "Social betterment is inherent in the journalistic goal of objectivity...
...and indeed, in modern America's case, that we have a relative absence of norms or moral standards...
...but the utopian denizen of Riesman's world turned into a dystopian monster in ours...
...One type, widespread in nineteenth-century America, is the "inner directed" personality, whose values and aspirations are implanted early in life by his parents or other elders and guide him through life like a psychic gyroscope...
...A repeat survey of 284 London school children aged seven to eleven from varied social settings showed choices from acquaintances or religion, history, and public life dropped to 6% for boysand 13% for girls...
...They create Marighella-style "action models" to appeal to and activate the suitably predisposed and violence-prone types like Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Bremer, Mark Essex, and Sara Jane 16X...
...It is surprising how frequently you get this kind of know-nothing response out of learned journalists who on other subjects can dissertate for hours upon social causalities and complexities that escape the unsophisticated eye...
...Those poor saps really are asking for it...
...This is a sobering realization that should inform the daily routine of every editor, newsman, and television programmer, since, after all, they have got to live here too...
...When sweet Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio asked Time editor Henry Grunewald, "If you put on the cover of Time the photograph of a Girl Scout who had raised $80,000 for multiple sclerosis, would that encourage people to do good deeds, do you think?'' he replied: "Very possibl\ Yet he went on to say, "Our chief business is to inform," and Newsweek editor Edward Kosner expressed essentially the same view...
...We begin to wonder 'who we are.' " And if we happen to be Sara Jane, or "Squeaky" Fromme crying on Venicebeach after running away from home, we are ripe for any Charlie Manson or news-weekly cover that flutters by to solve our identity crisis...
...Twenty-five years ago, in The Lonely Crowd, social psychologist David Ries-man gave us three categories of personality types, which I think can be useful in looking at the role of news reports...
...Do news reports "cause" or encourage riots...
...And readers dumped umbrage in the editors' mailbags...
...Thus mass media entertainment provided two-thirds of the 1965 generation's role models...
...Against this background the editors' decisions to plaster Squeaky Fromme's picture all over the nation on their covers was dangerously irresponsible...
...another 10% picked film stars and characters...
...By 1925 a survey of 1600 English youngsters showed a drop of roughly a third (to 20% for boys, 37% for girls) in those choosing as models acquaintances or historic, religious, or public figures...
...Finally, however strenuously they may have defended their "Squeaky" cover stories, neither Time nor Newsweek paid similar homage to Sara Jane...
...Do news editors in their decisonmaking roles inevitably have some causal responsibility for social phenomena ranging from street crime to decay of home and family to assassination attempts...
...children aged seven to fifteen asked them to name a person they knew, or of whom they had read or heard, that they would "most wish to be like...
...As a high school girl., she aspired to be a movie star, and told jeering peers they'd be sorry when she got to Hollywood and became famous...
...But Lynette Fromme made it...
...By refusing to become a conscious instrumentality of social control, journalism becomes, if you will, an unconscious instrumentality of social progress...
...In that light it seems purely ingenuous and simple-minded, albeit still culpable...
...Both magazines, indeed, re-examined thequestion in their next week's press sections...
...One of the most telling licks came on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, from none other than Clare Booth Luce, Henry's widow: "Elizabeth Seton, the first native American to be canonized as a saint, couldn't make the cover of Time...
...Whether the uprisings had run their course, or whether the less lavish coverage helped curb them, the change was perhaps a kind of guilty plea, and certainly a deliberate policy choice to try to "cool it...
...She went through three husbands and four marriages...
...It becomes comprehensible only when viewed within the frame of reference of ordinary know-nothing American journalists, untrained and unsophisticated in social psychology and the natural history of political extremism...
...These soulless souls wander in a psychic limbo between inner direction, other direction, and a future-shocked catatonic "autonomy...
...None other than Reuven Frank, NBC's top news boss, denounced me as some sort of Communist-minded censor, declaring that journalists should "refuse to be conscious instrumentalities of social control...
...What excuse can there be for supposedly sophisticated media managers to fail at this late date to realize their signal bombardments constitute crucial influences in the lives of a whole wandering tribe of ,"media freaks" ? And that these freaks' probable reactions should be weighed (perhaps not heavily, but certainly not lightly either) in decisions on editorial "play...
...John Rhodes (Arizona) and Sen...
...He becomes attentive to his peer group and to the symbolic environment...
...Fully 54% chose "pop" singers or TV characters or personalities...
...Durkheim's word, anomique, fits: an anxious awareness that the prevailing values of society have little or no personal relevance to one's condition...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 9 Eugene H. Methvin Time, Newsweek, and Squeaky Newspeak When Time and Newsweek both appeared with Mansonite "Squeaky" Fromme's face plastered over their covers, I thought, "Uh-oh...
...And, in their heart of hearts, most editors know full well that their decisions on what to report and emphasize have an impact...
...Disseminating truth is sufficient...
...One of her husbands was a Hollywood studio technician, but in her tall tales to people she wanted to impress, she made him a celebrated producer, just as her modest West Virginia beginnings became Southern aristocracy...
...On Capitol Hill, GOP leaders Rep...
...Do news reports "cause" or encourage riots...
...When sweet Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio asked Time editor Henry Grunewald, "If you put on the cover of Time the photograph of a Girl Scout who had raised $80,000 for multiple sclerosis, would that encourage people to do good deeds, do you think?'' he replied: "Very possibl\ Yet he went on to say, "Our chief business is to inform," and Newsweek editor Edward Kosner expressed essentially the same view...
...In one place where she worked as a bookkeeper for about a year, she listed at least 16 different surnames in various personnel files...
...Likewise, after the contagion of college closings following the 1970 Kent State massacre, student heliraising began to he shunted into smaller headlines, inside pages, and verbal summaries in place of full-screen action...
...A civilization that shuffles its heroes from the Biblical Joseph, David, and Jesus to John Lennon and Peter, Paul and Mary is performing dangerous brain surgery on itself...
...As a high school girl., she aspired to be a movie star, and told jeering peers they'd be sorry when she got to Hollywood and became famous...
...She went through three husbands and four marriages...
...Well, they caught it, and Sara Jane did take her potshot—and you can bet your sweet bippy life hasn't b...
...This is the typical response by news media whenever their coverage, handling, and news-play decisions arc criticized for encouraging violence and antisocial behavior...
...It is an old debate, closely tied to questions about news gathering and editorial selection, and the classic position of journaliists has been, in the words of Minneapolis Tribune editor Charles Bailey, that they are in the business of "reporting news," not that of "behavior modification...
...They're going to catch it for 'encouraging the nuts'—and then suppose somebody else really does take another crack at the Pride of Grand Rapids...
...Riesman defined his third category, the "autonomous" personality, only dimly, but he envisioned him as capable of choosing his goals and modulating his pace from a fully conscious view: "The goals, and drive toward them, [are] rational, non-authoritarian and noncompulsive...
...In 1902—the year Marconi signaled the letter "A" across the Atlantic, six years after Hearst and Pulitzer each printed one million newspapers in their Manhattan plants, the first such massing of a mega media audience in history—a survey of U.S...
...Clearly, here was the new man...
...They create such inviting images as the Marlboro wrangler, the Hathaway man, and the "Toni Twins" to shape consumer behavior...
...They're going to catch it for 'encouraging the nuts'—and then suppose somebody else really does take another crack at the Pride of Grand Rapids...
...And both, to no one's surprise, duly found themselves innocent...
...It exaggerates but a mite to say twentieth century technology replaced the Bible with the Beetles and James Bond...
...The society bombards the individual with a swirling, seemingly patternless set of alternatives...
...We can hardly blame Riesman, writing at the end of the second decade of radio broadcasting and "talkies," for not discerning what to us in the third decade of transcontinental television is painfully obvious...
...Nearly a third of the boys, and half the girls, named a parent, relative, friend, or neighbor...
...In one place where she worked as a bookkeeper for about a year, she listed at least 16 different surnames in various personnel files...
...Thus mass media entertainment provided two-thirds of the 1965 generation's role models...
...He is a creature of the pack and the mass media, more of a slave to the bombardment of signals coming from others...
...This is a sobering realization that should inform the daily routine of every editor, newsman, and television programmer, since, after all, they have got to live here too...
...Those poor saps really are asking for it...
...But in psychological fact, she was simply Sara Jane 16X, whatever identity she had an itch for this morning...
...Vide, Alvin Toffler: "The United States suffers from a kind of value vertigo...
...In 1968, as urban and campus riots were rising to epidemic levels, I suggested in a New Leader article that mediaexecutives have a duty to consider that any mass audience contains potentially dangerous levels of free-floating hate, violence, and lawlessness, ready to spill out when properly stimulated...
...The technosocieties are so large, and their complexities so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that it is only by plugging in to one or more of their subcults, that we maintain some sense of identity and contact with the whole...
...If you'd like to debate me on the point, first read Marighella...
...In that light it seems purely ingenuous and simple-minded, albeit still culpable...
...not a single elevenyear-old named an acquaintance as his role-model...
...By 1965 Megamedia Man was on the loose...
...Now we had a whole new pantheon: mass media celebrities...
...One of her husbands was a Hollywood studio technician, but in her tall tales to people she wanted to impress, she made him a celebrated producer, just as her modest West Virginia beginnings became Southern aristocracy...
...Likewise, after the contagion of college closings following the 1970 Kent State massacre, student heliraising began to he shunted into smaller headlines, inside pages, and verbal summaries in place of full-screen action...
...By 1925 a survey of 1600 English youngsters showed a drop of roughly a third (to 20% for boys, 37% for girls) in those choosing as models acquaintances or historic, religious, or public figures...
...Riesman defined his third category, the "autonomous" personality, only dimly, but he envisioned him as capable of choosing his goals and modulating his pace from a fully conscious view: "The goals, and drive toward them, [are] rational, non-authoritarian and noncompulsive...
...Vice President Nelson Rockefeller said, "Let's stop putting it on the front pages and on television...
...Disseminating truth is sufficient...
...You're just monkeys on the ends of their very long manipulation sticks...
...It is surprising how frequently you get this kind of know-nothing response out of learned journalists who on other subjects can dissertate for hours upon social causalities and complexities that escape the unsophisticated eye...
...Whether the uprisings had run their course, or whether the less lavish coverage helped curb them, the change was perhaps a kind of guilty plea, and certainly a deliberate policy choice to try to "cool it...
...In 1968, as urban and campus riots were rising to epidemic levels, I suggested in a New Leader article that mediaexecutives have a duty to consider that any mass audience contains potentially dangerous levels of free-floating hate, violence, and lawlessness, ready to spill out when properly stimulated...
...These soulless souls wander in a psychic limbo between inner direction, other direction, and a future-shocked catatonic "autonomy...
...In 1968, in the face of rising criticism after the Martin Luther King murder triggered an epidemic of outbreaks, news 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 editors did begin to "downplay" ghetto riots...
...Twenty-five years ago, in The Lonely Crowd, social psychologist David Ries-man gave us three categories of personality types, which I think can be useful in looking at the role of news reports...
...We can hardly blame Riesman, writing at the end of the second decade of radio broadcasting and "talkies," for not discerning what to us in the third decade of transcontinental television is painfully obvious...
...Second, more characteristic of the mid-twentieth century, is the "other directed" personality, who responds in early childhood to signals from a far wider circle than his parents...
...And readers dumped umbrage in the editors' mailbags...
...Such liberals as St...
...It is an old debate, closely tied to questions about news gathering and editorial selection, and the classic position of journaliists has been, in the words of Minneapolis Tribune editor Charles Bailey, that they are in the business of "reporting news," not that of "behavior modification...
...Though a ripe 46 years of age, she was still shopping in America's media cafeteria for an identity, until she happened to stumble on one—Presidential assassin, courtesy of "Squeaky" Fromme...
...Do news editors in their decisonmaking roles inevitably have some causal responsibility for social phenomena ranging from street crime to decay of home and family to assassination attempts...
...obeying this internal piloting, he is less independent than he seems...
...Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Marquis Childs, New York Timesman William V. Shannon, novelist Saul Bellow, and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz lambasted the "Squeaky" covers...
...Now we had a whole new pantheon: mass media celebrities...
...By refusing to become a conscious instrumentality of social control, journalism becomes, if you will, an unconscious instrumentality of social progress...
...Vice President Nelson Rockefeller said, "Let's stop putting it on the front pages and on television...
...Durkheim's word, anomique, fits: an anxious awareness that the prevailing values of society have little or no personal relevance to one's condition...
...John Rhodes (Arizona) and Sen...
...Second, more characteristic of the mid-twentieth century, is the "other directed" personality, who responds in early childhood to signals from a far wider circle than his parents...
...In 1902—the year Marconi signaled the letter "A" across the Atlantic, six years after Hearst and Pulitzer each printed one million newspapers in their Manhattan plants, the first such massing of a mega media audience in history—a survey of U.S...
...but the utopian denizen of Riesman's world turned into a dystopian monster in ours...
...children aged seven to fifteen asked them to name a person they knew, or of whom they had read or heard, that they would "most wish to be like...
...Today we see "autonomous" man suffering from "future shock" and "overchoice...
...Hugh Scott (Pennsylvania) let fly...
...they consider themselves, after all, influential citizens in their communities and nation...
...another 10% picked film stars and characters...
...Nearly a third of the boys, and half the girls, named a parent, relative, friend, or neighbor...
...Those poor saps really are asking for it...
...But Lynette Fromme made it...
...One of the most telling licks came on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, from none other than Clare Booth Luce, Henry's widow: "Elizabeth Seton, the first native American to be canonized as a saint, couldn't make the cover of Time...
...Failure to identify with some such group or groups condemns us to feelings of loneliness, alienation, and ineffectuality...
...That one clearly hurt, and Time, to its credit, quoted the Lady Luce in its next issue...
...indeed, the name she was using when she potshotted herself into stardom, "Moore," was her mother's maiden name, instead of her own, "Kahn...
...Consider Sara Jane...
...they consider themselves, after all, influential citizens in their communities and nation...
...And you're the guys who put Patty Hearst on your covers two weeks after "Squeaky" and the very morning Sara Jane done her thing—arid you think you're not in the behavior modification business...
...They create Marighella-style "action models" to appeal to and activate the suitably predisposed and violence-prone types like Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Bremer, Mark Essex, and Sara Jane 16X...
...One type, widespread in nineteenth-century America, is the "inner directed" personality, whose values and aspirations are implanted early in life by his parents or other elders and guide him through life like a psychic gyroscope...
...She married, had three children, and abandoned them to run away to California—where else...
...We are truly a lonely crowd full of Pattys, Cinques, Tanias, Malcolm Xs----rootless, restless, craving to establish existence and character...
...We are truly a lonely crowd full of Pattys, Cinques, Tanias, Malcolm Xs----rootless, restless, craving to establish existence and character...
...The society bombards the individual with a swirling, seemingly patternless set of alternatives...
...Media managers should realize (as most do not yet) that they are literally managing a psychological cocoon within which live thousands and even hundreds of thousands of unstable and loosely rooted, suggestible souls...
...He becomes attentive to his peer group and to the symbolic environment...
...That one clearly hurt, and Time, to its credit, quoted the Lady Luce in its next issue...
...And, in their heart of hearts, most editors know full well that their decisions on what to report and emphasize have an impact...
...those ten years old or older drew more often on idealistic fiction, history, religious literature, or public life...
...not a single elevenyear-old named an acquaintance as his role-model...
...Vide, Alvin Toffler: "The United States suffers from a kind of value vertigo...
...obeying this internal piloting, he is less independent than he seems...
...Certainly the advertising campaign designers who pay the freight realize it...
...A repeat survey of 284 London school children aged seven to eleven from varied social settings showed choices from acquaintances or religion, history, and public life dropped to 6% for boysand 13% for girls...
...Consider Sara Jane...
...This is the typical response by news media whenever their coverage, handling, and news-play decisions arc criticized for encouraging violence and antisocial behavior...
...It exaggerates but a mite to say twentieth century technology replaced the Bible with the Beetles and James Bond...
...Today we see "autonomous" man suffering from "future shock" and "overchoice...
...By 1965 Megamedia Man was on the loose...
...On Capitol Hill, GOP leaders Rep...
...And intelligence officers for some foreign governments interested in subversion and social demolition realize it...
...She married, had three children, and abandoned them to run away to California—where else...
...A civilization that shuffles its heroes from the Biblical Joseph, David, and Jesus to John Lennon and Peter, Paul and Mary is performing dangerous brain surgery on itself...
...Well, they caught it, and Sara Jane did take her potshot—and you can bet your sweet bippy life hasn't been the same since atop the proud corporate towers of Time and Newsweek...
...Media managers should realize (as most do not yet) that they are literally managing a psychological cocoon within which live thousands and even hundreds of thousands of unstable and loosely rooted, suggestible souls...
...He is a creature of the pack and the mass media, more of a slave to the bombardment of signals coming from others...
...Well, here's some hot news: Cinque and Miz Moon and that crowd did read Marighella —and they're really the ones editing your magazines...
...Certainly the advertising campaign designers who pay the freight realize it...
...Well, they caught it, and Sara Jane did take her potshot—and you can bet your sweet bippy life hasn't been the same since atop the proud corporate towers of Time and Newsweek...
...Fully 54% chose "pop" singers or TV characters or personalities...
...Such journalism becomes unconscious, all right—but not necessarily an instrument of inevitable uplift in the best of all possible worlds...
...Finally, however strenuously they may have defended their "Squeaky" cover stories, neither Time nor Newsweek paid similar homage to Sara Jane...
...Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Marquis Childs, New York Timesman William V. Shannon, novelist Saul Bellow, and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz lambasted the "Squeaky" covers...
...Such journalism becomes unconscious, all right—but not necessarily an instrument of inevitable uplift in the best of all possible worlds...
...And both, to no one's surprise, duly found themselves innocent...
...Clearly, here was the new man...
...Oh, you up their in the editorial towers didn't read Carlos Marighella's Mini-manual of the Urban Guerrilla yet...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1975 9 Eugene H. Methvin Time, Newsweek, and Squeaky Newspeak When Time and Newsweek both appeared with Mansonite "Squeaky" Fromme's face plastered over their covers, I thought, "Uh-oh...
...The technosocieties are so large, and their complexities so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that it is only by plugging in to one or more of their subcults, that we maintain some sense of identity and contact with the whole...
...None other than Reuven Frank, NBC's top news boss, denounced me as some sort of Communist-minded censor, declaring that journalists should "refuse to be conscious instrumentalities of social control...
...Against this background the editors' decisions to plaster Squeaky Fromme's picture all over the nation on their covers was dangerously irresponsible...
...Oh, you up their in the editorial towers didn't read Carlos Marighella's Mini-manual of the Urban Guerrilla yet...
...Though a ripe 46 years of age, she was still shopping in America's media cafeteria for an identity, until she happened to stumble on one—Presidential assassin, courtesy of "Squeaky" Fromme...
...Hugh Scott (Pennsylvania) let fly...
...indeed, the name she was using when she potshotted herself into stardom, "Moore," was her mother's maiden name, instead of her own, "Kahn...
...But in psychological fact, she was simply Sara Jane 16X, whatever identity she had an itch for this morning...
...They create such inviting images as the Marlboro wrangler, the Hathaway man, and the "Toni Twins" to shape consumer behavior...
...It becomes comprehensible only when viewed within the frame of reference of ordinary know-nothing American journalists, untrained and unsophisticated in social psychology and the natural history of political extremism...
Vol. 9 • December 1975 • No. 3
