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...
...July 22) on the Baltimore police and garbage strike...
...Robert E. Farber, ruled out the near-term possibility of plague...
...These might have been flukes, but how can we be sure...
...In the reader's eye, truth is indivisible...
...Newsweek, however, did spell Mayor Schaefer's name correctly...
...That, at least, is how the same quotation appeared in The Sun...
...Perhaps the reporters thought the Free State so corrupt that no one would notice...
...For these sound if provincial reasons, I have renounced Newsweek magazine...
...That "about half the force remained on duty" seems to have been true for the first night of the police strike...
...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...
...It was with intense disappointment thatThe Sun (Baltimore) discovered the truth...
...the city's jails and schools were undermanned...
...one of them was intended that way...
...But Baltimore was a shaken city, and a pall of smoke from the burning garbage still hung over the sweltering streets...
...The hapless pederast, alas, was not in fact from Maryland...
...Nor did the city's resistance perceptibly weaken as the strike wore on...
...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...
...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...
...It might be noted, too, that the gestation period for rats is twenty-five days...
...A week before Newsweek went to press, the public-health officer, Dr...
...And when gross inaccuracy is joined by willful distortion, a journal no longer deserves to be read...
...Indeed, no sickness has been directly linked to the strike...
...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...
...Bruno said, neglected to call the magazine prior to deadline in order to check the finished story against the facts he submitted...
...Garbage accumulated in parts of the city, but private enterprise and the public's cooperation kept much of Baltimore clean...
...I don't think it was done for a malicious reason,'' he added...
...The city had offered a wage increase of 5.5,percent, but it wasn't enough—and last week the garbage was piled everywhere...
...Newsweek's most recent assault on Maryland was its story ("The Dump...
...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...
...And for the crisis-weary residents of Baltimore, there was no end in sight last week...
...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...
...Newsweek relied on a "stringer," a part-time correspondent in Baltimore, for most of its information on the strike...
...That helps explain some of the errors...
...the streets were safe only for muggers, looters and the ever-burgeoning population of rats...
...It was the wrong thing to do," Hal Bruno, Newsweek's deputy bureau chief in Washington, conceded recently...
...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...
...The next night," Newsweek concluded, "police themselves went on strike for higher pay...
...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...
...This city will go crazy,' said one East Baltimore woman...
...That stringer, Mr...
...The' correction never appeared...
...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...
...But, it does not explain why Newsweek proceeded so boldly with information it had not been able to verify...
...Yet within eighteen months, two Newsweek stories I had firsthand knowledge about turned out to be false...
...He once promised to build ^ boys' home in his state,' recalls Manhattan patrolman Anthony Mercaldi...
...Looting and vandalism did erupt after news spread of the police walk-out, but the damage was localized...
...Bruno, who that week directed the magaz'ine's reporting in Maryland, agreed that the story, in places, was exaggerated...
...A reporter and writer chose the wrong means to protect a confidential source...
...There was no siege, of course...
...Bruno pointed out that Newsweek confessed its sins to inquiring reporters as soon as the article ran...
...If they had just said 'a politician' and let it go at that, it would have been okay...
...They were not, however, summoned specifically for that assignment...
...Newsweek says it does not know...
...In two hours of reporting that night for The Sun, I did not see a single act of looting...
...Newsweek again refused to qualify its claims...
...It was also a proud city, having surviveu and functioned for two weeks in the absence of key government services...
...the public-health officer warned of an outbreak of bubonic plague...
...The people responsible for this have had their error pointed out to them and have been warned it had better not happen again...
...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 mayor did not declare that negotiations had reached "the bottom line...
...Accompanying the article was a dramatic picture of Negroes looting a store...
...the strike lasted only two weeks...
...It's just about crazy now.' Sanity returned at the weekend, with tentative settlements of both strikes...
...Most of Baltimore, including the downtown business district, was left unscathed...
...Bruno, prior to my call and his own check with New York, had never heard of the incident...
...And last year, in another article referring to Maryland, Newsweek deliberately distorted the truth...
...Sprawling heaps of garbage," which suggests a city awash in swill, is the phrase of an unbridled imagination...
...The "East Baltimore woman" Newsweek quoted is probably a woman who happened to be standing on East Baltimore street...
...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...
...But in last week's soaring temperatures, tempers also ran high...
...It was a city under siege,"Newsweek began, "Sprawling heaps of garbage sent a sickening stench into the humid midsummer air...
...To this charge, the stringer—one of The Sun's best reporters —pleads guilty...
...Baltimore was undoubtedly a shaken city as the strike reached a close...
...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...
...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...
...If a story about Baltimore is wrong, how can a Baltimorean believe what he reads about Watergate...
...The people of Baltimore would not let our city become paralyzed," proclaimed Mayor Schaefer, and the mayor was right, Newsweek's Mr...
...A magazine does not rise or fall on two articles...
...Newsweek's account of the initial walk-out is inaccurate and incomplete...
...The confessions, however, were evidently offered sotto voce...
...The claim "the streets were safe only for looters, muggers and the ever-burgeoning population of rats" is a fabrication...
...Why any state...
...Competence is the newsman's standard, not perfection, and the most demanding test of competence is convincing those who know first-hand...
...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...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
