What David Broder Could Learn from Sally Quinn (and Vice Versa)
Noah, Timothy
What David Broder Could Learn from Sally Quinn (and Vice Versa) by Timothy Noah One of the more encouraging developments in journalism during the 1960s and 1970s was a movement away from the dry...
...Return of the Kid Gloves Partly because of the new conservative mood in the country, style writing seems to have taken a few steps back toward the women's page approach in recent years...
...Bradlee said he wanted to bring to the coverage of the elite a more "sociological purpose...
...you read him as much for what he tells you about lobby groups and Congress as for what he tells you about price supports and acreage allocations...
...But fine as the piece was, it came up short on the "why" side...
...The women's page was born sometime in 1890s and died sometime in the 1970s, at least in the major metropolitan dailies...
...Schary apparently enjoyed hearing himself talk...
...Do they want us to say that guests at state dinners wrangle over the matches for souvenirs...
...The most prominent practitioners of this new form were Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times and Sally Quinn of The Washington Post...
...One shortcoming was the frequent lack of a controlling idea connecting concrete observation to larger themes...
...Did he promise to veto the bill or didn't he...
...We had become convinced," he said later, "that traditional women's news bored the ass off all of us...
...and when the style sections developed they would—unfortunately—travel largely down this path...
...To be sure, an interview with the president is always something of a coup, but the adulatory tone and the large accompanying photograph of the president and first lady looking deeply and lovingly into one another's eyes were a bit much...
...Style and Substance The greatest challenge of all for style writers would be to take on more conventional "news"the congressional hearings, presidential press conferences, and other staples of the front page...
...Among other things, it included Reagan's umpteenth affectionate recounting of how, whenever Reagan was attacked by the press as governor in California, Nancy would hold an imaginary press conference to defend him while taking a bubble bath...
...The second way to read Quinn's profile was as a story about Washington's party goers...
...Its rise coincided with that of the department stores, whose advertising increased the need for features aimed at women, especially those related to home improvement...
...I used to know...
...Though they kept within the parameters of objective reporting as rigidly defined by the Times, Curtis's stories managed, largely through keen selection of revealing detail, to shed light on some of the less attractive attributes of her subjects...
...At The New York Times Charlotte Curtis was showing a similar willingness to be unflattering...
...These new style sections were very much a part of the era, but they had a journalistic lineage as well...
...Curtis, Quinn, and other style reporters rarely took this risk...
...for example, when she profiled Acapulco's leisure set, she lightly mentioned that Warren Avis, the rent-a-car magnate, designed his cliffside house so that "you'd never see the servants," and after Truman Capote's famous 1965 masked ball for Katharine Graham, she reported that Mrs...
...There's nothing wrong, of course, with interviewing Mikhail Baryshnikov or Lauren Bacall when they come to town...
...In one sense I have become the people I write about," says Quinn, who left "Style" in 1980 to have a baby and work on a novel...
...Here, for example, is Dore Schary, the high-minded vice president of MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, talking about the movie business over lunch at a Beverly Hills restaurant: "He spoke earnestly, as though trying to convey a tremendous seriousness of purpose about his work in motion pictures...
...Quinn painted a portrait of a young hustler from Pocatello, Idaho, who was willing to pay $150 to attend a fundraiser for a Democratic representative at the Harrimans' even though he was an active Republican, and who could often be seen at mass at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, "otherwise known as the 'Kennedy Church' or the `celebrity church,' " even though he was a Mormon...
...Von Hoffman even on one occasion took his own publisher to task for her role in a 1975 pressman's strike...
...through Halberstam's book you can begin to understand how well-intentioned and brilliant men could deem honorable a war that seemed an atrocity to so many others...
...The names of' these new sections-=`Style," "Tempo," "View," "Living," "The Way We Live"—suggested that the editors were vaguely aware they were missing something in their news and feature stories, and the women's pages were the forums in which they were going to capture it...
...A second shortcoming of the typical style reporting has been a failure to empathize with its subjects...
...He once had a birthday party for me," Braden told Quinn, "and to tell you the truth, I almost didn't even go...
...Speaking of his wife's painful ordeal with cancer (she died in 1981), McNamara said, "Jesus Christ, she was in pain...
...They liked writing for "Style," von Hoffman explained, because it was "the part of the paper that isn't tied to inherited ideas of what an event is!' The section was characterized by an engaging irreverence toward Washington notables...
...To some degree, the same might be said of the profession as a whole...
...What will the reporter from the New York Times write...
...Feature stories traditionally provided human details on the day's news—the scene at the home of the gangster's mother on the evening of his electrocution, for example—or else they simply explored the broad realm of human interest by reporting, say, the 13th birthday party of the Dionne quintuplets...
...Hendrickson skillfully evoked these traits, which during the Vietnam war took on tragic proportions...
...Perhaps more significantly, she was given the title of associate editor, which made her the first woman in history to make it onto the Times masthead...
...For one, it was a painfully precise portrait of the partythrower as a social type—the sort of person who is determined to get ahead in Washington...
...But there appeared as well a new kind of feature story that was rich in observation and human detail, and that at the same time conveyed some sense of the significance (or lack of same) of the individual or event in question...
...No one I spoke with at the Post, from the lowliest reporter on up to Ben Bradlee, was willing to give me a very precise definition of "spin...
...Unfortunately, skewering set the tone early on, and style pieces displayed a much stronger urge to debunk and defrock than to get inside their subject's world and begin to understand why they act the way they do...
...Style sections missed it, perhaps because they themselves are victims of it...
...So, instead of just talking to the diva, for example, how about talking to the men who haul her equipment around and handle the mike...
...The result: Volcker will drone on for an hour about M-1 targets...
...Gwynne, a former loan officer for a medium-size Midwestern bank, who recounted in Harper's how his bank, awash with cash, was literally throwing money at third world borrowers, with predictably unfortunate results...
...Almost 20 years later, McNamara was still quantifying...
...Hendrickson, good as his piece was, didn't pursue the question...
...A more recent practitioner of something like the style approach is Ward Sinclair, whose beat is—of all things— agriculture...
...Profiled in style sections, individuals like Gwynne could shed light on other fields, such as science, medicine, the law...
...Many newspapers have gone so far as to create whole sections to suit their needs—The New York Times's "Home" section and its periodic travel and fashion supplements are examples...
...there were things one just didn't write about...
...This method was carried a bit further in the Post's "Style" section, inaugurated in January 1969, by its well-known reporter Sally Quinn...
...They did want to know the gossipy—if unflattering— details...
...and we'd all cut our throats .") Bradlee had also wanted more-2`good writing, freer writing," he told me—and undeniably he got it...
...He was obviously in no hurry to make his point...
...While such violations appear almost quaint by today's standards (as do Winchellisms like "debutrash" for "debutante" and "Chicagorilla" for "gangster"), they were ground-breaking then, and opened the way for writers to report what they knew in broader realms as well...
...Such features tended to be boxed in by prevailing journalistic conventions...
...by chronicling Martindale's upward maneuvering with painstaking care, Quinn raised that question in a highly suggestive manner...
...In 1973, for example, she recounted the travail of Charles Revson, who, "what with the fuel shortage...
...These are the elements that are considered important in determining success or failure at the box office,' he said, and paused, as if he felt slightly bewildered by the point he was trying to make...
...on the other, it can reveal the biases of the reporter...
...the horoscope, puzzles, bridge, pet columns, etiquette, 'high society,' and the likes of Ann Landers" as hopelessly out of step with feminism...
...Something similar is happening at The New York Times, where Charlotte Curtis has left the op-ed page to write a weekly column, but this time in a circumspect manner more befitting the dignity of an associate editor...
...Unknowns do exciting things every day...
...These articles mingled with stories of a more local bent— marriages, parties, and the ubiquitous profiles of spouses of prominent men, to name a few perennials...
...What David Broder Could Learn from Sally Quinn (and Vice Versa) by Timothy Noah One of the more encouraging developments in journalism during the 1960s and 1970s was a movement away from the dry and one-dimensional newspaper story towards a variety of forms that conveyed to the readers more of the depth and texture of people 'and events...
...Unflattering details of the story were simply left out, and any adjectives used were uniformly favorable...
...Soon no one will be listening— perhaps not even Volcker himself...
...Ross added a new element—an account of what she observed while she was conducting her interview...
...At the Post they have a word to describe stories that rise above conventionality in one way or another and get talked about around Washington...
...What we need is to bring together the old newspaper categories—a marriage of the Sally Quinns and the David Broders...
...There was another strain from which the new style sections drew—the personality profile as practiced by Lillian Ross of The New Yorker in the late forties and fifties...
...An example was the coverage of perhaps the most famous party of the late sixties and early seventies, the one that Leonard Bernstein ,gave for the Black Panthers on New York's Upper East Side...
...even very sympathetic stories like Radcliffe's Reagan interview tend to fail in helping us understand human motivation, and remind us that sympathy and empathy are not the same thing...
...During the Vietnam war, he focused upon the "body count" and other quantitative measures at the expense of firsthand observations and judgments that might have served as better guides...
...But Wolfe went further, casting his unflattering observations into a unifying theme, which the title of his essay'Radical Chic" captured so aptly that it became a cliche for the elegant posturing which Wolfe so vividly described...
...He divulged pregnancies, for example, before the official birth announcements and pending nuptials before the engagement was announced...
...So did William Geist's recent frontpage story for The New York Times on a Korean grocer who invoked the wrath of Park Avenue residents by daring to sell vegetables on their high-rent thoroughfare...
...The reporter generally never gave much insight into what made the new secretary tick...
...The staples of these women's pages—topics like home furnishings, cooking, weddings, and engagements, and the doings of the rich and powerful—continued to receive attention in the new sections...
...Winchell and his cohorts in Broadway gossip had another effect...
...This opened another door for reporters, making it possible for them to recount the telling detail that might explain or even undercut what the interviewee was saying...
...The piece noted approvingly that Curtis, who had become the Times's "family, food, fashions, furnishings" editor in 1965, was producing a page that was "well worth reading— for men as well as women" because of its coverage of such subjects as the changing status of Arab women in Israel and a retired madam who claimed to have been in the business of saving marriages...
...Through them, celebrity worship became an essential part of our culture...
...Cafe society was chronicled first in Vanity Fair (founded in 1914 and edited by Ben Bradlee's uncle, Frank Crowninshield) and then, with some help from the budding ranks of press agents, in gossip columns like Cholly Knickerbocker's in the Journal American and, most important of all, Walter Winchell's in the Daily Mirror...
...To some," wrote Quinn, "he has emerged as the leading host in town...
...Still, the feature illuminated the day's news with human detail, in a way that the straight news stories generally did not...
...In one 1968 dispatch from Cambridge ("the Cook County of academic politics"), Just described the fevered speculation over who John Kenneth Galbraith (its "Richard Daley") would support in the presidential race...
...In tracking down the prominent Washingtonians Martindale counted among his "friends," Quinn found that a number of them either ridiculed him behind his back or didn't want to talk to him at all...
...Tom Wolfe achieved a kindred empathy in The Right Stuff, in which the astronauts, who had hitherto been among the great cardboard figures of American journalism, became living, breathing characters, with a complex mixture of virtue and vices...
...If style writers still have a way to go in bringing reflection to bear upon their fact gathering and observation, their editors have further to go in their choice of subjects for the page...
...The New Journalism, as this reporting was called, drew heavily in turn from two journalistic forms: the feature story and the Broadway gossip column...
...Sometimes we just want to know what the president said yesterday, and don't much care how he looked or felt or thought as he said it...
...To this day, style sections, which I will call them for want of a better term, remain heavily committed to the agenda of their advertisers...
...In a 1964 article on society reporting in Washington, written on the eve of the style revolution for The Reporter, Meg Greenfield quoted one society reporter as asking her, "What do they want us to do...
...In terms of cost and in other terms...
...I don't go to his parties anymore...
...To be sure, we wouldn't want all of our news to mix the style approach with the facts...
...In a deposition in General William Westmoreland's libel suit against CBS, McNamara had asserted that "no responsible military officer would ever hold information from a superior that conceivably could bear on the superior's rightful decision-making power...
...Readers with the wit to read between the lines might discern suggestive insights on what, in editors' eyes, comprised the "real" news...
...The other side to this coin is that style writers need to acquire more of the fact-gathering skills of the news reporters...
...Style sections place more of an emphasis on "writing" than on actual reporting, with the consequence that information-gathering techniques can be a bit casual...
...His writers included, in addition to Quinn, people like Judy Bachrach, Nicholas von Hoffman, Judith Martin, Henry Allen, Myra McPherson, and Henry Mitchell...
...From these, Quinn moved on to more ambitious stories about life, in Washington and elsewhere, with a particular focus on the art of social climbing...
...I haven't been for a year and a half...
...The latter provoked a spate of editorials and a huge public outcry, proving that readers do care about the problems of ordinary people and what those problems tell us about society...
...Here is Curtis on Gerald Ford: "President Ford is still the easygoing Middle Westerner, the Michigan boy who made good, and he goes around this polite, little mountain village in sports shirt, slacks, and a sweater, perpetually prepared for a good game of golf...
...honestly doesn't know what to do about Ultima II, his luxurious 250-foot, 1,200-ton yacht," and told of a number of other rich people who were actually looking forward to the oil crisis ("Lowering the thermostat is good for the sinus and fine furniture," said one...
...parties would still be covered, "but not as social events as much as expressions of this culture at this time in history...
...Another example was a profile of Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French president, by a Washington socialite and freelance writer named Ina Ginsburg...
...Winchell violated his subjects' privacy in ways that had not been done before...
...Society reporting had in the past tended to overlook why people throw parties in the first place...
...Too often, an interview will take place in a hotel room or office after the reporter has performed fairly perfunctory research...
...An example is an interview with Ronald Reagan by Donnie Radcliffe that appeared in the Post last summer during the Republican convention...
...After all, they were the ones who knew what was going on...
...A writer who does so, of course, can be called wrong...
...In a recent profile of Paul Tsongas for the Post "Style" section, for example, Myra McPherson sensitively explored the senator's private anguish over the conflict between family and political duty when he discovered he had a mild form of cancer...
...As a consequence, such stories may tell us all we want to know about that particular hotel room or office—but not very much about the subject that can't be observed within the confines of one or two hours of conversation...
...One more picture of Mrs...
...Through Martindale, we saw the world of influencehustling in Washington, while through Brzezinski we gained insight into the conflicts between the State Department and the National Security Council that were raging at the time...
...It was not a captain of finance, but S.C...
...In recent years, as "Style" reporting has become less enamored of bitchy detail, it has nevertheless rarely managed to convey empathy the way Wolfe and Halberstam could...
...Do they want us to say that most diplomatic receptions are crowded and awful and that no one knows anyone else...
...This picture has no single incident...
...The second form that influenced the new reporting was that of the New York gossip column, which developed as part of Manhattan's "cafe society"—the movie stars, debutantes, and prizefighters who were elevated to celebrity status in the teens and twenties by the fledgling mass media...
...On the one hand, Bradlee seems to understand on an instinctive level that "spin" is what gives a story drive and passion...
...Volcker may know he can bore and baffle them...
...But Quinn did not go that extra mile, beyond exposure to a genuine attempt to understand why such individuals behave as they do...
...The tough questions about interest rates will trail off...
...why shouldn't reporting recognize this by blending the best techniques of the style section and the "substance" section...
...Before Ross, The New Yorker profile—indeed personality profiles generally—had followed a fairly set format: an interview with the subject, augmented by library research and interviews with associates and friends...
...Bradlee seems to be a genuinely nonideological person himself, perhaps to a fault...
...This picture has no love story...
...But he is described by others as ambivalent about the virtues of "spin!' As Nicholas von Hoffman put it, "It depends on the day and the reaction...
...Dean Rusk attending the national day of some embassy...
...With the rise of the new style sections over the next few years, editors and readers seemed to be saying yes, they did want reporters looking at such events with their minds and senses alert...
...In Sinclair's hands, agriculture becomes a metaphor...
...Why shouldn't subjects that we all recognize as important be looked at from the "style" point of view...
...There Aren't Any Secrets Between Us" was the headline, and the article that followed resembled nothing so much as the Republican convention's own tribute to the first lady...
...Consider the scene at a congressional committee when Paul Volcker comes to testify...
...A motion picture is a success or a failure at its very inception,' he told me...
...But there aren't enough Sinclairs to cover all the news stories that demand this mixture of fact and feeling...
...Indeed, the growing women's movement (of which the shift to the style sections was something of a forerunner) now saw the old conventions of the women's page as deeply insulting...
...Calvin Trillin identified this development in a series of articles in The New Yorker on food and restaurant snobbery...
...One reason for this tenderness for the establishment is that newspaper reporters, at least at trend-setting newspapers like the Times and the Post, are now comfortably ensconsed in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy...
...None of this...
...Golly, Cholly By 1972, the transformation of the women's pages to the new style sections was far enough along to be officially certified by Time magazine in a profile that year headlined, "Flight from Fluff...
...On Joseph Alsop: "Joseph Alsop is Washington's ultimate connoisseur, an expert of such dimensions on so many subjects that the world usually has to track him to his lair!' To be fair, Curtis has also written columns on subjects like the effect of the recession in West Virginia, but there is no mistaking a half step back towards the tone of the old society pages...
...How, for example, could a man of such apparent experience in the world retain his naive faith in the institutions that produced the numbers for him...
...A major part of this movement was the transformation of what had been known as the "society section" or the "women's pages" into something at once less definable but potentially more significant—not just for those pages themselves, but for the way newspapers portray the "news" in general...
...At present these pages continue to dwell on profiles of celebrities or stories about parties they attend...
...Too often news reporters omit facts that are crucial and include those that are unimportant precisely because they lack a point of view that tells them what is relevant...
...Counting Milligrams Before we pine too long over the good old days of style reporting, however, we need to remember that this reporting, good as it could be in the seventies, still had some distance to go...
...If any lower-level employees at the World Bank had been inclined to inform the boss that the bank was helping to bring about a debt crisis in the third world during the seventies, they weren't going to pass that word in the cafeteria...
...The word is "spin...
...One of the best Style pieces of recent years—Henry Allen's profile of the daredevil world of bicycle messengers in Washington— explored life on the street level with the sort of care that is usually reserved for the McNamaras and Agees...
...Timothy Noah is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...It was Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee who, as much as anyone, brought this melange of the new and old journalism together...
...Style reporters also must overcome their fear of ideas...
...Hendrickson's account was full of human detail that shed light on McNamara's tenure as secretary of defense during the Vietnam war and as head of the World Bank, from which he recently retired...
...Among the latter was Joan Braden, a Washington socialite whom Martindale had described as one of his two best friends...
...The major obstacle was, simply, convention...
...In recognition of such efforts, Curtis was named editor of the paper's op-ed page...
...This sort of piece had been common in the kid-glove days but writers at "Style" in the early seventies had been told never to write "unless he or she has done something extraordinary or unless he or she is feeling a little put out," according to Judy Bachrach, a particularly caustic "Style" writer from that era...
...McNamara, Hendrickson pointed out, always took his meals in his private dining room on the 12th floor...
...The tone is just slightly, but unmistakably, more respectful, at both the Times and the Post...
...During the seventies, for example, taste emerged as more important than it had ever been before as a way of defining social class...
...If that subject was going to be dealt with in the Post, it would most likely appear in a column by David Broder...
...Party reporter Betty Beale recalls how the Eisenhowers rarely invited the Nixons to White House functions, signaling to hawk-eyed readers what the pundits didn't realize until later—that Eisenhower was ambivalent about keeping Nixon on the ticket in 1956...
...Perhaps the quintessential "Style" piece was a profile that Sally Quinn wrote in 1974 of Steve Martindale, a 30-year-old lobbyist at Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm, who was getting ahead in Washington by throwing parties for prominent people that he barely knew...
...This was not the case until quite recently, but by 1975 "Style" found itself trumpeting the rising status of reporters in an article on the making of the movie, All the President's Men...
...In addition to a McNamara, how about the individuals who actually put his revered numbers together...
...A certain degree of standardization came about after 1900 with the rise of feature syndicates, which provided columns on such subjects as cooking, clothing, and advice to the lovelorn...
...I forget if that's right...
...I think she was on 200 milligrams of Demerol a day...
...One article that did take at least a step in the Halberstam Wolfe direction was Paul Hendrickson's three-part profile of Robert McNamara, which, appeared in the Post last May...
...Starting in the mid-sixties, Curtis wrote stories about the rich that made a great impact with their quietly ironic edge...
...To tell you the truth, I'm not very interested and I don't know much about him" The Martindale story was rooted, in part, in the familiar society-reporting form...
...A 1972 article in Ms...
...This picture has no women...
...There was resistance, great resistance, to making The Red Badge of Courage...
...Curtis's piece on the Bernstein party was amusing...
...Style writers should also apply their hawk-like eye to developing social trends...
...In this respect, writers like Quinn and Curtis had not moved past Ross...
...Life, after all, is a mixture of the intangible and concrete fact...
...But it went past that form in at least two ways...
...At the same time the opinion writing of the editorial page tends to be inadequately grounded in fact...
...But she left the significance of his ideas untouched...
...Bradlee, for example, asked me what I thought "spin" was, expressed surprise at my observation that it was a phrase heard frequently in his newsroom, and then told me he understood it to be a pejorative term...
...It may be that Bradlee is wary of the word because he knows that at least one of the things that gives a story "spin" is a point of view, which newspapers avow never to have—except on the editorial page...
...Take, for example, McNamara's tragic obsession with numbers...
...That so many important people were willing regularly to attend parties thrown by someone they barely knew and—it was strongly hinted—didn't particularly respect, showed the nation's capital as a place where people got together not to be among friends but to engage in the cultural rituals of "making contacts" and being seen as someone of importance and hence—by extension— clout...
...It was fertile ground for inquiry...
...Loel Guinness, an international banker's wife, found her ruby and diamond necklaces "so heavy, she said, that she thought she'd have to stay in bed all day to recover...
...For all Wolfe's occasional glibness and verbal excess, he is at least willing to offer an interpretation of what he is reporting...
...The direct antecedent was the work of writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese in such magazines as Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement—work that came to full flower in New York magazine, which editor Clay Felker founded in 1968 after the Herald Tribune folded...
...Instead, his lead the following morning will be, "Paul Volcker announced before a House committee yesterday that . Some appreciation of the intangibles did creep onto the Post's news pages in the late sixties through the reporting of Ward Just, who has since left the profession to write novels...
...Ross was telling us not only what Schary said but what she saw as he was saying it...
...The article, which went on at tedious length-15 paragraphs—about the interior decoration of the Elysee Palace and the Mitterrands' private residence on the Left Bank, was what was once known around the "Style" desk as a "spouse of' piece...
...When told that military intelligence officers had sworn that they had engaged in wrongful or intellectually dishonest practices, McNamara expressed disbelief, saying, "That is not the nature of a government—when people understand that a wrong is being done, somebody talks about it ." What had this man learned all those years in business and government...
...The lives of ordinary people can be fascinating, as Dickens and Twain have shown...
...But to the extent "spin" means point of view, we need more of it, properly labeled of course...
...A 1938 journalism textbook by Curtis D. MacDougall of Northwestern University captured the tone of the society page by describing the essential elements of a party story: names of participants, decorations ("color scheme, its significance and how it was carried out"), refreshments ("always learn who poured and who served"), and, of course, the occasion...
...it was rumored that only his barber knew...
...The committee will be buffaloed...
...The representatives may feel they don't have complete mastery over the technical details...
...Quinn made a splash that year when she got Henry Kissinger to describe himself as a "secret swinger" at a party, and soon followed it up with controversial interviews with the wife of the British ambassador ("Saving face means more to Asians than life") and George Wallace's rambunctious mother-in-law ("Sh0000000t, honey, he ain't even titty high...
...Research assistance for this article was provided by Jim Lynn...
...But fame is a poor guide to what is important or even to what is interesting...
...it did not draw together the threads between McNamara's background and character and policies, as Halberstam began to do in The Best and the Brightest...
...To others he is, well, a social climber...
...Then there was McNamara's insulation from subordinates who might have told him what the numbers didn't...
...Too often neither the reporter nor the opinion writer captures the feel of the person or event they are describing...
...even more, they wanted to know what such events might suggest about the culture of which they were part...
...This was what David Halberstam attempted in The Best and the Brightest...
...For some, it's a battle of glamor," Sally Quinn was quoted in the article as saying, "and the movie people have found out they're losing ." The piece described Quinn as "frankly glamorous herself" Seen in this light, Quinn's profile of Steve Martindale can be read as a critique of an amateur by a pro...
...many readers want their glimpses of the stars...
...Society reporters like Beale failed, however, to make such connections for their readers...
...praised the new approach being taken by the Times and the Post and denounced the oldstyle women's page, which "is somehow seen as the proper repository for...
...In the era of the society page, recalls Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times, "all weddings were beautiful, all parties were perfect" in the eyes of their chroniclers...
...Soon, newspapers around the country were imitating her and imitating the Post's "Style" section as well...
...But much of what we call "news" isn't, really, or at least not in the way the news reporters tell it to us...
...a profile of the new secretary of commerce might contain, in the first three paragraphs, that individual's age, hobbies, marital status, and offspring, and then go on to recite his achievements and the comments of his former teachers and associates...
...To be sure, Quinn's piece on Martindale was revealing, as was her profile of Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, which showed him to to be embarrassingly flirtatious and vain...
Vol. 16 • December 1984 • No. 11
