Media Barons Gone Wild

ShiningPath · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2004 9:53 am

The New York Times quotes an anonymous New York Post employee as saying that the Post’s embarrassing “scoop” about Dick Gephardt’s selection as John Kerry’s running mate came from a tip called into the newsroom by Rupert Murdoch. I suspect the news editors didn’t feel comfortable asking the Alien who his sources were.
This NYT story was blind-sourced, but it’s plausible based on my experience. At one newspaper I worked for, the publisher called in drunk one night and stopped the press run because the word “Israel” had been hyphenated in body copy. Apparently, he thought (erroneously) that there was a rule against breaking the word between two lines. At another paper, upper management came back from a bar visit and ordered a giant photo of Cary Grant in a beard run on Page 1 because it was interesting. Our readers thought Grant must’ve died.
Does anyone else have similar tales of strange guidance from above?

Wayne Countryman · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2004 12:16 pm

Please forgive me if I've offered this before:At my first job, pretty much the only rules set down by the owner of the small chain were that we run his and his wife's copy untouched. The publisher of our paper, its "flagship," ran the chain.The owner spent most of his time on hunting around the world. His wife led her own life of leisure. Neither had a background in journalism.Every four years he covered the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. She covered the top fashion shows in New York, Paris and Milan, providing purple prose about haute culture for the readers of their Appalachian papers.In 1980, the owner, a diehard Republican, wrote in the lead of the day's lead story during the Republicans' convention that, in his view from his hotel penthouse he could see coho salmon leaping from Lake Michigan as he decided that if the Demos chose Jimmy Carter the next month it at least wouldn't be as bad as their pick in 1968, when they nominated George McGovern.Getting no farther, this frightened cub copy editor ran to the managing editor. "Did you see that lead?" I asked."Coho salmon. Ha! Can you believe he put that in there? I guess they've been restocking the lake.""Jack, I meant the McGovern part.""What about it?""McGovern was nominated in 1972, not '68.""Yeah, I know. So?""So we need to change that, right?""Nope. He says nothing gets changed, so it stays."I argued unsuccessfully that it would make us look stupid, make the owner look stupid, mislead or insult our readers -- and on and on.The M.E. seemed to enjoy running it. No correction ever appeared. No one said another word about it. Business as usual there.

Bumfketeer · **Posted:** Fri Jul 09, 2004 12:26 pm

An editor I worked for at the Milwaukee Sentinel:1. Had made his bones 30 years before as a city editor by directing coverage of a tornado. After this, he decreed that our paper would have a weather story every day, because people are interested in weather...even yesterday's.
He did not mean days on which the weather was vaguely interesting. He meant every day. We had a full-time weather reporter. Imagine doing a weather story explaining that it was 74 degrees and cloudless on a spring day.2. Also apparently had decreed (or one of his toadies had decreed) that when we published a mug shot of him (which seemed to happen about 120 times a year), it could not run smaller than 12p2 X 18 picas. Most other lesser beings had 6-pica mugs.A true titan of journalism.

Hyatt Lee · **Posted:** Tue Jul 13, 2004 5:19 am

This story doesn't quite work, but it's close. I worked at an English-language daily in Taiwan last year. I think it was in June, 2003, when Hong Kong democracy activists demonstrated against the proposed Article 23, which was essentially a gambit by Beijing to legally try people for sedition.I was on the late page, waiting for any last minute changes for page one before the press run. I knew the demonstrations were big because I had been trolling the wires for well over half an hour. Almost every agency was reporting the demonstrations at 500,000 strong. My editor-in-chief came up and told me to write into the headline and copy that there were one million people protesting. I protested his request. I showed him all the wire reports. He said he had a "special source," so I was forced to go ahead. Of course the next day the paper looked foolish.I found out later that the special source was a man who had once lived in Hong Kong, but on the night of the demonstrations was sitting at his desk in NYC. I left the job a month later.

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