The Minneapolis Tribune Is a Stone Wall DRAG

Our reporter Dan Miller wrote that the tape proved that Vooge had asked three times to go in and stop the riot, he had his men ready and felt he could handle it.  And three times he was clearly told from headquarters, “Stand by.”  The third time the order was given, Vooge, clearly disgusted spat out the words, “OK.”  Miller write it: ‘OK,’ said Vooge, obviously perturbed.”  The phrase “obviously perturbed” was cut on grounds that it was editorializing—subjective observation.  “I know Vooge was perturbed that same way I know he opened his mouth and said something—I heard it,” Miller protested.  But Vooge came out in the Tribune uttering nothing more then an obient, indifferent, “OK”—that he objected to his orders never came out.  One result was that the many police officers who sympathized with Vooge felt the Tribune had once more stabbed them in the back and was trying to make the liberal higher-ups look good.

Similar editing has cost Trib reporters any number of good news sources who give a reporter information in good faith.  The reporter writes it straight and then it comes out in the paper sterilized from any germ of subjectivity and consequently distorted.  The sources becomes obviously perturbed with the reporter, the reporter doesn’t get any more tips from the source and so his ability to cover the news in his are is diminished.

I suppose I shall have to deal with objectivity more extensively here since the vice-president has made it fashionable to damn and blast the press for its suspected lack of objectivity.  I don’t believe in the stuff myself— I’ve seen the truth murdered too many times in the name of objectivity—but I’m open to the argument that what we really need is a better definition of objectivity.

I wish I knew you, readers of the Minneapolis Tribune.  My words have been appearing on your breakfast tables or wrapped around your garbage or something for three years now and were it not for the busy pencils of editors, you might have some idea of who I am.  But you are to me a great faceless mass out of which periodically pops a letter lambasting the good, gray institution I worked for as a commie pinko rag.

I think one of the Tribune’s many failures is its failure to try to explain to its readers what we feel our function is and what pressures there are on us the change traditional approaches to the news.  I shall not attempt to go into those questions here, but I would like you to know that, for all our silence on them in the paper, they are not being ignored in the sterile linoleum halls of the Trib.  Behind that dull front page you poor souls presumable wade through every morning, there rages a debate.  Did you think we dismissed Agnew’s attacks on the press?  Do we appear in different to those angry letters on our editorial page?  Did you think we were cynical about incensed phone calls?  There are human beings behind that remarkably uninspired façade on Portland Avenue.  We hurt, we bleed, and we doublecheck.  By God and the fear of Premack (he being the foul-tempered news editor of the Trib) we try to be Objective.  The debate is over whether or not we should try.

At one end of the spectrum we have staffers who think all newsmen should be subjected to some form of lobotomy that would prevent them from ever forming an opinion on anything at all, including whether the sky is blue.  At the other are those who urge personalized journalism, even unto the use of the prohibited pronoun “I.”

Should reporters be allowed to wear buttons? Give the peace sign? Put bumper stickers on their cars? Write their congressmen? Vote? Join political clubs? Or any club, even a garden club?

Should newsmen express opinions in public? In private?  Dare they make friends among sources?  Does one earn a right to an opinion on a problem after having studied it?  Studied it for how long?  Should we have a special section for analytical reporting?  Are the people interested in our conclusions about anything?  Is an “Analysis” label in a story sufficient to warn the reader that it might be tainted with a reporters thinking?  Should reporters think?  D0 reporters think?

All these questions have been seriously, passionately, violently, endlessly debated at the Tribune.

As I understand the conclusion of the Tribune’s management, they read like a Tribune editorial: “On the one hand we have X, but on the other hand we have Y.  Therefore, we conclude that this problem is a problem.”  So we carry on in the same plodding tradition, periodically accused by our readers of being a commie pinko rag.

We carry on.  The Channels of Communication are silted up with the corpses of stories that never got covered and ideas that were never pursued.  Some reporters quit and other quit trying.

The ME keeps saying his door is always open.  He sends out an all-staff memo to keep in touch with reporters.  Reporters keep sending up memos that are heard of nevermore.  And everyone gets information from the copy boys, who are the only people in the place who know what the hell is going on.

Why didn’t we cover the Stenvig phenomenon? Why didn’t we send someone to cover Chicago conspiracy trial? Why do we run yesterday’s weather map? Why do we eat up two columns of precious front page space with those damned summaries? How come Fuller’s expose of  the bulk-meat racket never got printed? What makes “crusading” a dirty word around there? Who said Dayton’s was perfect? Why all the free publicity to United Fund?

But I don’t really think the thing preventing the Trib from becoming a great paper is money.  I think it could be done with less than they’re got now.  The first thing that stands in the way is staggering mismanagement.  All I can suggest now is that the Trib call in one of those thousand-dollar-a-day management consultants to try to unravel the Channels of Communication and attack Peter Principle.  The P reigns at the Trib.  Sometimes I think damn near everyone on the desk has been promoted to his level of incompetency. Good reporters are not rewarded with more money; they’re rewarded with promotions to desk jobs for which they are neither competent nor suited. To look around the newsroom is to see living tragedy in terms of wasted talent.  Premack, who is driving half the staff to alcoholism as an editor, was a brilliant political reporter.  Cunningham, a man of extraordinary compassion and integrity, sits on the desk all day writing memos on an endless roll.  Letofsky, one of the few truly excellent writers on the staff, is required to crank out diddly-poop tripe for TV magazine. Guindon, an incredible gifted cartoonist, is muzzled lest he offend the sensibilities of the Great Silent Majority. Steele is a man who is actually interested in ideas for God’s sake, ideas—things which never happen at the Tribune—and they keep trying to make him write objective reviews. And a whole tribe of bright, gifted young people who’ve come on for a trial spell or as summer interns has been lost for lack of training or guidance.

But beyond, or perhaps behind, the mismanagement, is Their almost stupefying self-complacency.  They point to letters attacking us as communists and letters attacking us as Bitchers and claim they must be doing something right.  On any given controversy, they print what A said and then what B said and think they’ve produced an adequate piece of journalism. 

Cowles, Sr., I understand, developed a philosophy of journalism called “responsible monopoly.”  What a contradiction.  Bower Hawthorne, says he thinks of the paper as “A cafeteria, with a little bit of something for everyone.”  Allen, then ME, an enormously likeable New England intellectual type, seems to just sit there and suffer.  Other management types are just sort of there: I don’t know that they do anything except play the old Army game of keep-your-tail-down and make sure the mistakes get blamed on someone else.  Curiously flaccid people.  Not evil—just cautious.  Reader’s Digest, Sears-Roebuck mentalities with a veneer of Minneapolis Club snobbism.

These men do not question the assumptions of the Reader’s Digest or of Sears-Roebuck or of the Minneapolis Club and they either represent or misunderstand those who do question.  If they were in fact running a cafeteria their attitudes and the reflection of those attitudes in their product would make little difference.  Unfortunately, they are running a newspaper in a monopoly press situation during a time when this country is racked by a technological revolution, a social revolution, a moral revolution, a potential political revolution and least a dozen other revolutions.  You will not find answers or even understand these things in the Tribune.

The new list of the ten best newspapers in the country has come out.

The Tribune didn’t print it.  The Tribune wasn’t on it.