Fact Plus Opinion

A New York Times executive once told Ken Stewart that a reporter's duty "is to tell what he sees, not what he feels." Ken Stewart found it hard to agree. Says he in his just-published News Is What We Make It (Houghton Mifflin; $3): you cannot always isolate opinion from fact. Opinion often is fact. Interpretation often is news.

Scholarly, balding, 42 -year-old Kenneth Norman Stewart's peripatetic newspaper career spans the continent and the period between two world wars (he is now with OWI, soon returns to New York City's PM). Working on many papers and on many big stories, he has seen the news paper profession change gradually under the impact of powerful influences: the Depression, the rise of the American Newspaper Guild, the invasion of city rooms by women, the development of news magazines, the counterpull of radio, the expansion of government information agencies. The change he believes most important is the shift in emphasis from factual, objective news reporting to a standard of mixing opinion with fact to approximate full truth. Says he: "If you mean by objectivity absence of convictions . . . [and] uncritical acceptance of things as they are ... the hell with it."

Right & Wrong. Stewart joined the New York Times in the mid-'30s, principally because of its reputation as the fairest and most reliable of U.S. papers. He still thinks it is, but by his own standards he did not find it perfect. During the Spanish Civil War the Times bent backward to be neutral and impartial, and Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger is quoted as saying: "I confess to a vast sense of relief that I do not have to take sides. . . ." Ken Stewart's reaction was that Publisher Sulzberger was glad he was not "compelled to choose between right and wrong."

More & more, in Stewart's opinion, newspapers are striving not merely to present unrelated facts to their readers but also to draw the line between good & evil. Stewart's examples of this trend: the rise of the trail-blazing newspaper columnists, who "helped the reader get his own bearings"; the birth of PM, dedicated to opinionated reporting. And even the Times, Stewart points out, "would not now pretend to be neutral about the Nazis."

Blood & Night Work. Stewart's book is no piece of sobersides pontificating. It is a swift narrative, peopled with hundreds of newsmen & women, sparked with many an engrossing anecdote (for example, about the New York Herald Tribune's onetime ban on words like "blood" and "sexual"; the bizarre way staffers on the old Paris Herald lived; the innards-corroding strain of working on the "lobster" (night) shift, where "every meal is breakfast").

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