Wayward Pressman

When Abbott Joseph ("Joe") Liebling was six, he read in a New York newspaper that a heavyweight named Carl Morris was the White Hope to lick World Champion Jack Johnson. A couple of days later, a fighter named Jim Flynn licked the trunks off the White Hope. That was in 1911. Joe Liebling has mistrusted newspapers ever since.

Instead of making Liebling swear off the press, this mistrust made him a constant and critical newspaper reader. As he says: "When one cannot get the truth from any one paper (and I do not say that it is an easy thing, even with the best will in the world, for any one paper to tell all the truth), it is valuable to read two with opposite policies to get an idea of what is really happening." It also provides him with copy for a witty--and sometimes windy--department in the New Yorker called "The Wayward Press," a running commentary on the behavior of the daily (mainly Manhattan) newspapers. This week in The Wayward Pressman (Doubleday; $2.95), Liebling publishes a collection of his columns with enough autobiographical notes to establish his credentials.

Sandwich Man. As a war correspondent and writer for the New Yorker, Joe Liebling, a fat, friendly man who likes to listen while he works, proved himself one of the best U.S. reporters. Before that his career was often more down than up.

Dartmouth had kicked him out for cutting chapel too often. He later found that the Columbia School of Journalism "had all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A. & P." The "colorless, odorless and tasteless" Times fired Liebling from its copydesk for identifying an unidentified basketball referee as "Ignoto" ("unknown" in Italian). He quit his next job on the Providence Journal when the publisher fired a reporter to make room for the son of a local bigshot. (Liebling dedicates his book "to the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism can have meaning.")

He spent $22 to get a sandwich man to parade in front of the New York World with a sign reading HIRE JOE LIEBLING, but the city editor always went in & out the back way, and never saw it. Eventually Liebling landed a job on the World anyway, just before the paper folded. In the next four years he wrote more than 750 feature stories for the World-Telegram and New York Journal, made a mad miscellany of friends: curators of tropical fish, kept women, bail bondsmen, wrestlers' pressagents, horse dockers, female psychiatrists. The last thing he was told about the newspaper business before he left it was a Hearst executive's dictum: "The public is interested in just three things: blood, money and [sex]."

Critic's Teeth. Liebling has decided prejudices of his own. "The Sun" he says, "is a suburban paper published "on the island of Manhattan . . . as perfectly preserved as the corpse of Lenin." Liebling's impression of Pundit Walter Lippmann: "Nowtherefore and whereas and ahem." PM's Max Lerner writes editorials "like an elephant treading the dead body of a mouse into the floor of its cage." Liebling often rags the Chicago Tribune and Bertie McCormick, but wonders if it "isn't like punching the heavy bag. The Colonel is in the direct line of Dickens' Colonel Diver of the Rowdy Journal and of Elijah Pogram, who 'Defied the world, sir--defied the world in general to compete with our country upon any hook; and devellop'd our resources for making war upon the universal airth.' "

Liebling views with alarm the trend toward fewer newspapers and their control by "a group of wealthy individuals who share the same point of view." He thinks publishers have no right to be publishers simply because they inherited papers. Writes Liebling: "Try to imagine the future of medicine, law or pedagogy if their absolute control were vested in the legal heirs of men who had bought practices in 1890--even when the heirs lacked any special training."

He doubts the complete freedom of the U.S. press, points out that it takes $10 million to start a newspaper in a big city and $1 million in a middle-sized city. Reporter Liebling's solutions (which all call for big money, too): 1) newspapers backed by labor unions, citizens' groups and political parties, 2) endowed newspapers, "devoted to pursuit of daily truth as Dartmouth is to that of knowledge." Liebling thinks an increasing number of readers share his mistrust of newspapers. Says he: "There is less a disposition to accept what they say than to try to estimate the probable truth . . . like aiming a rifle [with] a deviation to the right."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.