Journalism's Woodstock

Across town, the American Newspaper Publishers Association gathered in annual session at the Waldorf-Astoria to hear purse-warming reports of record circulation (62.2 million) and ad revenue ($6.2 billion) for 1971. But journalism's Young Turks of all ages, assembled in a crowded hall on Manhattan's West Side, weighed not profit and loss but the less tangible standards of their craft. The tumultuous two-day A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention* was timed to coincide with the publishers' gathering, and the mood of confusion and malaise generated by the Lieblingers produced the desired contrast. The nonstop critique underscored journalism's variety and energy--plus a widespread disenchantment with conventional practices. It was, in a way, journalism's Woodstock.

Sponsored by the New York journalism review [MORE] (circ. 8,000), the Counter-Convention attracted some 2,000 reporters, editors, freelancers, students, journalism professors and unaffiliated critics from all over the U.S. A few paid their own way to New York from points as distant as Hawaii to participate in the biggest forum ever involving those who write, report and broadcast the news. [MORE] Editor Richard Pollak promised all comers "a chance to bitch"; the response was collective catharsis. Panels on subjects ranging from "the new journalism" to "racism-sexism-elitism" were punctuated by scatological outbursts that went live on radio and cable television into many startled Manhattan households.

The litany of complaints was familiar: too much control by editors and publishers, too much reliance on official sources, not enough time to dig out the real story not enough blacks and women in newsrooms, not enough pay for anybody, not enough coverage of such causes as ecology and Gay Liberation. The session on the new journalism turned into a mudslinging match between The New Yorker's Renata Adler, who condemned the genre as no more than "zippy prose about inconsequential people," and New York magazine's Tom Wolfe, who claimed Boswell and Dickens as editorial ancestors. "We are doing a more complete job of reporting," Wolfe insisted, "including people's thoughts."

One of the most significant questions raised was why so many capable reporters leave the daily-newspaper field. Such Pulitzer Prize alumni as David Halberstam and J. Anthony Lukas of the New York Times talked of low pay and insufficient "time to think." Freelancer Murray Kempton, ex-New York Post columnist, cryptically cited "spiritual reasons," and advised those with families to support to quit by age 40 in order to earn an adequate income elsewhere. Most who talked about the exodus from dailies conveyed the impression that they thought their talents were shackled by conventional newspaper discipline.

In discussing "advocacy journalism," New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker seemed to be swimming against the tide when he observed that "news stories should not be editorials." But the real advocacy to be guarded against, he said, is the "sort that accepts the status quo as the norm." One of the few old-fashioned admonitions came from Seymour Hersh, who first broke the My Lai story: "There is not a newspaper in the country where, if you assemble your facts and do your work hard enough, they won't put [an expose] in."

Complex Truth. If the sessions were long on rhetoric and short on concrete solutions, they did produce two specific results. A second meeting is scheduled for Washington, D.C., next year, and in the interim a manifesto will be drafted demanding that "working journalists" participate in their employers' decision making.

At the end, Master Muckraker I.F. Stone, 64, stood up to accept th A.J. Liebling Award from the editors of [MORE] for a long and lonely career of crusading. Stone assured his audience that "the Establishment is so full of crap, that it really deserves to be treated disrespectfully." But he added a warning that the critics who dominated the Counter-Convention might consider: "The truth is something so complex and so infinite that nobody has the full measure of it. The real fun of being a reporter is in those moments when you realize how little you know."

* Named in honor of the late critic who contributed columns on "The Wayward Press" to The New Yorker for 18 years until his death in 1963, and who once observed that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

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