Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [55]
The fact that news has become a profitable venture for large corporations has not always been good for people in the business. The disappointing fact is that a large part of the American public reads a newspaper and watches television news more for entertainment than information. This has contributed to the profit-driven companies’ tendencies to deal less seriously with the truth in favor of entertainment. The truth is often less interesting than rumor or gossip and our good newspapers are to be congratulated for their imperfect resistance to being entertainers.
I’ve met hundreds of news people during my sixty years in the business. In World War II, I lived in a press camp with twenty-five and met my first bad apple reporter. He wrote for a news magazine and was ostracized by the others because he regularly put quotes in the mouths of anonymous soldiers he had not interviewed and described events he had not seen.
There’s one in every crowd, but what I want to say in this commercial for journalism is this: Reporters are more honest and ethical than the people in any other line of work. It’s just very difficult to get the whole truth and tell it accurately.
Big Business
T here is no more interesting or important work in the world than being a reporter. That’s my opinion, of course, and being at least in part a reporter myself, it’s natural I’d think so.
The word “reporter” isn’t quite right for the job, though, because it only describes half of it—the half where you tell the reader or the listener what you’ve learned. The other half of a reporter’s work isn’t described by that word. That’s the part where he or she collects the information before telling everyone about it. That’s the hard part.
A good reporter ought to be part detective, part puzzle solver and part writer. A reporter has to find the facts, piece them together so they make sense and then put them down on paper in a manner that makes them clear to everyone else.
People often complain about inaccuracies in news stories. They talk as if reporters were deliberately inaccurate or in on some conspiracy, and this is almost never the case. No reporter sets out to write a distorted or inaccurate story. They sometimes come out that way because reporting is hard and some reporters aren’t good enough. They also come out that way because a lot of people are very secretive and tell the reporter what they’d like to have printed, not what the facts are.
This all comes to me now, because this morning I got a letter from a boyhood friend I haven’t seen in thirty-five years. I knew him as “Bud,” but now his letterhead says his first name is “Cornelius” and he’s vice-chairman of a big corporation in Oregon. He was a wonderful friend when I was young, but I don’t think I know him at all now. After some personal words, he went into a tirade against the news organizations.
Being attacked by businessmen isn’t a new experience for most reporters. I heard Lewis Lapham, then editor of Harper’s Magazine, attacked one evening by a Texan with huge coal interests in Montana.
“You people know nothing about business,” the businessman yelled at Lapham.
“You’re right,” Lapham yelled back, “and it’s probably a damn good thing for business.”
When businessmen say newspapers and television don’t cover business very well, it makes me nervous because in many cases I think it’s true. It is also true that it is business’s own fault. Information about any business in town is almost impossible to get. They say they have a right to privacy, and I agree with that, but they’re being stupid by not being more open, and I’ll bet they won’t agree with me.
It is possible now, because of the Freedom of Information Act, to get information out of government. It has been a great thing for the American public but, of course, there is nothing like that requiring business to reveal its business. Some businessmen claim they are secretive so their