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By Root 934 0

spent a decade at the paper: Proctor & Gamble had bought this company, Hazel and Holly, which made the Darkie toothpaste. It was the best-selling toothpaste in Asia. The problem was that the brand mascot was a blackfaced minstrel. It was plastered over the toothpaste boxes. They obviously could not sell this in America, so they tried to find a name and an image that did not completely replace Darkie. It was too valuable as a brand, a name, and an image, but of course they wanted to erase the racist overtones. They eventually came up with Darlie. Instead of a minstrel in blackface, they used a silhouette of a Victorian dandy that looked a lot like the original Darkie. The story ran on the front page of the business section. The morning that the piece appeared in the paper, I got a telephone call. I was sitting at my desk in the business section. It was the head P.R. guy for Proctor & Gamble. I noticed the phone connection was scratchy. I asked him where he was calling from. He said, “I’m in a limousine. I’m going to the airport with Mr. Mark,” meaning Ruben Mark, who was the CEO of the company. “I just want to let you know we really liked the article that you published. We like working with you as a journalist. As long as you keep writing stories like that, we would be very happy to work with you. Mr. Mark was wondering if you might be open for lunch some time.” Then he proceeded to give me Ruben Mark’s home telephone number. I said, “OK, well, thanks a lot, talk to you later,” and I hung up the phone.25

“This was one of the first stories I had written for the business section,” McGill remembered. “I had never heard anything quite so direct, the quid pro quo laid out so baldly: ‘If you keep writing good stories, you will keep getting access to the CEO plus perks like lunches and home telephone numbers for future stories.’ This is a signal example of what underpins a lot of big-time mainstream journalism.

“I wrote a story in 1983, while working as a reporter for the New York Times, about a proposed telephone rate hike in New York State,” McGill went on:The story had great interest in the New York area because it meant a rise in rates for New York customers. I was a metro reporter. I didn’t know anything about rate hikes or telephone companies. I was smart enough to ask questions and write down answers. I had a street sense of accuracy and fairness, enough to get a story written. I got the information from the telephone company. I knew enough to call the people who were against the rate hike who were the consumer advocates. I got what they thought about the rate hike. Then I called the phone company to get their response to the critics of the rate hike. It was formulaic. It was the standard he-said-she-said formula. The Times published it on the front page of the paper. That night I was walking with the news editor to Grand Central Station. The editor asked jokingly: “Did you really understand the story you wrote today?” “Not a word of it,” I said. And we both had a big laugh.

But inside, I didn’t feel so good. It was a kind of arrogance. I was painting by numbers. I had written the story by calling up legislators who were sponsoring the proposal, and then calling up citizens’ groups who were raising hell about it, and then getting back to the legislators for their reaction. I then stitched all the quotes together under a grand-sounding theme, and voilà! I’d been dutifully “objective” and gathered both sides of the story and made a “fair and balanced” front-page story for the New York Times. The point is, if anything unfair or truly nefarious was being done by the legislators, lobbyists, or citizens’ groups in the process of getting this rate hike passed, I would have been blithely unaware of it. The principal actors in this story could have driven a bribe or a lie or a loophole or a simple unfairness right under my nose, and I wouldn’t have suspected a thing. The he-said-she-said formula was all I needed to get on page one.

“During my last few years at the Times, I joked with my wife that my work there was