My alma mater was too proud of its reputation as the oldest chartered college west of the Alleghenies (The Harvard of the West and actually, the second oldest) and in contemporary times, a Public Ivy, to allow a journalism school to call its campus home. That would be like having a school of cosmetology in the Physics Department.
The university did offer journalism classes within the English Department, however. Whenever I needed an easy A, which was fairly often, I took one. The classes were all taught by a whimsical, dapper, sixty-something throwback who was a freelance stringer correspondent for the Cincinnatti Enquirer and various other southwestern Ohio papers.
With his painter’s brush mustache and Beau Brummell airs, Gilson Wright bore a striking resemblance to film star, Adolph Menjou, a point that Wright made himself and made repeatedly. He once served as Menjou’s escort on a visit to our campus. Wright was smitten and reveled in being seen as Menjou’s doppelgänger.
Whenever there was a celebrity visiting campus, Wright tried to snare the individual for a class interview. Walter Alston, then manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers came every year. He was a native of Darrtown, Ohio, a suburb of Oxford, roughly six miles away, as we always joked. Oxford is where Miami University is located, and Walter Alston was a graduate of Miami (One of the reasons it was called The Cradle of Coaches).
Every year after the baseball season was over, there was a parade from Darrtown through Oxford’s High Street to the town square. Alston always visited the campus and graciously granted interviews.
The interview in 1963 was particularly fun because the Dodgers had won the World Series, beating the Yankees 4 games to none. Hall-of-Famer Sandy Koufax won the first and fourth games, defeating fellow Hall-of-Famer, Whitey Ford, in both games.
The Evening News
I recall a visit to one of my journalism classes by the producer of The Huntley–Brinkley Report, which was the title of the NBC nightly news broadcast at that time. Hard to believe, but the network news broadcasts then were only fifteen minutes long. They went to thirty minutes during my college sophomore year.
The Huntley–Brinkley Report (sometimes known as The Texaco Huntley–Brinkley Report for one of its early sponsors) was an American evening news program that aired on NBC from October 29, 1956, to July 31, 1970. It was anchored by Chet Huntley in New York City, and David Brinkley in Washington, D.C. It succeeded the Camel News Caravan, anchored by John Cameron Swayze. The program ran for 15 minutes at its inception but expanded to 30 minutes on September 9, 1963, exactly a week after the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite did so. (Wikipedia)
Today, one gets the impression from mainstream media that Walter Cronkite was the anchorman of choice—the nation’s father figure. Cronkite is idolized in the profession, but at the time, my family and virtually everyone else I knew watched Huntley-Brinkley, as we usually called the program. It was the news program that was watched in my freshman dorm and later in my fraternity house.
At first I thought I was the anomaly, but I came to find out that Huntley-Brinkley’s ratings were higher than Cronkite’s for most of their reign. It is just another example of media outlets fudging on accuracy to promote their favored narrative and favored personalities. Brinkley’s irreverent wit cut too close to the media’s sacred cows for him to be unequivocally admired by a majority of his liberal colleagues.
Critics considered Huntley to possess one of the best broadcast voices ever heard, and Brinkley's dry, often witty, newswriting presented viewers a contrast to the often sober output from CBS News. The program received a Peabody Award in 1958 for "Outstanding Achievement in News," the awards committee noting that the anchors had "developed a mature and intelligent treatment of the news that has become a welcome and refreshing institution for millions of viewers."[9] The program received the award again two years later in the same category, the committee concluding that Huntley and Brinkley had "dominated the news division of television so completely in the past year that it would be unthinkable to present a Peabody Award in that category to anybody else." [10] By that time, the program had surpassed CBS's evening news program, Douglas Edwards with the News, in ratings and maintained higher viewership levels for much of the 1960s, even after Walter Cronkite took over CBS's competing program (initially named Walter Cronkite with the News in 1962 and renamed the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1963). It received eight Emmy Awards in its 14-year run. (Wikipedia)
I came to admire David Brinkley for his wit, candidness and style. His book Washington Goes to War is a fascinating account of how World War II changed Washington, D.C., from a sleepy southern town when Congress and just about everyone else escaped the heat by abandoning the city for most of the typically hot, moist summers, to a city of southern efficiency and northern charm. The sprawl began and has yet to stop.
Given my respect for and loyalty to the Huntley-Brinkley Report, I was a bit disappointed to hear our journalism class guest, the newscast’s producer, describe the behind-the-scenes sausage making that went into getting the news on the air. I do not recall much of his talk, but I recall his description of how their day began. It began with a meeting of staff to discuss the content of that evening’s program.
The discussion largely consisted of a group perusal of that day’s New York Times, then editors deciding which of the Times front page stories they would use for that evening’s broadcast. That suddenly changed my perspective as to how objective and extensive was the coverage of the news. It was not just in the NBC newsroom, of course, that the Times set the news agenda. It was just about everywhere. Although somewhat disillusioned, I decided I had better start reading the New York Times.
I was further disillusioned by my experiences writing for the campus newspaper The Miami Student, affectionately known as the Miami Stupid by most of the student body. Despite the fact that I was being molded into a liberal by my liberal professors, I found the staff of the paper to be so far out in left field that even as a professed lefty, I felt uncomfortable and out of place.
After starting out doing rewrites of wire copy, I began to be assigned stories I had to cover live. The editor, who was a somewhat abrasive New Yorker with a heavy accent to match, assigned me to cover a speech by a former Mayor of Cincinnati, Charles P. Taft. Taft was the son of Robert Taft, the conservative Ohio Senator, and the grandson of President William Howard Taft.
A Choice Not An Echo
Early campaigning had begun for the 1964 presidential election. It was not unlike the 2016 election in that a Republican insurgent, Barry Goldwater, had a rabid, loyal following, particularly among young conservatives. He was vehemently opposed by the liberal eastern faction of the GOP, led by Nelson Rockefeller, just as Trump was opposed by the GOP establishment in 2016.
Goldwater was portrayed by the opposition as a somewhat daft war monger whose trigger finger you did not want on the nuclear button. Draft age males feared that Goldwater would escalate the skirmishing that was going on in Vietnam to all-out war. In short, we of draft age feared being drafted and therefore, feared Goldwater.
I do not recall much about Taft’s actual speech except that I remember feeling very grownup sitting among this sophisticated crowd of concerned adults and covering the speech just like the big kids from the Cincinnatti and Dayton papers. I tried to write an objective story even though I did not want to see Goldwater elected.
Although proud to see my story on the front page and above the fold, I was somewhat taken aback by the headline. I do not recall the word extremist ever being used by Taft, but the story was definitely edited to reflect that point of view. That became my first object lesson in slanting the news, or all the news that’s fit to print.
“Good night, Chet.”
“Good night, David.”
Next: New York Time subscriber and real world journalism awakening.