When reporter Craig McCool and photographer Mairin Chapman of The Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette went to a local party to research a series on drinking among young adults, they saw nothing wrong with partaking of the libations themselves.Where — WHERE, I ask you — is the next Hunter Thompson going to come from if newspapers fire reporters for drinking beer? I mean, newsguy-wise, it's okay to make up your stories, manufacture quotes, print antigun press releases as news, be inaccessible and aloof from your community, outright lie...but have a couple of beers, and YOU'RE HISTORY!
But editors did. The result: The two were dismissed, and the paper ran an editor's note this weekend explaining the incident.
"Their conduct is unacceptable and violates the standards that we uphold every day as journalists," Editor Rebecca Pierce said in the note, published Saturday. "We don't condone it and we can't ignore it."
I always knew mainstream journalism was going to hell in handbasket...
2 comments:
"Their conduct is unacceptable and violates the standards that we uphold every day as journalists" ...
They were drinking beer. Lou Grant didn't keep beer in that bottle in his desk. And Hunter Thompson didn't achieve his finest hallucinations with beer.
The journalistic failure may have been that they remained too close to sobriety to report the proper editorial viewpoint.
I was lucky enough to start my career (such as it is) in journalism at the end of the Old Days, when type was cast in lead and learning to read backwards was a survival skill (the lead was mechanically fixed into forms, called "turtles"). The editors I learned under were hard men — and a few women — survivors of the newspaper wars in New York in the 1930s who carried guns and kept a bottle of Old Scratch in the drawer of their amazingly messy desks. I remember once one of the editors threw a coffee cup at a "copy boy" who accidentally replaced the blue ink ribbon in the UPS with a black ink ribbon used only for the AP machine. They didn;t know the meaning of politically correct and didn't give a damn whether you succeeded or quit in tears. It was Darwinism in action, and they beat us into journalists. I was very very lucky!
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