Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  Third, go looking for complaints. That sounds strange, I know—most of us have all the complaints we can handle. But I was reading a U.S. News and World Report survey of some five thousand heads of households. The biggest problem business had was credibility: most people say they do not believe what business claims about its products. That’s troublesome, but the same survey turned up this hopeful note: of the one-fourth of the people who had made a complaint to a manufacturer about a product in the past year, nearly half of them said they were satisfied in the way those complaints were handled.

  Think about that: one of the biggest pluses American business has going for it is the satisfaction of the customer who complains, and whose complaints are heard. And it’s better that they complain to the businessman than to write to their congressman.

  We deal with gripes in the newspaper business all the time. One of the best-read sections of every paper is the “Letters to the Editor,” and the best letters are the ones that slam us all over the page. The Times also has a “corrections” corner, originally because we thought that was the responsible thing to do, but now it is turning into a well-read feature. Why? Because nobody’s perfect—customers and readers understand that, and react well to efforts to improve.

  And, finally, do some complaining yourself. Fight for your rights—everyone else is, and business has just as much a right to be heard as any other force in our society.

  Just about every survey about public perceptions of business shows that the strongest antibusiness feeling is on the college campus. That’s a big challenge, and it invites a kind of sensitive confrontation. Businessmen, especially young businessmen, should assume that burden; it cannot be solved only by taking an ad in the college newspaper. To combat antibusiness feeling at its source, businessmen have to arrange to tie into college activities, participate in seminars, and have honest answers to student questions about environmental and human concerns. Nor is there any need to be on the defensive; we know that the market system outperforms any other, and it includes the irreplaceable element of personal freedom. That’s not something to apologize for; that’s something to proudly assert.

  I think you’ll find more places in which to make that kind of affirmation. Many newspapers are adopting op-ed pages, seeking expressions of outside opinion.

  On the Times, one of our most popular Sunday features is a page of outside opinion labeled “Point of View,” where businessmen and academics and government officials blaze away on everything from energy policy to capital shortages.

  More than ever, across the spectrum of our lives, that element of controversy is a vital part of the news. News is not only what happens but what people think has happened, and what values they attach to what has, or has not, taken place. Business is a prime part of that creative controversy; so is journalism. Sometimes it hurts; most of the time it’s fairly exciting and quite constructive.

  My point is this: it is not so much a matter of the press being antibusiness, which I have to admit it sometimes is. Nor is it a matter of business being antipress, which you will have to admit it usually is. That tension between press and business—in a relationship not quite so adversary as that which exists between press and government—is the healthy tension in a land of separated and balancing centers of power.

  Is the press antibusiness? The answer is no. Is the press antidullness, antistuffiness, anticorporate secrecy? The answer is yes.

  Is a probing, skeptical, searching press coverage good for business? I think so. You may not agree completely. You might look at modern business news coverage the way John Wanamaker looked at advertising: half of it is wasted, he felt, but he never knew which half.

  Business and journalism share certain great values: we are both pro-opportunity; we are both proconsumer; we are both proprofit; and we are both profreedom.

  We are looking at each other now with new eyes, in a kind of institutional midlife crisis. And I think we’re both going to come through it stronger than ever.

  A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times Defines Freedom of the Press

  “Judge Medina… laid it pretty heavily on reporters and editors and publishers who were too quick to compromise…: ‘Fight like hell every inch of the way.’”

  As executive editor of the New York Times from 1977 to 1986, Abe Rosenthal thought his mission in life was “to keep the paper straight”—that is, to resist in the news pages not only government’s influence, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers, but also the subtler nudges of cultural and ideological bias. In the early stage of his half century at the Times, he won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting from Poland; the Communist regime also honored him by expelling him. On reaching retirement age, the crusading editor stepped up to the post of op-ed columnist, where he won human rights awards for his espousal of the cause of individual dissidents oppressed by tyranny.

  On November 18, 1981, he spoke at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, at a convocation honoring the memory of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a Colby graduate of 1826, who died defending his printing press against a mob violently opposed to his stand on the abolition of slavery.

  Rosenthal’s speech begins with a surefire attention getter: “Let me tell you a little true story….” (Audiences love to listen to stories, especially when they know a point will follow.) The speaker sets up his key message with a colorful quotation midway in the speech, which he reprises in a ringing conclusion.

  ***

  LET ME TELL you a little true story about how a reporter I knew operated. Every day he would go out and cover his beat the best way he knew and the only way he knew: by talking to people in the town about what concerned them, about the cost of living, about the feel of life, about what they thought about their leaders, about politics.

  Every night that reporter went home, wrote a story, and then carefully burned his notes or flushed them down the toilet. It was a pity, because he knew he might forget what he couldn’t write that day if he burned his notes. But he also knew the police had permission to search his files anytime.

  A lot of people did not want to talk to the reporter, because they felt he might reveal their names on purpose or through a slip of the typewriter. They were defenseless people, and they were afraid.

  The reporter never urged them to talk, because he understood their fear. Others, however, did talk to the reporter, precisely because they felt powerless and wanted somebody to tell the truths they knew. They accepted his word that he would suffer imprisonment before telling their names.

  The government became very annoyed at this reporter. They questioned him directly about his sources, and, of course, he did not respond.

  They bugged his home and followed him wherever he went, and they searched his office and tracked his phone calls. Finally, the government got really angry and said, You can’t write about us any more, you can’t have access, go away. But some of the people about whom he had written and whose names he had never revealed kissed him when he went away, and gave him roses, and everybody said he was a hero, and later he was loaded with honors.

  I was the reporter, and the beat I covered was Communist Poland. That was the first time I had to operate worrying about the police and courts and the first time I had to burn notes and think about going to jail. I thought it would be the last, because I resolved never again to work in a totalitarian society.

  Now it is twenty years later, and I am the editor of the same newspaper for which I was a reporter in Poland. I spend my time dealing with news and with staff matters, but there is one subject that now takes up a considerable amount of my time and thoughts and that has to do with whether reporters should burn their notes, whether they are going to go to jail, what are the possibilities of a sudden police search, whether people who once talked to us will talk any more, whether other papers can be fined out of existence, whether the police will secretly commandeer our phone records to find our sources of information, whether we will be allowed to cover the administration of justice, how to get the pol
ice to reveal necessary information.

  New York, not Warsaw.

  I do not tell you all this to imply that we have gone totalitarian or that the Republic will fall. But I do tell you that the process essential to a free press—one of the institutions that will help guarantee that we do not go totalitarian, that the Republic will not fall—is under attack, and not from our enemies or the enemies of freedom. That we could handle. No, it is under attack from some of the very people whose professions have helped create and strengthen a free press, some of the lawyers and judges of our country, honorable men and women who traditionally have been the philosophic allies of the free press. And it is under attack from federal legislators and politicians who certainly do not see themselves as enemies of a free press. They just think the American press is a little too free for their tastes.

  They want to prevent the press from printing certain kinds of information. They say that obviously this does not affect such respected newspapers as the Times or the Washington Post or the Boston Globe. All they’re aiming at, they say, is certain nasty fringe publications. Now, I happen to agree that some of their targets are indeed nasty and fringe, but it is precisely the fringes, not just the center, that the First Amendment was designed to protect.

  Simply see what has happened in the past few years. A dozen or so reporters and editors have been sent to jail for no other crime than trying to protect their sources, exactly what I did in Poland every day and for which Americans praised me. Others are now under orders to reveal sources or face jail. The courts have permitted newsrooms to be searched. Thousands of memoranda and files have been subpoenaed in different actions around the country. One large newspaper, our own, has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now every small newspaper lives under the threat of being fined into bankruptcy at the decision of a judge. Laws erected by state governments to protect the reporter’s right to work freely have been destroyed by some courts.

  Many judges have decided that reporters can be barred from essential parts of the court process, pretrial hearings, which constitute so important a part of the administration of justice. Other courts have placed severe restraints on participants in the judicial process, preventing press and public from finding out what is going on. A wall of judicial protection has been built around information held by the police behind which they can operate in relative secrecy.

  In more and more cases, courts have upheld the principle of prior restraint—that is, preventing the press from publishing what it feels should be published. Until a few years ago this was unthinkable.

  And in case after case, by demanding notes and files and sending reporters to jail for not revealing sources, courts in effect have ruled that they have the power to enforce publication of what reporters and editors feel should not be published, because the information is either confidential or simply inaccurate, untrustworthy, or damaging to innocent people, just raw material.

  In totality, courts now have ruled themselves overseers of essential decision-making processes of the free press that the First Amendment was designed to safeguard from government encroachment—what to publish, when to publish, how to operate, what to think….

  I do not think there is a plot against the press on the part of the courts. I do think that there is a resentment against the press that comes from many things. I do feel that most of that resentment comes from the virtues rather than the failures of the press, the unpleasant virtues of telling the people the truth about Vietnam, Watergate, corruption in government or in business, the aggressiveness and cantankerousness which are part of our makeup and function.

  We annoy the hell out of people. And we have our faults, by God, we have our faults. There are scores of publications I wouldn’t read, let alone work for. And there are a few for which I have loathing and contempt.

  But there is a difference between resenting the press or even loathing it and trying to control it.

  The First Amendment was written not to protect the press from the admiration of government but from the loathing of government, all branches of government.

  Courts and the press are involved, it seems to me, in two philosophic differences. One is that some judges feel that it is incumbent upon them to protect what the government says for the national security of the United States. National security usually turns out to be a matter of political or diplomatic interest or plain embarrassment. The price of prior restraint, a fancy way of saying judicial censorship, strikes me as a very expensive price indeed to pay to save government face.

  Remember what the government said would happen if we published the Pentagon Papers? National calamity, revelation of state secrets, disaster upon disaster. The government position was a fraud, and the government, I believe, knew it….

  As Judge Harold Medina once put it, any judge who knows his business and who has a stiff backbone can afford a fair trial without any invasion of the freedom of the press.

  In that speech of his, Judge Medina laid it pretty heavily on judges who he thought violated the First Amendment. He also laid it pretty heavily on reporters and editors and publishers who were too quick to compromise. He gave them a piece of advice: “Fight like hell every inch of the way.”

  Well, we are fighting, and it seems that almost every time we turn around there is a new battle to be fought.

  One had to do with the seizure of the telephone records of our Atlanta bureau by the Department of Justice. They were not investigating us; they were investigating the Ku Klux Klan, which we also had been investigating, without informing us or giving us a chance to fight. Southern Bell bowed to a subpoena of the Department of Justice and turned over all the records from our Atlanta bureau and from the home of our bureau chief. The purpose of the subpoena was to find out who our reporters were talking to.

  This clandestine investigation of a reporter’s work is a clear violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. I’m happy to say that that particular threat has been considerably eased. Because of complaints from the press and the bar, the Justice Department issued new guidelines that made unnotified seizure much less likely….

  The press is not asking for privilege. That word implies some special gift to be bestowed upon the press or withheld from the press at somebody’s discretion, a judge’s or a legislator’s or a policeman’s. No, we are not talking about the privilege of the press, but the right and ability and duty of the press to function in any meaningful sense.

  Yes, this all concerns editors, reporters, and publishers, but I beseech you to consider that this concerns each of you as citizens of a country based on freedom of thought and expression.

  Every individual American has to ask herself or himself some questions:

  • Do you want a society in which newspapers have to operate under the fear of being fined to death?

  • Do you want a society in which newspaper offices can be searched without advance hearings?

  • Do you want a society in which the public does not know what is taking place in vital parts of the court processes?

  • Do you want a society in which the police process is made virtually secret?

  • Do you want a society that is the totality of all these things?

  Please think about it. If your answer is “No, I don’t want that kind of society,” then fight like hell every inch of the way.

  Radio and Television Journalist Daniel Schorr, at Seventy-five, Makes a Few “Confessions”

  “The older I get, the more I begin to realize that life isn’t that simplicity of the young reporter saying, ‘Out of my way, Bud, I want that story, and if I get that story, there it goes.’ I have a greater and greater sense of complications.”

  Dan Schorr became famous as a CBS television correspondent, a member of the team Edward R. Murrow assembled, which is remembered by broadcast journalists with the awe that Yankee fans show in recalling their “Murderers’ Row.” Schorr was never a go-along, get-along type, even within his company: his uncompromising integrity led to clashes wit
h CBS boss William Paley and later with CNN boss Ted Turner. What he called his “inescapable decision of journalistic conscience” led him to broadcast and publish a report by the House Intelligence Committee that the House had voted to suppress; in a dramatic confrontation that affected press freedom in Washington, he faced down the irate committee, which decided not to pursue him for contempt of Congress.

  On October 3, 1991, in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday a month before, National Public Radio—proud to have him as its senior commentator—gave a party at the Smithsonian Institution’s “castle.” To an audience of politicians, friends, and fellow journalists, Schorr proceeded to reminisce, as if off the cuff; as the structure of the speech shows, however, the extemporaneous remarks were thought through in advance. The combination of a startling fact about his early career and a surprising ambivalence about what seemed to be such clear-cut judgments in his later career gripped the audience; it was one of those speeches, excerpted here from a transcript of the tape, that offer food for thought to both sources and broadcasters long after it is delivered.

  ***

  …LET ME MAKE to you a couple of confessions, and maybe you’ll learn a little bit about how I view a profession that is very, very dear to me, but part of an industry about which I’ve learned to have a great many reservations.

  First confession: I actually never really intended to go into broadcasting at all. All my young life what I wanted was to be a newspaper reporter, especially a foreign correspondent, and most especially, a correspondent for the New York Times. Back in the very early 1950s, I was a stringer for the New York Times, in Holland, writing assiduously. Finally, I went to New York and said, “You know, I really want to be a staff correspondent for the New York Times.” The managing editor asked me to go through a trial period in New York to see whether I could cover local news as well as foreign news, and I did. Finally he said, “Go back to Holland. I think we’re going to do it. It’ll take a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, and then we’ll appoint you to our staff.”