“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’
polis foorce an’ the banks, commands the milishy, conthrols the ligislachure,
baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted afflicts th’
comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim afterward. They ain’t annythihng it don’t turn its hand
to fr’m explainin’ th’ docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin’ saleratus
biskit.”—American humorist (and journalist) Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902)
I came across this quote in a letter to the New York Times in May 20165 from Miranda
Dunne, granddaughter of Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago columnist who created
Irish immigrant bartender "Mr. Dooley." But I happened upon it on a singularly awful day in the recent
history of the tabloid press: the announcement that the New York Daily News was laying off half its newsroom staff.
The paper that long carried the motto "New
York's Hometown Newspaper" was one of the two newspapers bought by my
blue-collar immigrant family when I was a kid. The years haven’t been kind to The Daily News or the other paper we habitually read, The Bergen Record. (These days, the latter—sold over a year ago
by the North Jersey Media Group, the umbrella organization long owned by the
Borg family—looks like just another pallid property of its new owner, Gannett--especially so given its own draconian round of cuts.)
I never achieved my youthful ambition of writing for
a newspaper, and now that I am in a job where I often have to deal with the
results of news articles, I am more skeptical than I was before of the notion that reporters and editors try to exclude any preconceptions from affecting their coverage.
But I continue to read newspapers every day, in the
form I always read it—newsprint—and I can’t imagine living without them. Their outright
disappearance would amount to a total eclipse of American freedom, as far as I'm concerned, since no trained cadre would be around to mind the vast chicken coop that constitutes the American political system.
Its glory was epitomized by Jim Bishop, who
practically swooned at the tactile atmosphere when he became a copy boy at the
paper, imbibing the press room in all its glory:
“Silence,” he recalled in his
memoir, A Bishop’s Confession. “The sound of dust settling…I waited. It
came—the dull tentative growl of presses. It was slow. It gathered confidence.
The hollow sound, like a train approaching a tunnel, hit its stride, and the
floor, the walls, the ceiling trembled as though in fear of the news they
spawned.” (Bishop would move on to the New York Mirror before becoming a columnist and the author of books on the
deaths of major historical figures like Lincoln, Christ, JFK, and Martin Luther King
Jr.)
Nearly 30 years ago, in a continuing ed writing
class, our instructor, Paula, a onetime reporter for the News, asked us to judge six different sets of unnamed leads
for the same story—one from the News and the other from the New York
Times. The winner in each case turned out to be the Daily News.
Though Paula might have been forgiven for rooting for her old employer, I
think she had something more elevated in mind. She wanted to remind us not to
let a reputation for global or national coverage, no matter how well-deserved,
color our judgment of what constituted good or bad writing—particularly at the
local level, which The Good Gray Lady has never really made a priority.
The tone of the leads chosen by Paula was punchy. It
was the scrappy voice of the working class that the News carved out as a niche—and not only against the Times: For the past 40 years, it has
been the centrist-to-liberal counterweight to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing New York Post.
Founded in 1919, the News, as the first American tabloid, basked in the supernova energy
of the city in the 1920s. You didn’t go to the News for stock-market stats or news—most of its readers were lucky
to rub two nickels together, let alone invest them. It wasn’t trying to influence
national leaders, either. Its staff writers, especially at the start, weren’t
college boys, let alone Ivy Leaguers.
But its readers were happy with a formula that might
best be described as S+S=S(quared)—in other words, Sex plus Sensationalism
equals Success. The particular variations in it helped continue the tradition:
comic strips, columns, gossips, sports, and the latest ax murder.
Most of all, there were those headlines. Some must
have made its inventors double over in laughter (e.g., when Long Island Auto
Mechanic-Turned-Lothario Joey Buttafuoco got his hand caught in the cookie jar
yet again, this time for soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman: “SO
JOEY, HOW’S TRICKS?”). At least one has been credited with helping ensure that
a GOP incumbent President would lose in the next fall election ("FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD")
The paper’s moment of truth has been coming for a while—many
would say since the 114-day 1962-63 newspaper strike, which helped kill four other
papers. Automation was the point of dispute then, and now another technological
factor—the Internet—has come into play.
Nearly 25 years ago, when the paper also looked on
life support following the financial machinations of its owner at the time,
Robert Maxwell, a former co-worker at my company recounted his onetime News colleagues’ determination: “They
were all saying, ‘Just try to kill
us.’” I can only hope that this same never-say-die spirit gets today’s staffers
through their own current crisis.
“Time: this is what the novel asks of the writer and
the reader. And time is just what our contemporary existence is determined to
shorten. So much of our homely, domestic technology is meant to make things go
faster, the human effort shorter. And it is curious that saving time at one
point does not make one ready to give it at another. Quite the contrary. If the
laundry washes and dries quickly, the grateful housewife does not then think
that she will give to the dishes the time left over from the quickened wash:
no, she demands instantly that the dishes keep pace with the laundry. But it is
really a more subtle time the novel depends on. A spiritual and intellectual
lengthening, extending like a dream in which much is surrendered and slowly
transformed. Perhaps it is the fear that something has happened to time, some
change has taken place, which makes us wonder if a new generation will always
be there to read the novels, particularly the novels of the past. The terms of
the contract between the author and the reader are severe, the demands are
serious. Frequently we hear the doleful warning of a retreat on the part of the
reader, a withdrawal of attention, an indifference to the august tradition that
stands there like so many stone and marble college buildings, ready for parody
or destruction.”—American essayist-novelist Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), “Reflections on Fiction,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 13,
1969 
“In my house, LOL means Laugh Or Leave.”—Late-night
talk show host Conan O'Brien, tweet of Nov. 10, 2012
“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’
polis foorce an’ the banks, commands the milishy, conthrols the ligislachure,
baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted afflicts th’
comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim afterward. They ain’t annythihng it don’t turn its hand
to fr’m explainin’ th’ docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin’ saleratus
biskit.”—American humorist (and journalist) Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902)
