Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (111 page)

For the journalist, that means the freedom to get to the root of the truth, the freedom to criticize, the freedom to goad and stimulate every institution in our society, including our own.

For businessmen, that means the freedom to compete fairly, on the basis of value and service. And it means the freedom to defend themselves against unfair charges by pressure groups, to assert the principle of the profit motive, and to fight off excessive or stultifying government regulation.

For the consumer of your product and mine, it means the freedom to hold our claims to account, the freedom to complain like hell and get attention paid to those complaints, and the freedom to choose a competitor if we fail them.

Let me, then, practice what I preach about the new coverage of business news. Here are a few ideas we can use in our business lives.

First,
get out front
. Teamwork may be great, and the organization spirit is commendable, but business news is made by people. Individuals. Human beings. Business leadership ought to include some public leadership—but the trouble is, the public perception of business leaders is all too often that of the
bland
leading the
bland
. Oh, there are some exceptions, and Detroit is home to some of them. Yet, in a recent poll, 93 percent of the people interviewed could identify Walter Cronkite; 79 percent, Henry Kissinger; 66 percent, George Meany; but when they
were asked about Thomas Murphy and John de Butts, they wondered if the pollsters were putting them on. Less than 3 percent could identify the heads of General Motors and AT&T.

Why are there so few business heroes? Is the press trying to hide the identity of businessmen, or are businessmen worried about becoming celebrities? It is true that with public renown comes vulnerability, both personal and corporate; many businessmen choose, out of modesty or caution, to stay out of the limelight. A faceless official spokesman often becomes the voice of the company.

Even publishers should show their faces now and then. I think it’s a fine thing when somebody comes up to me after a speech and says, “You’re doing a great job with your newspaper, Mr. Chandler.”

Next,
stop talking the inside lingo of business
. Whenever businessmen get together, they bemoan the fact that business is “failing to communicate,” whatever that means. One reason may be that they’re talking a specialized language that the public is not about to take the time to learn.

That language barrier concerns us at the
Times
. Occasionally, we hear the charge that newspaper and television reporters are poorly prepared to talk to business people about financial subjects. And it is true that the subject matter is becoming more complex, involving nuclear safety, or tanker technology, changes in accounting rules, and the like. From our side, we’re hiring more reporters with formal educations in business subjects—
not
so much to talk the language of businessmen, but to interpret these complex subjects for the lay reader.

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.

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 police 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.