(30) From Woodward and Bernstein to Donald Trump: A Career

P.J. Cratty

Description

This book is a recounting of a profession that is on the downhill side of history. It's far too fashionable today for front offices to tell us that all we need is a better use of white space, color graphics, more features, and online bells and whistles to slow the decline. They seem impervious to the fact that there is nothing online that wasn't first gathered and compiled by a journalist. But the individuals preaching these tactics are not newspaper people. Newspapers today are run by ad and circulation department execs, "Bean Counters," whose first and only allegiance is to the bottom line and certainly not to the primary product of a newspaper, which is THE NEWS. The bean counter approach is, and always has been, to turn the newspaper business into just that--A BUSINESS--which according to the Constitution it was never meant to be. Bean counters' priority, as is their wont, is always the bottom line. And their adherence to that principle has surely adversely compromised the newsroom, causing staff to be cut to the bone and leaving journalists little more time than rewriting "news releases." The bean counters further compromise the product by stunting any attempt at newsgathering with a very real conflict of interest that comes from the advertising department personnel far too close and protective of those who are the subject of much of that news and who also contribute to that all-powerful bottom line.

Sujets

• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645366560
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

(30) From Woodward and Bernstein to Donald Trump: A Career
P. J. Cratty
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-01-31
(30) From Woodward and Bernstein to Donald Trump: A Career About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgment 1. Bad Dreams 2. Battling Machines Politicians beware: Somebody always finds out 3. The Road Guard We’ve done our job, now you do yours 4. A Naked Lady 5. Stirring Shit 6. “Car 54, Where Are You…?” 7. Crazy Days 8. Nothing to Write Home About 9. A Nine-Fingered Paratrooper 10. S’ter Harbor Police 11. Another Casualty 12. Fairy-Tale Ending 13. Girl on a Bridge 14. The Rest of the Story ’Nam Vet’s Lament 15. (30)
About the Author
P. J. Cratty has spent almost 44 years in the newspaper business at 13 separate community publications in six different states. He has served in every capacity possible in newsrooms – as an obit writer; sportswriter; sports editor; school, police, city, county, and state beats, as well as a columnist, investigative reporter; and as a city, copydesk, managing, and executive editor. His experience includes stints as both a weekly editor and general manager of a weekly chain and work at dailies ranging in circulation from 5,000 to 40,000.
Dedication
To Kath, who, despite how everything turned out, was the best decision she and I ever made. She gave me two wonderful daughters, who, along with her, were the bedrock of my career herein contained. Then she was left to raise them on her own. It was a chore that nobody but her could have accomplished and one that allowed me to selfishly follow my own life’s adventure recounted in this book. I know it doesn’t come close to an even trade, but certainly you got the best part of the bargain.
Copyright Information ©
P. J. Cratty (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Cratty, P. J.
From Woodward and Bernstein to Donald Trump: A Career
ISBN (Paperback)
ISBN 9781641829755 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366560 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920016
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
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Acknowledgment
There are many people I need to acknowledge for my 44-year career in the newspaper business, and perhaps I should start from the beginning.
To the late Delbert Roberts, who took a fresh-out-of-college rookie with little to no typing skills and broke him in. To Darrell Bates – also no longer with us – who took a rookie sportswriter and carried him at his first major paper. Then there was Dave Elbert, who is probably most responsible for the newspaperman I became. The late great Forrest Kilmer, who, like myself, was a former paratrooper who no doubt protected my job security, considering all the trouble I caused him.
The Hurt brothers, Murray and Nolan – fellow hometown scribes and family friends – who made me into the columnist I later became. Murray was the greatest columnist I ever knew. My favorite publisher, and that’s saying quite a bit because I liked only one other, my wife, Scott Champion. Rich Heiland and Dave Berry put up with a lot of my shit but have remained close friends ever since my Texas days. And I shouldn’t neglect Dave Hawk.
And also, every colleague I met, worked with and for, and/or mentored along the way. They are too numerous to catalog but I can’t remember too many I couldn’t at least be in the same newsroom with. I’m sure that many of them couldn’t say the same about me. But at least I’m sure that I’ll always be remembered.
1. Bad Dreams
“Shit,” he said just above a whisper as he sat straight up in bed, soaked in sweat, almost as if he’d been struck by lightning.
It was 3:00 a.m. by the green glow of the digital clock on the VCR on top of the television across his cluttered one-room plus a bath. In the distance, he could hear a train whistle, as the South Shore rolled into Indiana City, Mich., from the east, looking for takers headed to downtown Chicago, as it was every couple of hours.
Another day was beginning for the rest of the world, but not him. He still had another 12 hours or so to kill before starting the second shift on the copy desk at The Courier in 1998.
Once again, he had the uncontrollable urge to take a piss, and since he was already wide awake thanks to the same dream that seemed to interrupt some of his sleeping moments the past few years, he went ahead and stumbled in the dark to the bathroom. He cussed every time his foot landed on a stray shoe, plastic fork, paper plate or some other unknown object.
It wasn’t that his apartment, situated on the upper story of a modest red-brick home about 10 blocks from the lake, was that big, but he always had a pile of junk lying on the floor and the journey across the space was not unlike a walk through a minefield in the dark. And God knows he was never one for bright lights in the middle of the night. He was always worried about his night vision, which he was just certain was compromised by lights. It was either that or his inability to fall asleep with the lights on.
As he stood pissing in the darkness, which was broken only by the lights along 11th Street streaming in through the slatted rollout window at the south end of the room, he couldn’t get that dream out of his head. But then he never could.
It always started the same way. Or at least the part of it he could recall later seemed to begin the same. Like most of his nocturnal journeys, there were parts that were as clear as a bell and parts that seemed to float through the air, nameless, faceless, and placeless.
Three soldiers, their jungle fatigues, drenched with sweat, are standing on a dirt road that forms one wall of a half-dried rice paddy on a cloudless Southeast Asian day. The sun is so bright, the trio is forced to squint, and one of them puts his hand up in the air in a vain attempt to cut the almost painful rays.
None of them say a word as they consider the questioning eyes of an old man, who looks as dried and worn as the field behind him. The shriveled Gook stands in front of them with a look on his face suspended somewhere between a fake smile and absolute terror.
One of the young soldiers reaches into his deep fatigue pockets and, with tears in his eyes, hands the old man every scrap of Piasters he has on him.
For years, that was all Cratty could ever conjure up in the way of a wartime memory. It was always at about that same moment in this recurring movie of the mind – or was it a nightmare? – that he’d awaken, sometimes quietly, sometimes in a cold sweat with an audible cry, like tonight…or better yet, this morning.
His own private dream was rather tame by comparison to some he’d heard of. And it hadn’t even crossed into his dreams until sometime in the 1980s, a good 20 years after his tour of duty with the 1st Brigade of the 101st had ended.
Before that, it was an all too clear memory of one afternoon in that tour.
He knew that one of the soldiers in his dream, the one with tears in his eyes, was himself, and he had absolutely no idea who the others were. He knew it was him, but it was one of those things that’s peculiar about dreams. You recognize the characters without really seeming to use your sense of sight.
It was almost his only lingering memory from Viet Nam. It and an even stranger remembrance about an old woman standing naked beside Highway 1 and shouting unintelligible epithets in Vietnamese as his outfit passed were the only things remotely resembling nightmares, he retained from his stint on the other side of the Pacific in the mid-1960s. He had been 10,000 miles from his Midwestern roots and an entire universe away from the 18 years of his life before Viet Nam and more than three decades since.
It wasn’t as if he had found anything like home since leaving the small-town Midwest. He’d spent the 30 plus years since ’Nam moving from one newspaper job to another in what was quickly becoming a futile attempt at finding a stable work environment. His two grown daughters were always distant voices on the telephone as he moved from paper to paper, trying to find someplace to land and at least build something remotely resembling retirement security.
His connection with his two daughters was probably the closest thing to an anchor in his journeyman’s life spent at 13 publications in six different states by the time it ended.
However, that quest for any real retirement security was also quickly becoming a pipe dream. He hadn’t spent much more than a couple of years at six or seven of the rags he’d bounced around in just the past quarter century. Just like his three marriages, only one of which – his first, gave him his two daughters – he’d spent more than a couple of years in.
Other than those two dreams, which he never discussed with anybody else until early in the 1990s and then only in counseling sessions, his recollections of the Viet Nam War were quite uneventful, or at least he thought so.
Oh, there were flashes, bits and pieces of other things that darted in and out of his memory about that time. But there were surprisingly few faces and only portions of names, almost exclusively last nam