I periodically take "media relations" classes just to see what the reporters are saying their lives are like these days. I have been on both sides of the communications fence, pitching stories as a public relations practitioner and fending them off as an editor.
In last week's class, a television reporter actually said That Which Is Never Said. The general manager sends down "must cover" and "must cover favorably" edicts that usually are associated with an advertiser. It's "an ethical dilemma," he shrugged. This has been the standing procedure everywhere for decades, but no one ever, ever admits it. In this era of dying old-school media, I was startled that at last we had come to that level of desperation where the obvious cannot be denied anymore.
The following week we had a newspaper reporter who was so low energy, I was dying to ask him how in the world he had gotten his job. He had majored in something unrelated -- like psychology -- and then as is often the case, didn't know what to do with the major and needed a job. So he went to a small paper and was hired.
These stories amaze me. I made the apparently bad mistake of actually majoring in journalism, only to hear from the managing editor of the Richmond News Leader back in the 1970s that editors didn't like journalism majors. "They have preconceived ideas," or something like that. They preferred to hire any other major but journalism and then mold that person to their liking. At 22, I was still pretty moldable, but it didn't matter. I was tainted. At least it was better than what Alf Goodykoontz, now deceased in a car accident, told me the following year, that he wouldn't have a single mother in his newsroom because we were "emotionally unstable."
