About Editing and Writing

Ben Bradlee, Al Haig, David Brinkley, and George Will after a Sunday morning show.

Watching television talk shows and reading Twitter, I sometimes wonder where are all  the big name editors? Where’s Marty Baron? Dean Baquet?

Then I remember back when ABC-TV tried to redefine the Sunday morning talk show with This Week With David Brinkley. A regular panelist on the new show was Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post, then at the height of his fame after Watergate and the movie version of All the President’s Men.

Protesters who oppose Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court confronted Senator Ted Cruz and his wife at dinner on Monday night, heckling them at their table at a Washington restaurant until they left….The videos were posted online by Smash Racism DC, an anti-fascist organization, which said the protesters on Monday night were from several left-leaning groups.

—New York Times, September 25. 2018

Dining disruptions have clearly become a tool for progressives looking to express their frustration at the Trump administration and its supporters, including Cruz.

—Washington Post, October 4. 2018

My sense of how an editor should behave was shaped by reading Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by Scott Berg. Perkins was a book editor at Scribner’s and his authors included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, James Jones, and many others. His genius was his ability to inspire writers to do their best work. He often had a big impact on a book—the length, structure, and title—but to the outside world the finished book always was the author’s—it was the author’s genius, not the editor’s. I translated that to often just saying, “Writers are more important than editors,” and always believed it.

From the October 2nd Washington Post obit of French singer and composer Charles Aznavour:

“Country music tells stories, and my songs tell stories,” he said. “I start with anything — you, me, the telephone, the kids — and I create a story. It’s what songs should do.

“Sure, I’m a country-music writer,” he added, “but my country is France.”
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One of my favorite short pieces the Washingtonian published was a collection of country song titles put together by Larry Sons and Doug Todd. At the time, Sons was a Dallas advertising executive and Todd was public relations director of the Dallas Cowboys.

President Donald Trump is considered a bad electoral joke by almost all of the Washington press corps and liberal establishment. And he continues to provide lots of evidence with angry TV appearances and tweets.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected President, liberals also considered him a bad electoral joke, a B-rated movie actor who had no clue how to run the country or deal with foreign adversaries.

Reagan had been elected President in 1980 with 50.7 percent of the popular vote but that win came against President Jimmy Carter, who had seemed to wreck the economy (home mortgage interest rates had risen to 18 percent) and he was seen as weak against foreign adversaries (52 American diplomats and citizens held hostage in Iran).

If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me….Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? —Army chief counsel Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954.

He proved again that anyone who exposes him, anyone who does not share his hysterical disregard for decency and human dignity and the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, must be either a Communist or a fellow traveler. —CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow about Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954.

Washington is a much better place if you are asking questions rather than answering them. —Dean’s Law

He who knows does not tell. —Lao-tse

It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever. —This Is Spinal Tap

When they feel the heat, they see the light. —Senator Everett Dirksen

In politics, nothing happens by accident. —Franklin D. Roosevelt

Margalit Fox retired from the New York Times in June and upon leaving she wrote a Times piece with the lead, “For this obituary writer, the end has come. I don’t mean, thankfully, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns—the ‘end’ I’ve written about in more than 1,400 obituaries for The New York Times. I mean the end of my career at this newspaper.” She went on to say that “in what may be the most foolhardy decision of a foolhardy life, I have decided to pursue a long-held dream of writing books exclusively.”

By Richard Babcock

I think I started to learn to write—you never really stop learning—when I spent six months on the copy desk of The Record, a mid-sized newspaper in northern New Jersey. I landed a reporting job at the paper on the strength of my law degree—I’d never studied or practiced journalism, I just thought it sounded more fun than reading contracts. After six months covering a little New Jersey town, I got rotated through the copy desk, the regular procedure for rookies.

John Fennell was editor of Milwaukee magazine for 13 years and then until last year taught at the University of Missouri school of journalism. At Missouri, he held the Meredith Chair in Service Journalism and also coordinated the annual editorial awards contest for the City and Regional Magazine Association.