Waiting for the Hourlies

-- 30 --

2005-03-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

Bernie Cullen started this blog in January andhad looked forward to commenting on journalism and First Ammendment rights. Sadly, he died in his sleep early Sunday, Feb. 27.

Here is the obituary that appeared in the Journal News:

Former editor dies
By ROB RYSERTHE JOURNAL NEWS(Original publication: March 1, 2005)

Bernie Cullen, a veteran reporter and editor who made some of his most important contributions to journalism while battling a debilitating kidney disease, died Sunday at his Lake Carmel home. The cause of death was a heart attack, said his longtime companion, Valerie DeBenedette. He was 53.

A former assistant metro editor and Putnam local editor in the 1990s at Gannett Suburban Newspapers in White Plains, the precursor to The Journal News, Cullen was never so serious as when he was defending the freedom of the press, colleagues remembered.

Yet, friends said, he maintained his sense of humor, even as dialysis drained his energy. "It's not good when the business loses a guy like that," said Tony Davenport, The Journal News' managing editor in Rockland. "This was one of our own."

Cullen worked for newspapers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut after graduating from New York University in 1973. He returned to Manhattan in 1980 as a reporter for United Press International — a wire service that then was the major rival of The Associated Press.

The same year, Cullen's kidneys failed because of a genetic condition known as polycystic kidney disease. During the next decade, Cullen worked with a professional enthusiasm for fast-paced street reporting that defied his medical condition. Cullen received his first kidney transplant in 1986.

"I remember Tennessee Williams died in a hotel in Manhattan, and the editor told Bernie after awhile to come in and take care of himself, but he wanted to stay out there on the story," said Andrew Blum, a friend and former fellow reporter at UPI. "Most dialysis patients don't even work. The fact that he worked as hard as he did always blew me away."

Cullen came to Gannett Suburban Newspapers in 1989 as an editor, working on several desks before becoming the Putnam local editor. His colleagues remembered his gift for working with young reporters and his commitment to deadline journalism.

"He was always a dedicated journalist," said Robert F. Rodriguez, a Journal News photo editor who went to NYU with Cullen, where both were editors for the Washington Square News. Cullen's contemporaries also recalled his sense of humor during his eight years in the newsroom.

Cullen, who invariably worked through the sick feeling he would have after receiving dialysis treatments, once felt so nauseous that he pulled the garbage can near his desk just as a young reporter entered his office to ask what he thought about her story.

"Bernie threw up right into the can," said DeBenedette, a former writer at the paper. "The look on the poor girl's face was total surprise."

Earlier this year, Cullen launched a Web log site. His posts promote the importance of a free press for a free America, in a season when media credibility is suffering from criticism of biased reporting.

This is the eulogy that I wrote and read at his funeral:

Garrison Keillor once said that a funeral may be the best party that anyone every throws for you. Everyone says wonderful things about you and you only miss it by a few days.

Bernie would have loved this. Except he would not have wanted to be the center of attention. He would have been standing on the sidelines making jokes. He might have acted affronted at all this and have said that we all shouldn’t have, but that would have been an act and he would have been very touched.

Since Sunday morning, the one thing that almost everyone has spoken about is Bernie’s sense of humor. Bernie was an enormous fan of bad puns. He had a cockeyed view of life and he found the world funny in a sideways way. Not one single big family dinner could pass without two specific jokes. “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Prov and you provolone.” And “Never let the pasta and the antipasta touch, otherwise there will be a blinding conflagration of pure energy and the universe would be destroyed.”

Frequently, he would say something funny in such a dry, deadpan way that people thought he was perfectly serious.

Let me be a reporter again for a minute and give you some facts. Bernie was 53 years old. He was a graduate of New York University. He went into journalism and worked as a reporter at newspapers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut before going to work at United Press International (UPI) in its New York office, UPI was the place where he had dreamed of working all his life. UPI was at that time one of the two big news wire services and Bernie covered news events such as fires, murders and big trials. He covered the Howard Beach trial. He once got Mayor Ed Koch of New York City on the phone and could not get Koch to stop talking.

Bernie joined Gannett Suburban Newspapers and was a city editor in the New Rochelle bureau before joining the main office in White Plains. He was bureau chief for Putnam County for several years before his health forced him to take a less intensive job back in the White Plains office and then forced him to quit working.

Bernie’s kidneys failed first in 1980 because of a congenital condition called polycystic kidney disease. He worked at UPI in New York while he underwent dialysis. He had a kidney transplant in 1986 that lasted until 1994. He underwent hemodialysis three times a week until he received a second kidney transplant in 2002. Yet, he still managed to work full-time through most of that. He hated having to give up his career. Being a journalist was what he was.

He always thought it was weird that people said that he was brave about his kidney disease, and the other medical problems he had. As he said, it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. I think what people were talking about was how he kept his sense of humor and could crack jokes at almost any time. The times he expressed fear or doubt were private.

Bernie was as active in St. Andrew’s as his health would allow. He was a devoted member of this community for several years and served on the vestry in 2002 and 2003. He worked at the Food Pantry and served as an usher. He loved photography, computers, and ham radio. He was a first-class gadgeteer and could rarely walk past an electronics display without stopping. I often tried to get him to enter some of his photos in the annual Putnam County Fair. The problem with his photography was that he was always taking the pictures and was in so few of them.

Bernie was also an avid reader. When my freelance writing fell off he pressed me to get a job at Barnes & Noble because of their good reputation as an employer, and more importantly because he could use my employee discount. I fear that B&N sales are now going to go down by about 10%. But though he was known for his wit and humor, he loved to read these incredibly serious, deep books on philosophy, science, and religion. He was once sitting down with a professor of philosophy at the café in Barnes & Noble and was almost beside himself with happiness to realize that he could keep up with the discussion and ask some probing questions.

Bernie had a very strong sense of justice. He was passionate about issues. He was a liberal in all the best senses of that word: generous, tolerant, and progressive. He held very strongly the old-fashioned notion that a free press was essential to a society. And he had the progressive notion that blogs and bloggers were a new and useful form of journalism. Only a few weeks ago, he started a blog or web-log, a kind of an interactive internet diary, on issues of journalism and First Amendment issues. He only had a chance to make three entries in it. He would love that this might be the first eulogy to include a URL. You can go to his weblog at http://charlesjccullen.blogspot.com/ to check it out.

Bernie loved his family and friends. He felt that he had gained a family when he moved in with me. Having grown up as an only child, this meant a lot to him. He loved having a big family and having family traditions at Christmas and other holidays.

I will miss Bernie so much that I cannot find words. He was devoted, sweet, smart, and above all, he could make me laugh. When you think of Bernie in the future, please remember to laugh

I will keep the blog open, but will not add anything. I can be reached at valdeben@suscom.net.

Valerie DeBenedette

That Was The Week That Was

2005-02-08T19:59:00.000-08:00

Last week was "The Week That Was," as that 1960s satire of the previous week's news always claimed. But the reason last week got that special designation, even though it affects every facet of American society, may not be immediately apparent.

Oh, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq, or the war in Afghanistan or any of the other wars burning around the globe. Forget about all that.

And, for the moment, let's also forget about talking about reduced coverage under Medicare or Social Security. Or exactly how many employers will drop prescription coverage for sicker employees when the new Medicare program starts.

Let's also forget, for the time being the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all the othr conflicts around the world.

Great issues to talk about. They'll keep us entertained for hours. But let's do that someplace else in some other blog.

Right now we need to ponder, as this country approaches its 229th birthday, what kind of society we want to be when the next generation takes contol in the coming years.

If the recent news reports are correct, many of tomorrow's leaders might not be that adverse to some major changes in our basic way of life.

An extensive study involving thousands of high school students showed a strong belief that perhaps we have a little too much freedom. Maybe the government should even get to take a peek at and possibly change what we see and hear in the media.

The study, involving 100,000 students, almost 8,000 teachers and about 500 administrators was conducted early last year at the University of Connecticut.

A third of the students, after they were read a copy of the First Amendment to the constitution - a single paragraph that allows us to say what we please, worship wherever we chose and even hold a peaceful protest - said that tiny but great paragraph goes "too far."

For the record, here is that paragraph in the United States Constitution that has suddenly, and sadly, become controversial:

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It was drilled into me and to most other high school students in high school that this is the greatest nation in the world and the land of the free. We had it better not only than those rogue states headed by dictators but even better than the citizens of major European countries.

That lone paragraph hardly sounds like anything controversial. We were all brought up believing that the Constitution was one of the things that made this country different than all of the cesspool dictatorships that could be found around the world.

When I was graduated in 1969, the Vietnam War was in full swing, as were the protests against it, and a big issue centered around demonstrators who burned the American flag.

But the results of this study went far beyond whether burning the American flag should be made a crime. Three-quarters of the students surveyed thought the Constitution already banned flag burning.

They were wrong. The U.S. Constitution does not prohibit flag burning.

Half said it might not be a bad idea if the media had to get approval from the government before they could air or print a story. Nearly a fifth of the students said the media should not be allowed to convey unpopular opinions.

A large percentage said the government got to decide what was considered "indecent," on the Internet and that it had the legal power to remove it.

After reading several stories on the study I began to wonder just how disturbed we as citizens should feel.

Hodding Carter III of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the $1 million study's sponsor, was quoted in newspapers as saying these findings are "not only disturbing; they are dangerous."

Many educators said schools throughout the country were failing to give their students a good education in civic and public participation in government.

But many were quoted in the media and many more said in discussion groups and other blogs that the media had it coming. No one would ever consider taking away freedom of the press if the press "acted responsibly."

The one common thread that stuck out was that a small but significant number of people on the net seemed very supportive of the government and viewed the media as a threat.

Many said Dan Rather, the New Yok Times and the networks were all symbolic of what was wrong with the media. Journalists had abused their power, many said, and now they needed to pay for what they did.

From personal experience over my 30 plus years as a journalist I have seen numerous instances in which adults - even some holding public office - knew neither how media work nor what the First Amendment says. Sadly, these people I spoke with were a little foggy about exactly what the media's job was.

And when you start watching the watchdog, the foxes are going to start getting the hens.

It is so easy and at the same time so dangerous to our freedoms to be cavalier in condemning the media and believing the government must make sure the media acts 'responsibly' in the future.

The danger in giving the government the power to censor newspapers that act "irresponsibly" should be apparent even to a freshman in high school, and yet so many of the adults just don't seem to get it.

Eighteen percent of all students surveyed thought unpopular opinions should not be allowed to be expressed.

Who gets to define what "irresponsible" journalism is? The government? Congress? The Supreme Court? Should the president decide what the media says? And who sits down and makes the list of unpopular opinions that will now be forbidden for people to say? The White House spokesman?

I'll go with all the others to the local Barnes & Noble to pull all the books and magazines from the shelves expressing unpopular opionions or those whose writing is "irresponsible." Perhaps we could all go outside and have a large book burning like they did in pre-war Berlin.

It would warm us on that cold February night when we burned away our most important freedoms.

But you know what I think? Once this huge mass of people who are united in purpose gets to the book store, they are going to find they are each pulling different, very different, kinds of writing from the shelves. And that unity will soon become illusory.

In many cases people will base their opinions of what to trash on their political beliefs. Some will say that anything critical of the president is slanderous or even constituted treason, a crime punishable by death. Others may say light hearted fiction needs to be pulled from the shelves while innocent civilians are dying in Iraq.

Finally! The left and the right united in the same purpose - its just that they can't agree on exactly which writing is "irresponsible."

And like Pravda, our newspapers, books and magazines will have nothing but praise for our electd officials and the society they constructed.

Pravda in New York.

And just like the Afghans who were able to take their televisions out of hiding when the Taliban fell, we will be able to pull our prized books containing unpopular opinions or irresponsible journalim from the dark, dusty shelves of our basements.

And here is where all of those people congratulating the students who were "bright" enough to see what so many adults could not - that the media has not "behaved" responsibly - have gone wrong.

The First Amendment provides for free speech. Not in most cases. Not when we like what it says. It provides for free speech. And if that does not cover all cases then we do not have free speech.

(The First Amendment does not protect the media from libel, invasion of privacy and a number of other things. They can be held responsible for any laws they violate. They just cannot be censored. But the government cannot order that a story not be printed except in the most extreme of cases.)

The last time Washington tried to censor the press was, I believe, in the early 1970s when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, a government study that showed how shabbily our elected leaders handled the steps leading up to the Vietnam war. Why should any bungling by our elected officials be automatically classified as "top secret?"

The government is far more threatening than the press.

You can throw away a copy of the New York Times if you don't like it. Sue the paper if you want. Use it to wrap fish.

But what do you do if someone comes to arrest you in the middle of the night on vague or no charges at all and you are never heard from again?

Let the government edit the press and we will all find out what a fantastic job the government is doing.

And I'm sure ANY administration would love to have that very chance.

But the issue goes beyond making the media behave itself and just print what is "responsible."

If many high school students don't particularly like the First Amendment and want it dumped, as a good number of the students paticipating in the study seem to feel, we may also someday see Uncle Sam telling us a lot of other things we won't particularly want to hear.

What about where you go to church? Do you go to church? Oh, it isn't a church? Its a synagogue or a mosque?

Good news if you are a Christian. Bad news if you are not. Wait . . . will I belong to the "wrong" denomination?

And we could be arrested not only for what we wrote, but picked up a second time for complaining that we were arrested. And if we peacefully protested either of our two arrests, we'd be thrown in the slammer for a third time.

Which is all good news if the government that is in power at any given time represents your views.

But the problem is governments change. The Taliban's did. So did the Soviet Union's. And the definition of what constitutes 'good journalism' will sway with every election and every shift of power. Do all of those students who feel the government should be allowed to change what the press says before it goes out is really better versed in the finer points of writing than a writer?

Does anybody really believe that if the government had the final say on what the media says about it this really would remove any alleged bias from the process?

Who is better to write about what the government is doing than a a member of the government himself? He is closer to the action than the reporter. Who is best suited to define fine reporting? Of course it the government. That's why I'm not upper management. Things like that seem so counterintuitive to me.

And surely, the politician wouldn't be beholden to any business or any special interest who contributed millions to his campaign.

This just occurred to me... I think we are holding jobs in each others' field. Maybe we ought to switch. I know as well as the president does when to fire off the nukes. On the Fourth of July, perhaps.

And the next time the media comes up with a new set of documents like the Pentagon Papers, the government might just decide that the latest Garfield comic strip might look prettier on page one instead.

The Man Without A Country

2005-01-30T16:40:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when I was in junior high school, a diabolical English teacher assigned the class to read what was a hard-to-find book entitled "The Man Without A Country."

I must have learned more in tracking down an old tattered copy of the book by Edward Everett Hale than I did from the short piece of fiction itself. I traveled through every nook and cranny of New York City before Barnes & Noble, then just a small operation, bailed me out by obtaining a used copy of the 1863 novel for me.

Hale, who died in 1909, told the story of Philip Nolan, a U.S. Naval officer who cursed his country at his court martial in the early 1800s and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life on a ship that traveled up and down the coast.

He was never to step foot on American soil again and, as the years passed and he sailed endlessly on the U. S. Corvette 'Levant,' he mourned his sentence as much as I did mine when I was ordered to find the book.

Now there is a point to all of this. But because I am writing this on my own blog I don't have an editor's heavy breath coming down over my back and I don't have to tell the point until I feel it is time.

So let me go back to last summer when I was looking at various blogs and discussion groups. I was drifting aimlessly amidst discussions of all sorts when I saw an article on a major website written by a political conservative who was discussing national healthcare.

I chimed in to disagree not so much with his opinion as with the fact that it was written in a very disingenuous style. If I recall correctly, the point of his article was that we can afford healthcare for everyone in the nation and it was worth doing even though, he said, it would mean everyone would have to give half their paycheck to the government.

He later said he was being sincere, but that the 50 percent tax rate he estimated would be required to give healthcare to everyone was sort of a wild guess.

Despite my disagreement over the style in which he made his point, we hit it off pretty well and I was admitted into a small intimate group of conservative friends who discussed issues of concern to them.

I chimed in here and there agreeing with some and disagreeing with others. I bemoaned the serious divide in our nation. The level of discussion has gotten so shrill. They were a friendly group and I enjoyed the discussions.

I defended the media, and because I was a journalist and probably because they were conservatives, they automatically assumed I was a liberal. And its true, I did defend some liberal positions. But I also agreed with some of their positions.

And it took a while before they realized the true nature of my position.

Someone finally criticized the media, saying that the journalists were all liberal and their news coverage biased towards the left. They asked me why their side has been unable to get fair coverage - and that required that I throw my cards on the table.

I told them I've heard it all before - usually from the zealots on both sides. And the last thing most groups with a cause wants is an unbiased story. They want a story friendly towards their position.

I became that man without a country. I didn't have a side. And I said I found the many attempts by all sides to manipulate me over the years more than a bit annoying.

The only thing a group with any kind of a cause wants, I said, is an article favorable toward their position. They all wanted you to print the 'truth,' and they were the ones who held it.

The emails stopped after that. I trust they are all safe someplace. I'm getting worried. They haven't called.

If you want to be liked, don't become a journalist. The only people disliked more than a journalist is, perhaps, a public relations man. And I've been there too.

But as low-paid as most journalists are, most find it more meaningful than to be spin doctors or pr men. I did public relations briefly during the early part of my career - and it was for a company whose message I actually liked - but I still couldn't get excited telling people what to think. That's none of my business.

For the most part, I explained, I have had a hard time identifying with any of those I have covered during my career as a reporter. The only exception may be the occasional person in trouble - like the dialysis patient I once wrote about who faced death because his application for transportation got lost in the system and he had no way of getting to his treatments.

The State of New Jersey found the man's application after the story was published. When he asked them to find the application he met with no success. No one particularly seemed anxious to look. Those stories are fun to do. You go home feeling you've made a contribution.

If you are a journalist you are likely to become annoyed with the relentless attempts by so many people over the years to manipulate you and by the relentless shouts of "foul" by many you have written about.

I recall when I began my career in 1973 for the Herald News in Passaic, N.J., two people who were having a property dispute that I wrote about complained my articles were biased. Each thought the article favored the other.

Many of these complaints have been fairly sincere ones. When someone reads an article, that person sees it from their perspective. And if the article goes right down the middle, as it should, neither side is going to like it.

I first learned that at a journalism class at New York University. The students were each told to write a feature article about a classmate and to look for some good and some bad points in their subject. The professor made his point well. I wanted to at least burn the story if I could not do the same to my classmate as well.

It is the responsibility of the media to print the truth more than one person vehemently claimed at either United Press International or one of the newspapers for which I've written.

On the surface it seems like a perfectly reasonable demand. Of course the media should report the truth. Is there anyone out there who would want the media to print lies?

And you do print the 'truth' when the plane goes down or a highway collapses.

But there are many other kinds of stories where the 'truth' is elusive, and it is not the reporter's role to find where it lies. Give the reader all the information you can, make it interesting, and let the reader decide things for himself.

Its a job I don't particularly want. I don't care what the readers believe. That is their business and not mine.

Let the pundits and columnists for The National Review or The American Prospect decide where the truth lies. Or let the reporter who covered a particular field for a decade or two and who is now writing magazine opinion pieces determine where the truth lies.

If you want find out who is trying to bias the news, look towards the public relations industry and the spin doctors. They are acting as an attorney would, doing whatever they can to get their client portrayed as favorably as possible. The truth is no more relevant to them than guilt or innocence is to the attorney.

When I reported in New York City, most of the people I dealt with were politically savvy. This was New York, where every group and organization is represented by a public relations official. Many of these people worked on Park and Madison avenues and were highly paid.

One public relations official, working for the mayor's office, wanted to fix a parking ticket for me.

There were times when the news conference I was sent to cover almost resembled a wedding. Feed the reporters, they thought, their salaries are so low they must be hungry. It doesn't really matter who is doing this. They want you to get people to see things their way and they are not beyond coming bearing gifts.

Some of the gifts were quite insidious. Public relations representatives bearing information... often at 4 pm on a Friday. Its an important story, but one that is offered when 'the other side' has already left for the weekend. City and state government is notorious for doing this.

And you have a dilemma. Is the information compelling enough to write about, knowing you can't get a response from the other side for another day. Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

But you resent being manipulated and it doesn't particularly matter who is doing it.

Let's spoon feed the reporter all the information he needs... make it really easy to write a story. Maybe he is lazy and will pick the 'easy' story over the 'hard' one.

And if you are looking for a story, make sure there is a cute child at the news conference who is representative of the problem being portrayed.

Sad to say, if there is bias in the media it is towards pretty people and against ugly ones. For the wealthy and against the poor.

One night the staffing was low at the wire service and we had to make choices over what got covered and what did not. Actually there are always choices.

On one lonely night in the mid-1980s socialite Robert Chambers was arrested and charged with killing his female companion during "rough sex" in Central Park. On the same night an elderly man in Harlem was hit by a stray bullet and killed.

One reporter. Two stories. One story was covered. The other wasn't. You know the answer. The fairness, or unfairness, of that one could be debated at great length. Certainly one life was not worth more than another.

Do you give the reader the story he demands... the one he complains about if doesn't get? Do you cater to that bias? Or do you give him one feel he should want? That's a hard question that warrants debate.

This is where any bias lies, and I've heard few people who complain their view of political 'truth' is being skewed bringing up these harder questions.

Ah, if you only could have read it

2005-01-25T20:44:00.000-08:00

I began the first blog in my 53 years on this planet just last week. Word after word. Sentence after sentence. All pure gold prose.

But alas, for you will have to take my word for it. When I looked for it today I found that it had disappeared into the ozone rather than into bloggerland.

But at least one person got the chance to read what might be a trifle poorer than my account in the paragraph above. I only caught a few lines of the viewer's opinion of what I had written, as I struggled to get the disconcerting letter from out of my spamblocker and into the "In" basket where it should have gone. That disappeared as well.

I'm having a bad week. The person seemed to think that it was unethical for a journalist to have a blog. It compromised the integrity of the press. Another act of subversion. Another nasty deed by the liberal press.

In that first marvelous (grin) post I mused on the nature of life. On whether mankind could look behind the curtain an view the gears, wheels and levers that produce the experience that mystics, even Christian mystics such as St. John of the Cross, claimed to have when they blended with in one ecstatic moment. An experience with God, these mystics say.

It is an experience that sounds increasingly like the comments made by scores of physicists over the last century, comments even made by Albert Einstein, who tried in vain to discredit a philosophic implication that his very work had come to foster.

I said in my first post that I did not know where my blog would lead, but that through frequent additions it might develop a momentum and a direction of its own. But the same God countless numbers of mystics have tried to find may, in fact, have acted in his own subtle way in that brief instant when the old blog disappeared and then when a criticism of it briefly passed through my spamblocker and off onto the stars.

God's ways are subtle, but when one looks back at things that happened at crucial points in their lives many claim to have seen His hand at work. I sat in a book store recently with a philosophy professor. I couldn't afford the man's course but now I had him, uninterrupted for 90 minutes.

I asked him to cut to the chase and tell me what its all about. Why there is something rather than nothing. A lifetime's search and he didn't know any more than I why we are on this planet, living, one day at a time. But we both shared a skill in eloquence in the way we said neither we, nor anybody else, has looked behind the curtain.

So my critic solved the dilemma. Maybe when you write something that others might chose to read, it should be about something with which you are intimately connected. Something you care greatly about.

After spending 30 plus years at five newspapers, one magazine and United Pres International, I might have something to say about the media. It is hated more than loved. At times it is feared, other times ridiculed. It is the subject of debate at many a dinner table. The information it provides serves as the basis on which many of or decisions we make.

But there is a serious problem. It is not a problem of whether the media is biased toward the left. It is not a problem whether the news is biased towards the right. We have been accused of both. That makes me feel good, for reasons I will someday explain.

The problem is that so many of the people I have met with over the years do not know how to read a newspaper. They don't know how the media works or what to expect. And because they do not know that, the media is failing in providing the role in society that it is intended to.

There is a dearth of civics courses at the high school level in which people are taught what to expect from the media and what not to expect. And only by knowing that can they make an adequate decision as to whether the media has succeeded in helping them or not.

Where is the most important story placed in a newspaper such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Who gets to decide what is newsworthy? What is the editor thinking when he mauls what was a perfectly... oh wait. I was and editor too - when he sends a story back to a reporter and tells him to take a different approach.

When the reporter leaves the office at the end of the day is he proud that he held a heavy amount of responsibility and performed his duty to the public well? Or is he snickering with his editor over how they have snuck their opinions into a story and hodwinked the reader yet again?

How do the reporters feel when they leave the office at the end of the day.

This lack of knowledge about the media can be found in the average person off the street as well as mayors, businessmen and even superintendents of school.

A while back I had a local schools superintendent call and order me not to print a story. I had a good laugh and told him it was going into the paper because it belonged there. But I always like to go the extra yard and since the superintendent sounded so sincere we met at then end of the day to discuss the story.

The schools superintendent said he was empowered by law to take any steps necessary to protect the wellbeing of the students and he said this story would frighten them. He said the only problem was that the law did not provide for sanctions against newspapers who printed a story that, while true, might frighten the youngsters.

This was a brilliant man and I am convinced he really believed what he was saying. Surely if he were bluffing he would know that I would call it. A schools superintendent can't order a newspaper not to print a story.

If he were really helping his students he would be aware of the Bill of Rights. A newspaper cannot be prevented from printing anything, although it can later be held responsible if any laws were violated. The last time anyone tried to practice prior restraint of publication was with the Pentagon Papers. And it didn't work then either.

On a tangent, the story concerned several students with hepatitis in an elementary school class and the teachers union which was considering whether to strike because they were afraid that both they and the other students were threatened.

The ill youngsters posed no threat to anyone. And even the most severe critics of the press would probably agree that maybe if the teachers were wondering if one day the just not show up for work, perhaps everyone ought to know.

But this is not an isolated case. There was the town councilman who insisted that the town's governing body had the authority to require that only residents of the town be allowed to write about the town. He insisted we switch reporters.

Wrong again. There are different thoughts on this, but if a person lives in town he probably owns land in town. His kids go to school there. He has a personal interest in what happens in the town. And I think the chances of a conflict of interest are too great to allow such a person to report on where he lives.

But the point... an elected official thinking the town can chose the reporter he want to cover the town and can legally throw the reporter out and bar him from writing about the town.

And the problem is not endemic to the suburbs. I was ordered to leave the scene of a demonstration in midtown Manhattan by a police officer who told me a reporter didn't belong there and that "if you people stopped covering these things (demostrations) maybe people would stop having them."

His order that I leave the demonstration was upheld by a deputy chief who agreed. Surely the police - the people who can to a great degree control what we do - should understand that the people had a right to demonstrate and that any citizen has a right to attend the demonstration and write a story about it.

Nearly 700 Koreans mass in front of the Soviet Embassy to protest the downing of a civilian pasenger jet that had strayed over Soviet airspace and a deputy chief - someone very high in the ranks of the New York City police department agreed that a reporter did not belong at the demonstration. That maybe if we keep the press away from these things people will stop holding demonstrations.

Had I not been on dialysis at the time and feared that being arrested might risk my life by causing me to miss a treatment, I would have remained on a public street and be arrested.

I hope people will read this and ask questions. I enjoy telling people what the media does and how it makes its decisions.

A while back I got on a conservative discussion group when I saw members making some major mistakes about basic things they should have learned in high school. One member, for example, seemed to think reporters just walked the streets all day looking for something to write about. There was a feeling a reporter could just show up at work one day and write about whatever struck his fancy that day.

Things went along fine for quite a while and my contributions to the discussion were accepted - until one day somebody told me the big problem in our society is that all the reporters are libereal and slant their stories.

My welcome quickly wore out when I was asked my take and gave it. The last thing either the political Right or the political Left, or any government person or anyone with a vested interest in a story wants is objectivity. I explained that for most of my career most of the groups I wrote about wanted the stories to favor their view and that as a general rule the people the media write about are the ones who try the hardest to manipulate its coverage.

I'd like to put down some ideas here from time to time. I don't know whether I want to get into whether the media leans to the right or the left. Everyone sees the press from their partisan perspective.

But just as there are few police officers who spend all day at a doughnut shop there are few reporters who don't take their responsibility as a heavy one.

And much of the left and much of the right will dispute that statement. So whenever each side in an article said I slanted it towards the other I knew I had done something right. And when I dissed both the left and the right and anyone else hiring big public relations companies to entice the media to put their spin on a story I found that journalists - good journalists - might not have a place anywhere on the political spectrum.'

And they shouldn't.