Martyrs for the cause of journalism

They outraged an advertiser, pissed off the publisher or fell afoul of right- or left-wing political correctness. Now these articles killed by major magazines and newspapers have found new life.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 26, 2004 | American journalism is alive and well. It's just homeless.

At this stage of the game, it is Capra-esque fantasy to believe that there is any publication in America where editorial content has not been affected by at least one of the following: pressure from the advertising department; fear of taking on a powerful subject; kowtowing to publicists in order to gain access to celebrities; fear of presenting a point of view that may unnerve a publication's targeted demographic; unwillingness to report negatively on people who may be friends or cronies of the publication's bigwigs; political correctness from right as well as left (the fawning coverage of the Reagan death rites was an example of the former); orthodoxies of one stripe or another; and the idiotic veneration of "balance" -- what Pauline Kael called "saphead objectivity" -- that renders publications a print version of television's dueling heads, telling the reader that all opinions are worth the same.

The journalistically displaced find temporary shelter in "Killed." Edited by David Wallis, this collection of journalism, each example killed by the very magazine or newspaper that had commissioned it, reads like a brief for the timidity that has taken hold in American journalism. Each entry is preceded by a brief introduction, usually by the author, explaining why the piece was killed. The specific reasons vary from piece to piece; the unifying reason is gutlessness.

David Wallis acknowledges that there are valid reasons why pieces get killed. He lays them out in the introduction to the book. "A competitor gets the scoop first," he writes. "Vital photos are unavailable. News events outpace the story. A dropped ad shrinks the available editorial space. The publication unexpectedly dies, or the subject of the article does ... And finally, honest disagreements occur."

A few of the pieces in "Killed" are the victims of those honest disagreements. For most of them, honesty doesn't enter into it.

It's hard to imagine any working writer who won't be delighted by "Killed." The book is a testament to the cravenness and cowardice of editors. Which isn't to say that editors as a species are the enemy. A writer who has been blessed to work with a good editor will tell you that he or she is a combination of boss, mentor, friend, co-conspirator and guardian angel. As the late critic Mark Moses put it about an editor he loved, the editing process is "a conversation at the end of which we have a piece." Good editors will work to sharpen a writer's voice, to bolster and streamline a piece's arguments, to save writers from themselves. Any writer who's honest will admit to having had cherished lines that some good, savvy editor was kind enough to say was bullshit. My first professional editor attributed all his editing instincts -- and they were good instincts -- to his "ear." He knew when the rhythm of a sentence was off. He knew when you were trying to get by with a mediocre sentence, and he made both himself and me work until the rhythm was right and the mediocrity was gone. And then he had the generosity to make me feel like it was my work that had fixed the problem.

Editors who build that kind of trust can do anything. One of the best editors I've ever worked with would quite often lop off at least part of my opening, cut a thousand words from my copy, switch sections around. And she was able to do it because again and again she proved to me that her changes were in the service of the piece. In other words, she was making me look good.

Next Page: Killing a gay-themed short story -- because a car manufacturer didn't like it

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