Martyrs for the cause of journalism

If there's a common thread among terrific editors it's that none of them have any use for the "because I'm the boss" approach. Good editors have enough faith in their own instincts, and enough respect for writers, to believe that they are obliged to explain their decisions -- and they know that reasonable, intelligent authority can always explain itself.

Good editors know that it's the writer's name that will appear on the top of the piece, not theirs. And they believe that if a writer has been hired to do the work, then it's the writer's voice that should carry it.

Too often, writers are given assignments because their work at another publication has impressed an editor. Then, instead of honoring the voice that impressed him or her to begin with, the editor will work to take out every trace of individuality in the writer's work because it "doesn't sound" like the publication. It's not a writer those editors want, it's the journalistic equivalent of tofu.

But then, as the jazz critic and columnist George Frazier (himself no stranger to battles with editors) once put it, "There are a lot of dumb bastards in the world." Some of them go into journalism. And, as in any other field, many of those go right to the top. In an old Nichols and May routine, Mike Nichols plays a TV producer voted "the most total mediocrity in the industry." To what does he attribute his success? "Whatever suggestions the advertisers make," he says, "I take 'em." That character may be the new model of success in journalism, a field where the ability not to take ethics too seriously may actually be a career plus.

In his intro, Wallis tells the story of Edward Kosner, who in 1997 was the top editor of Esquire, killing a David Leavitt short story because of its gay theme. "No advertiser was consulted," he claimed. It later came to light that Chrysler had demanded of the publications it advertised in, including Esquire, notification "in advance of any and all editorial content that might encompass sexual, political, social issues or any editorial that might be construed as provocative and offensive." Of course the four pages of advertising Esquire would have lost would have been costly. But Chrysler's list is so broad and so vague it gives the automaker virtual carte blanche over all editorial content. No one can be a hero all the time. Every job entails compromise. But in a situation like that, a magazine must decide whether it's in the business of advertising or journalism.

Work as a writer for any amount of time and you collect at least a few stories to make people's jaws drop. For a while, in the mid-'90s, I did the "Book Currents" column in the New Yorker twice a month. My job was to line up a notable person and ask him or her to pick five books on a given topic. I then wrote up their choices as a short column. I asked Paul Fussell to select war memoirs, Chuck Jones what books he'd like to see made into animated movies, Taylor Branch to pick memoirs from the civil rights years. When a new editor was put in charge of the column, he decided that instead of interviewing anyone, each column would focus on five recent thematically linked books and that my job was to write something about each of those books. When an assistant editor conveyed the editor's decision to me, I said this amounted to reading 10 books a month, for a fee of $500. The assistant editor told me, "You wouldn't be expected to read them."

In effect, the magazine was asking me to provide 10 blurbs a month for a column that always ran opposite a full-page Barnes & Noble ad. I told this assistant editor that I didn't write advertising, I thanked him for the good work he'd done with me (he was a great guy), and I quit. I'd be less than honest if I didn't say that the fact I had a steady job and could do without the $500 a month made it easy. Not all writers are that lucky. And Wallis is quite right in his introduction to complain about how writers collude in their own marginalization -- accepting contracts that assign publications total copyright or allow them to kill a piece on the vaguest of pretexts for paltry fees.

It's the dumb bastards whose decisions are called on the carpet in "Killed." Like Detroit Free Press executive editor Carole Leigh Hutton, who spiked Carlo Wolff's negative review of Free Press staffer Mitch Albom's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." The review had been given to Wolff, a freelancer, in the first place because the paper had felt that giving it to a staff member would create a conflict of interest. Hutton was not only dumb enough to kill the review but to justify her decision in a column in which she wrote, "I decided not to publish it because I think all our employees should be protected from, as one colleague put it, 'the ethical dilemma and no-win position of passing critical judgment on a colleague's work.'" I can only hope that some enterprising staffer at the Free Press pointed out to Hutton that, by her logic, editors should be abolished.

Next Page: What's worse, caving in to the Moonies and the Body Shop, or just canning a piece in favor of something more trivial?

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