THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE SENSATIONAL JOURNALIST
by Marie Villarreal

Whenever my local paper prints something that angers its readers, they always fire off letters to the editor certain to contain two things, the words, "you're trying to cultivate sensationalism," and the phrase, "you're just trying to sell more papers." But it's a red herring to say that newspapers choose news items with an eye to selling more papers. If they weren't to do that then how would they survive to service you better? And it is true that they mostly print news to fill up the white space between the advertisements. Advertising is what oils the wheels that make the machine go round.

And while newspapers don't usually seek sensationalism, when it comes, they greet it with open arms -- as do their readers. But what people call sensationalism today barely holds a candle to what was sensational say, 80 years ago. Recently, my husband, while helping me do research for my novel in progress, started reading to me from two 1940s books, "Such Interesting People" and "More Interesting People," written by a Chicago newspaperman named Robert J. Casey. Casey tells great stories about how newspapering was done in Chicago in the first third of the last century, where, in pursuit of a story, just about anything went. His tales make the newsgathering that goes on today in papers as large as The New York Times and as small as a town periodical appear absolutely tame by comparison.

In the old days, when almost every town had several competing newspapers, newspaper people were out-and-out scoundrels. Once, according to Casey, Harold McCormick, a Chicago farm machinery magnate and husband of a Rockefeller, fell in love with a younger woman. To restore some youth to his aging glands, he underwent a secret operation. Naturally, the Chicago Examiner, now defunct, wanted to confirm this sensational story. So it sent a reporter to McCormick's doctor's house in the middle of the night. The paper knew quite well that the doctor wouldn't talk, but they had also sent a reporter up the telephone pole outside the doctor's house. This guy tapped into the doctor's line, so when he called his esteemed patient to warn him, as the paper knew he would, the story was confirmed.

This story makes the Miami Herald reporters who hid in the bushes in order to catch Gary Hart committing adultery look like children. In his 1996 book "I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me," long-time newspaperman Jimmy Breslin wrote that compared to the old days, today's journalism is bloodless and boring. Today, he said, reporters are family men who work out in gyms at lunchtime and go straight home after work. That may be good for their children and marriages, but it's not good at all for newspapers. "Since words for a newspaper come from nervous energy and not propriety," Breslin said, "the readers get robbed and the news reporters never live. The bars are gone, the drinkers gone. Only the smartest, healthiest news people in the history of the business remain. And they are so boring that they kill the business right in front of you. A central reason why newspaper circulation is dropping so alarmingly is that reporters today have all the excitement of a Formica table."

So think about the good old days before you accuse your local paper of "trying to cultivate sensationalism," and "trying to sell more newspapers."