Opinion

“ALL THE NEWS UNFIT TO PRINT “

“All the News Unfit to Print,” is an amusing hodgepodge of tales about journalistic fabricators down through the ages. He ranges from the 18th century, when writers, like their readers, tended not to take anything in print other than the Bible seriously, up to the present, when pontificating journalists often describe their trade as “the first draft of history.” Eric Burns, late of the Fox News Channel and NBC News, says he is recounting “some of the sloppiest examples of those drafts.”

Burns includes young Ben Franklin’s bogus letters to the editor (his brother) of the New England Courant, written under the pen name Silence Dogood. Readers loved Silence, purportedly a 60-year-old widow, whereas Ben’s brother suspected his 16-year-old sibling, and so silenced Silence.

By the 19th century, the newspaper hoax was practically a literary genre unto itself. The New York Sun’s 1835 men-in-the-moon hoax so impressed Edgar Allan Poe that he described it as an “unmitigated splendor.”

A few years later, Mark Twain got his start in fiction not with Huckleberry Finn, but with newspaper scams like his “discovery” in Nevada of a “Petrified Man.” It was heady stuff, and soon he was “piping” stories about smothered Indians in a cave, and a family murdered by the father, a bankrupt mine owner. “(These) were feats and calamities,” he later wrote proudly of his hoaxes, “that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast.”

William Randolph Hearst felt the same way about the Spanish-American War. As he telegraphed his illustrator in Cuba on a slow pre-war day: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

Much of Burns’ material will be familiar to anyone steeped in American history, but “All the News” is an excellent sampler, and he even offers some spicy bits too. Nan Britton, for instance — President Warren G. Harding’s mistress is mentioned in a chapter about the once-cozy relationship between the press and elected officials (even, in those days, Republican politicians).

The reporters covering Harding knew of his randy reputation, yet they wrote nothing of it, not even after the president and Nan coupled, as Burns retells the story, “while both remained upright, locked in an embrace resembling a wrestling grasp as they banged against the walls of a White House closet, scaring the hell out of those nearby.”

Apparently, though, those nearby were even more scared to report what they had heard. Forty years later, President John F. Kennedy got the same pass from the press. As reporter David Broder explained, “Nobody wanted to spoil the fun for anybody else.”

Burns also revisits Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent in the 1930s, who won a Pulitzer Prize for some of the most mendacious reporting ever. Burns captures the flavor of Duranty’s Stalinist sycophancy with a series of headlines over his Times stories: “Red Army Held No Menace to Peace Europe’s Fears Belittled Big Soviet Crop Follows Famine Kremlin Wins Its Battle.”

Alas, Burns offers no comparisons between Duranty’s Times and its struggling four-color modern descendant. Jason Blair, surely the most famous “pipe artist” of the current era, appears only at the end of Burns’ book, almost as an afterthought.

All the News Unfit to Print

How Things Were .Ñ.Ñ. And How They Were Reported

by Eric Burns

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.