Battling Racism -- More than 30 Years Ago

While my newspaper colleagues examine racism inside and outside their profession, I can’t help but think I went through something very similar more than 30 years ago.

I first crossed paths with Jessica Hughes in April 1985 when I called seeking advice about where to host a bachelor party in Philadelphia.  She was a United Press International broadcast sales executive while I was a UPI newspaper sales executive in Dallas.

 

Back then, UPI was a leading competitor to The Associated Press and Reuters, serving hundreds of newspapers, radio and television stations around the world with breaking news reports from its bureaus across the United States and the globe.

 

Later that year, after transferring to Philadelphia, I met Jessica for the first time, face to face.  Prior to our meeting, I pictured an erudite, mainline Philadelphia lady.  

 

She was African American, and it was surprising because UPI did not have many, if any, African Americans in its sales ranks in the 1980s.

 

Jessica was quite graceful and about 12 years my senior. She was also a single mother and caring for her aging mother.

 

A year later, after becoming her boss, we made sales calls together in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, visiting a number of newspapers and television and radio stations. During our trips, she talked about some of her previous experiences, including setting up appointments with people she never met and listening to their racist jokes.

 

She mentioned their surprise – actually the shock across their face – when they met her face to face for the first time.  Never did it occur to them, because of how well-spoken she was, they were talking with an African American.

 

Jessica never said anything. She was far too professional. She went about representing UPI gracefully and professionally.

 

In March 1987, a few months shy of my 25^th birthday, with my new boss, taking him to meet a top-paying client, I told him I was resigning at the end of April to pursue my MBA at Northwestern University.  He inquired who should replace me.  

 

We discussed the likely candidates, and when he asked about Jessica, I said, based on previous conversations with her about my intention to leave, I wasn’t sure she wanted the job.

 

“That’s good,” he replied.  “Because UPI can’t afford to be represented by a black woman in Pennsylvania.”

 

I didn’t react to what he said but thought she already is. In time, she applied for my position, and I enthusiastically endorsed her application.

 

Weeks later, as my time at UPI was coming to an end, Jessica's status was unsettled. She wasn’t sure where she stood with UPI’s senior leaders. Eventually, they hired someone outside of UPI to replace me – another white man.

 

A year later, after moving to Chicago, a former UPI colleague said Jessica was looking for me.  I promptly called her.  She was pursuing a racial discrimination lawsuit against UPI and asked if I would give a deposition. Absolutely, I said.

 

I contacted her attorney and gave one over the phone, specifically mentioning what my former boss said about the reason Jessica couldn’t replace me. The smoking gun, as the cliché goes, was out of the bag.

 

A year later, I took three harassing phone calls from UPI’s attorneys.  Each time, they attempted to get me to recant. During the last call, I said if the case went to trial, my deposition would become my testimony.

 

They soon settled with her.

  

What I learned was how economic discrimination is. There was about a $10,000 salary gap between us. By not even considering her application, UPI was, in effect, keeping her down.

 

As for my actions, I do not consider myself any sort of hero. I did what anyone would do for a highly respected colleague.

 

African Americans have a bona fide complaint about discrimination. Certainly not every white man or woman is a racist, but there are plenty of racists out there, sometimes, I learned more than 30 years ago, in the most surprising places.

 

This article first appeared on News & Tech magazine’s website in July 2020. The magazine has since closed.

Book Review: Bulletins from Dallas: Reporting the JFK Assassination

Before he takes the oath of office, President-elect Donald Trump should read Bill Sanderson’s outstanding book, Bulletins from Dallas, about how the country’s two leading wire services covered President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.  Silicon Valley titans Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page (no relation to this reviewer) and Sergey Brin could stand to read it, too. 

After calling CNN “fake news” last week, Trump could use a tutorial about how reporters go about their jobs.  It’s not always pleasant – it might even take down our most sacred institutions or a favorite person – but that’s how the business operates.  At its best, it covers events and people without fear or favor and always with accuracy, balance and fairness.  Silicon Valley’s leaders could also use the book so they can discern which news is fake and which is real.

In this day and age of fake news websites and, recently, a network news anchor gone rogue, I’m sure it’s difficult to believe that two news wire services, The Associated Press and United Press International, once competed ferociously to not only get the news first but to first get it right.

The physical beating UPI White House Correspondent Merriman Smith took at the hands of his competitor, an AP reporter, is UPI lore and is vividly recounted by Sanderson, a New York Post editor, detailing how President Kennedy’s assassination was reported by the two wire services shortly after shots were fired across Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.

Sitting in the front seat of what was called the wire service car, with easy access to its radio phone, Smith quickly called UPI’s Dallas bureau once gunfire rang out, dictating details as the car followed the presidential limousine to Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy died. 

Realizing Smith was hogging the phone, the AP reporter, Jack Bell, punched Smith numerous times to get it back.  His pummeling didn’t work and a story about the shots crossed UPI’s wire before the car carrying the two reporters arrived at the hospital.  There’s even speculation Smith knocked the car’s phone out of order so UPI could maintain its increasing minute by minute lead in reporting the assassination’s details.

Nearly an hour before the White House announced Kennedy’s death, UPI did something out of the ordinary, quoting a Secret Service agent – the famous Clint Hill – that the president was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital.  UPI officially announced Kennedy’s death, based on a statement by White House Deputy Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, at 1:35 p.m. CST, and the AP followed two minutes later.

In the arena of wire service journalism, where every second and minute mattered, that was similar to losing the Super Bowl 100 - 0.  In other words, the AP was resoundingly defeated. 

UPI and AP clients, at the time, included hundreds of newspapers around the world, along with numerous television and radio stations.  They demanded accurate and fast reporting.  If they took both wire services, they often compared their reports for accuracy, speed, even writing style.

On that fateful day, most Americans didn’t realize what Smith, Bell and their cohorts were enduring to provide an accurate account of Kennedy’s death.  Instead, they saw the news delivered by the man considered the country’s most trusted news source, CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite, who spent his early years working for UPI’s predecessor, The United Press.

Like his fellow Unipresser, a term used to describe those who worked or were previously employed at UP or UPI, Cronkite was ahead of his television news competitors.  He was a man of great integrity and feared reporting Kennedy’s death until it was confirmed, knowing an erroneous report of such magnitude would ruin if not end his career.

That value is lost today.  NBC News Anchor Brian Williams was caught fudging the truth about his time covering the early days of the Iraq War in 2003.  The New York Times had its own issues with Jayson Blair, a reporter caught making up stories.  More recently, Rolling Stone magazine in 2014 reported a rape at the University of Virginia that never happened.

And while the news industry might want to be smug over Trump’s callouts of what’s fake news, it would be better served to remember that some of this problem starts with us.

Sanderson’s book traces Smith’s life from his youth in Georgia up through covering six presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.  He was a media star in his own right, writing stories for leading magazines and even appearing on television’s “The Tonight Show.”  Sanderson also shows that Smith was a Washington insider, perhaps too friendly with the presidents he covered, especially Lyndon Johnson.

The problem with today’s technology is that anyone can be a “reporter”.  But instead of having an editor review, correct and ask questions about stories before they’re published or broadcast, anyone can write a blog, publish a video, or post on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram and rarely be corrected or stopped, unless, perhaps, they say something libelous or they’re publishing an act of terrorism.  In other words, we’re in the era of fake news, deliberately or not.

As Sanderson opines, “The Internet made news faster (but) we ... gained four minutes (and) lost a lot more.”  (page 212) 

The changed habits of today’s news consumers – taking in more information online – hasn’t helped the newspaper business.  It resulted in fewer advertising dollars and fewer reporters, Sanderson writes.  In 2000, newspaper newsrooms employed 56,200 editors, reporters, photographers and support staff.  It’s down to 32,900 as of 2016. 

This decrease isn’t just compromising the news business.  It’s also harming the country.  It’s hard to believe the nation’s depleted newsrooms didn’t contribute to some of the reporting prior to the November 8^th election predicting Hillary Clinton winning the presidency.  An election involving 50 states cannot be covered from the newsroom.  Reporters need to be on the ground, finding out what the citizenry is thinking about those who would lead them.

Only now are the editors at The Times and The Boston Globe discovering states like Iowa and Wisconsin and sending reporters there.  From reading the stories, you might think they were covering foreign countries.

The news business and the United States were fortunate to have Merriman Smith and certainly a UPI which covered politicians and events across the globe as the world’s largest, independently owned news wire service. 

The wire services have suffered many setbacks since the early 1960s.  UPI is much smaller, nothing like it was twenty or thirty years ago, having been sold a few times.  It’s owned by News World Communications, a media entity founded by the Unification Church.  The AP suffers the same woes as the media industry it serves, seeing its revenues decline nearly 25 percent from their peak in 2008.

Sanderson’s book is very well sourced, and he told me both AP and UPI cooperated with him on the book.  He also said AP’s archivists worry about how UPI is maintaining its archives.  Maybe there’s a deal to be done there, with UPI allowing AP to manage and store their archives.

Smith’s life ended in tragedy in 1970 with a self-inflicted pistol shot.  He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  It’s a fitting tribute to him.  The man who stood for everything journalism holds near and dear – getting the story right – lays with America’s heroes, including his son, Albert, killed in 1966 while serving in the Army in Vietnam.

(Publishing details:  Bulletins from Dallas:  Reporting the JFK Assassination, Bill Sanderson.  New York:  Skyhorse Publishing, November 1, 2016)

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About me, the reviewer:  I’m a freelance reporter in Massachusetts and worked for UPI between 1984 and 1987, in Washington, Dallas, and Philadelphia.  I’m also the co-author, with Philip L. Kilbride, of Plural Marriage for Our Times:  A Reinvented Option? 2^nd Edition, Santa Barbara, CA:  Praeger Publishers, 2012.  My dad, Bob Page, was UPI’s general manager between 1975 and 1980.  He spent 20 years at UPI, from 1960 to 1980.

Link to my book:

https://www.amazon.com/Plural-Marriage-Our-Times-Reinvented/dp/0313384789

AP staff cuts: 

http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/12/ap-lays-off-25-staffers-004887

AP 2015 annual revenues:

https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2016/aps-2015-profit-rises-30-percent-on-tax-benefit-cost-cutting

BusinessInsider.com on a fake “mommy” blog:

http://www.businessinsider.com/mommy-blogger-calls-b-on-the-mommy-blogging-industry-and-admits-much-of-her-blogging-was-fake-2016-5

Cisco on fake blogs:

http://blogs.cisco.com/security/cognitive-research-fake-blogs-generating-real-money

Pew report on the U.S. newspaper industry:

http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/newspapers-fact-sheet/

Arlington National Cemetery obituary of Merriman Smith’s son:

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/amsmithj.htm

The New York Times story about Rolling Stone magazine’s fake rape story at the University of Virginia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/business/media/rolling-stone-rape-story-case-guilty.html?_r=0

The New York Times story about Jayson Blair:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html

The New York Times story about early voting leading to a Hillary Clinton presidential victory:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/us/politics/early-voting-registration.html

Al Webb: RIP

The first time I laid eyes on him was in 1973, when we lived in Hong Kong, where my dad ran UPI's Asia/Pacific division.  My dad, mom, younger brother and I greeted Al just outside of the Hilton, where he was staying after being transferred from Brussels.

He replaced Danny Gilmore as UPI's Asia/Pacific editor, overseeing the company's Vietnam War coverage and, of course, whatever news it could pull out of China, which was just beginning to re-open to the world.

My parents had Al over a number of times during our Hong Kong days.  He later visited us in Connecticut, where we lived while Dad was UPI's vice president and general manager.

Al was a trip.  He lived out loud, never hesitating to express his opinions.  In 1983, when I was a college student in Strasbourg, France, I called him at his apartment in London, asking about joining him for Christmas.  Absolutely, he said. 

It was supposed to be a three-day visit but Al kept insisting I stick around.  I finally left on New Year's Day, so hungover that a police officer at Heathrow patted me down thoroughly before allowing me to proceed to the ticket counter.

Al and I spent Christmas Day at a neighborhood pub.  As I recall, the manager and his wife lived upstairs; and they invited a few close friends to the pub for the holiday.

We spent a lot of time at that pub or back at his place, always drinking.

It's hard to say why Al kept insisting I stick around but some of it, I think, had to do with what happened to him earlier that year.  In April 1983, he was U.S. News & World Report's correspondent in Beirut when the U.S. Embassy was hit by a suicide bomber.  Had Al's penchant for the drink at the Intercontinental Hotel's bar not been around, he would have been killed.

Not one to get too wrapped up in what could have been, Al, instead, made a lot of money that day, filing news reports -- from the bar, of course -- to every English-language radio station that called.

The last time I saw him was in September 1984, in Annapolis, Md., at Harry's Bar, no less.  He was with his daughter (her name escapes me); and joining me that day was David Mould, who worked on UPI's Cables Desk.

We talked by phone a few times afterwards.  I called him from Dallas from time to time and Philadelphia, too, when I was working in those cities for UPI.

Al was a great guy.  Not only was he an incredible reporter he was also one of the best writers I ever read.  Al could cover anything, from a battle to a bridge tournament.  He was that talented.

May he rest in peace.

Here's his obit as it ran on the "Downhold wire."

Al Webb, a jack-of-all-trades American reporter awarded the rare military Bronze Star for battlefield heroism as a Vietnam War correspondent, died Jan. 25 in Banbury, England. He was 79.

The cause of death was listed as complications of pneumonia and diabetes, said his widow Elizabeth. 

In a half-century of distinguished reporting, Webb's bylined stories spanned the globe from the civil rights battlefields of the American South to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to Cape Canaveral and the Houston Space Center for man's first tentative steps to the moon and beyond. 

He spent most of his career with United Press International, 28 years, separated by a few years in the 1980's with U.S. News and World Report. He was a quick-witted, fast-talking and engaging reporter with a built-in knack for news agency work, which placed a premium on fast reporting and transmission, often with difficult pre-Internet communications from far-flung locations. He thrived on UPI's fierce competition with its arch-rival, the Associated Press. 

Like many of his agency's contemporaries, Webb, although trained primarily as a print reporter, was also an early example of today's multimedia journalist, taking photographs of soldiers in battle and filing radio reports as well.   

He  was one of three civilian journalists awarded Bronze Stars, with Combat Distinguishing "V" Devices, for evacuating a wounded Marine in the Vietnam War's bloody Tet Offensive in 1968. The others were Charles Mohr of The New York Times and David Greenway of Time magazine. (Another UPI reporter, Joseph Galloway, received a U.S. Army medal for valor for rescuing soldiers in combat in Vietnam).
  
Recounting the incident later, Webb said he became more combat corpsman than journalist when a Marine near him was shot in his throat during the battle for Hue. Webb said he and a Marine sergeant quickly "got the wounded guy under each arm and hauled him about 50 yards through some thick foliage."  Mohr and  Greenway arrived on the scene, and the "lot of us managed to find a blown-out door to use as a makeshift stretcher and were loading the Marine onto it" when the group was hit by an enemy rocket.

"I looked down, and my lap was full of blood," Webb said. "Most of the blood, alas, was from the poor Marine, when the back of his head just fell apart in my lap."  Still, Webb had sustained shrapnel wounds in the head, arm, butt, leg, ankle and foot.

Webb, the gravely wounded Marine and Greenway, who was also hit, were loaded onto a truck and hauled to the rear for medical attention. The Marine died there as he lay next to Webb.  As the helicopter was lifting off, enemy fire hit it, but caused little damage. He was later evacuated to Saigon and then to Bronxville, NY, for more surgery.   

Years later, then-Marine commandant Gen. Robert Barrow read about the incident and invited the three journalists to a ceremony at the Marine Barracks in Washington in 1980 and awarded each the Bronze Star, with Combat "V." 

Alvin B. Webb Jr. was born March 14, 1935, in South Carolina, raised in North Carolina and Tennessee and educated at Duke University. His career in news  began at The Knoxville Journal, but in 1956, he joined the Raleigh bureau of then-United Press. Over the next three decades, he would be assigned to a dozen UP and UPI  bureaus on three continents and would report from even more parts of the world.   

His earliest assignments kept him in his native South, including coverage of the emerging civil rights movement there. 

With the U.S. gearing up its infant space program in 1959, Webb was assigned to open a new bureau at Cape Canaveral to cover it. Its internal UPI "bureau code" designation was "BW," standing for "Bird Watch." From there, he reported on the early unmanned rocket launches, followed by the Mercury 7 program of manned U.S. space flight. 

Webb later opened another UPI space reporting bureau at what is now the Johnson Space Center and continued his coverage of the accelerating U.S. effort to fulfill John F. Kennedy's promise to send a man to the moon before the end of the decade. But with a war rapidly escalating in Vietnam in 1966, Webb requested and got a transfer to Saigon.   

Once there, Webb, a cat fancier, insisted to fellow UPI staffers that he got regular early warnings of danger from his Siamese cat Snuffy that was "able to hear rockets coming in" and alert him by furiously spinning around.

He later said he considered the Tet offensive to be "the single most important story" he covered.  

After recovering from the wounds sustained in covering it, Webb briefly returned to Vietnam, but when he was deliberately deprived of field assignments for his safety, he asked UPI for another foreign posting. He became the second-highest ranking editor at UPI's European headquarters in London and, later, Brussels, before moving to Hong Kong as the agency's Asia Division news editor. 

In the mid 1970's, Webb was recalled to UPI's New York headquarters, where he edited major breaking stories, including the escape of Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer, James Earl Ray, and the 1976 Israeli commando rescue of 92 countrymen held by hijack terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda.
 
But he also remained a leading UPI "fireman," covering big stories, including the 1978 Peoples Temple massacre in the South American nation of Guyana, where an unusual  Northern California cult, which mixed fundamentalist religion and Marxism, had set up a jungle commune to get away from mounting legal troubles back in the U.S. At a remote airstrip near the Jonestown compound, named for leader Jim Jones, armed members of the group killed California Congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate reports of abuse and mistreatment from relatives of group members, and four members of his party: three journalists and a would-be cult defector. Several others were badly wounded, including Ryan aide Jackie Speier, who now represents much of Ryan's old district in Congress. Jones then ordered his followers to kill themselves with a cyanide-laced drink, which Webb always pointed out was NOT the Kool Aid of erroneous legend and current jargon, but rather, Flavor-Aid. Jones' armed guards enforced his orders on those reluctant to follow.  

Webb, sent to head UPI's coverage and clad in a black turtleneck sweater in searing tropical heat, overcame communications difficulties to get out the bizarre story to a disbelieving world. He wrote and dictated stories over a single phone line to UPI's New York headquarters, shouting at editors there to keep the phone line open around the clock for days to send stories, photograph and radio transmissions.       
Webb later recalled, "We weren't sure at all at the start as to just what the death toll would be, but I seem to recall we believed it would run maybe a few score - 50 or 60, say."  Then the reported number of dead escalated, jumping up and up, prompting Webb to send new updates around the clock.  It became a grisly task.  

"U.S. authorities started coming out with the real totals, 525 and more, and these were starting to change at the rate of once every 30 to 45 minutes," Webb said. "Then I was told at least 600, maybe more, and I was momentarily stunned, or shocked, or something...I lost my breath about here. 
 
"It was all turning surreal, and numbers were just grotesque symbols that I really couldn't relate to people. I kept on writing and dictating.  I had barely gotten 750 at least out, when I had to tear that sheet out of the typewriter to put yet another number--this one over 800. Then it became more than 900  and rather quickly - and remarkably, I think, considering the circumstances--911.  The exact number turned out to be 913. It is a number I've never forgotten."

Not long after returning to New York from Guyana, Webb was assigned as UPI's manager in increasingly chaotic Beirut, Lebanon. The city once known as the "Paris of the Middle East"  had become the center of a decades-long sectarian civil war. Even in the middle of it, Webb's kindness to homeless felines was again on display. He gathered up a number of stray cats and housed them in his room at the Commodore Hotel -- home also to the foreign press corps.

In the early 80's, Webb moved to U.S. News and World Report and also returned to London, to which he had become increasingly attached since his posting there in the early 70's. In 1986, he returned for a second London turn with a now rapidly shrinking UPI. He later switched to financial journalism for Bridge Information Systems, which was subsequently acquired by Reuters. 

In 1992, Webb became a British citizen and lived in England the rest of his life, occasionally spotted wearing bowler hat and tie that would have shocked colleagues and friends elsewhere in the world and become the rare American to embrace the game of cricket. He was a long-time member of the Surrey County Cricket Club and even became qualified to be an umpire at minor local matches.

He also liked to host an annual home party for guests to watch the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race as well as his annual "Christmas Party,"  held in July because Webb believed "it's a much better time for Christmas." 

He remained active professionally, with part-time journalistic work for the Voice of America, Religion News Service, The Washington Times  and even a still-smaller UPI.  
 
On UPI's centennial anniversary in 2007, he told colleagues at The Washington Times: “UPI was my first, last and only love in journalism. The thrill of that competition, the absolute enjoyment of getting a story, of being accurate. It was the most fun I had in my entire life. Our mission was to get the facts down in an interesting order and let the reader make the conclusions. There was real integrity in that.” 

He is survived by his widow Elizabeth and an undetermined number of cats. 

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written by Tom Foty with editing by Ron Cohen, Richard C. Gross, Michael Keats and William Wright.