Luce and his empire by Swanberg W. A. 1907-

Author:Swanberg, W. A., 1907-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Luce, Henry Robinson, 1898-1967, Luce, Henry Robinson, 1898-1967, Periodicals, Publishers and publishing, Journalism, Journalists
Publisher: New York, Scribner
Published: 1972-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Luce and His Empire

had proved so able a man that his salary had skyrocketed and he was often called on by Luce to debate with him domestic and world problems. The suggestion of some critics that money had something to do with the Luce attitudes did not of course mean that his top men were insincere and motivated only, if at all, by cupidity. Some of them had been taking liberties with the news so long that it seemed as natural as for a chef to season a goulash. There were old-timers and newcomers, though perhaps not many, who truly be-heved in what they were doing. This was obviously the case with the strapping, intellectual Ways, whose sensitivity to news manipulation had not been dulled gradually. He had joined up as a forty-year-old newsman heavily experienced on the Baltimore Sun and Philadelphia Record to whom Time's facile shaping of events must have come as a sudden revelation rather than a slow and crippling disease.

Clearly he approved of Time, for the twelve-page biography was almost an unbroken hosanna. True, his admission that Time performed a certain processing or coloring of the news did not come until the very end of the appreciation, a point only the more determined readers would reach. He suggested that the additives Time combined with the news were not at all an imposition on the reader who might have thought he was getting unadulterated news, since there was no such thing as unadulterated news. There was no mention of the possibility that the additives were calculated to influence readers who might reach different conclusions if left to their own judgment, or that there might be something deceptive in all this. On the contrary, the additives reflected Time's concern over national and world events and its hope to instill the same care into its readers:

The shortest or the longest news story is the result of selection. The selection is not, and cannot be, "scientific" or "objective." It is made by human beings. . . . The myth of "objective journalism" reached its height about 1938-39, before the Hitler-Stalin pact, before the sharp cleavage of war reminded the Western world that the famed "two sides of a question" are not always, or even often, equal. . . .

Time in the 1930s was reporting the facts about Germany, for example, in a way that clearly showed Time's working hypothesis: that the Nazi Party was very bad medicine. It reports the Communist Party today against the back-grovmd of a similar hypothesis. . . .

Time's prospectus promised that "no article would be written to prove any special case." It tries hard to keep that promise. . . . Time is not dispassionate about news. It cares about what's going on in the world, and it hopes that its readers eare. . . . Fairness is Time's goal.

One of Time's researchers seemed to have been careless with a great many of her dots. Ways had not been with Time during the Thirties or

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