News Is a Verb by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307766762
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-05T08:00:00+00:00

4

Tell It to Abdul

(or Kim, or Ivan, or Rosa …)

IN 1922, WHEN the New York Daily News was three years old, its advertising department invented a slogan that swiftly became the newspaper’s basic motto: “Tell it to Sweeney! The Stuyvesants will understand.”

The message was simple. The Sweeneys were working-class New Yorkers, immigrants or their children; not all of them were Irish. The Stuyvesants were the uptown New Yorkers, more prosperous, owners of property, tracing their heritage back to old Dutch burghers or the WASP ascendancy. The Daily News was not telling the Stuyvesants to read another paper. They were saying that the paper was a big tent, with room for the Sweeneys and the Stuyvesants. And there were always more Sweeneys. If a newspaper was to be a mass medium, it had to get the Sweeneys as readers and then convince advertisers that they were a huge market.

The United States is now in the midst of the largest immigration wave since the turn of the last century, and the arrival of so many strangers among us is both a challenge and an opportunity for newspapers. Not many of the new immigrants are named Sweeney anymore (although there are substantial numbers of Irish immigrants, legal and illegal, in some major cities). Instead of Italian and Yiddish, they speak Korean, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, or one of a hundred other languages. But they are here in search of the same things the European immigrants wanted: economic betterment for themselves and their children, personal and political freedom, and a measure of happiness. They don’t come to America to feel worse.

Newspapers must cover this story in a sustained way for two reasons. First and most important is because the new immigrants are a great story. They are adding muscle to the workforce. They are changing neighborhoods and cities. They are providing social cement for certain “inner-city” neighborhoods, bringing new life to decayed buildings, creating small businesses, affirming the work ethic. They are altering the culture, producing novelists and poets along with musicians and actors and comedians. They are certainly improving the variety and quality of the food in our restaurants. In most cities, their crime rates are low, and not many find their way to welfare. Their energy can be infectious, too; they are showing many poor Americans that in the United States, personal history is less important than the willingness to work. Even the failures, the disappointments, the descent of a small number into crime or drugs are part of a much larger, marvelously positive narrative. Only newspapers run by fools would avoid covering this story.

The second reason for intelligent, positive coverage of immigration is practical: It is good business. If newspapers are reckless, careless, inadvertently racist in their present coverage, they will pay a price in the long run. Immigrants and their children have long memories. They remember how they were treated when they were poor and powerless, incorporating such treatment into the immigrant myth of overcoming obstacles. There are still some Irish-Americans

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.