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You are here: Home / The Insane Desire to Be First

The Insane Desire to Be First

by $8 blue check mistermix|  July 29, 20129:20 am| 27 Comments

This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment

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We see it in breaking news coverage (for example, the ABC News Aurora mistake) as well as in technology news (there was an apparently completely fabricated rumor that Apple was investing in Twitter on Friday) all the time, but I thought it might be good to remember that the fever for scoops, small and large, didn’t start with Twitter or cable TV news. From The Boys on the Bus, here’s an account of the doings of UPI White House correspondent Merriman Smith:

His sprints to the phone booth were legendary. He trampled anyone and anything in his way; he once slipped and dislocated his shoulder on the way to the phone but dictated for an hour before passing out from the pain.

He went to incredible lengths to score small scoops. It was rumored for instance that that he always was the first reporter to know that Nixon was going to go to the Western White House because he had cultivated a clerk at a San Clemente motel who called him whenever the whores came up from Vegas in anticipation of the arrival of the Secret Service.

For years, he doggedly hung on to his seniority privilege of sitting in the middle of the front seat of the pool car on on Presidential trips. He was in this cherished spot on November 22, 1963, in the Dallas motorcade. When he heard the sound of gunfire, he grabbed the radiophone (which was on the transmission hump, directly in front of him) and started to dictate. Jack Bell, Smith’s rival from the AP, was in the back seat. After Smith had dictated four pages of copy, Bell demanded the phone. Smith stalled, saying that he wanted the Dallas operator to read back the copy–the overhead wires might have interfered with transmission. Everyone in the car knew that Smith had a perfect connection–they could hear the operator’s voice coming over the phone. Bell started screaming and trying to wrestle with Smith for the receiver. Smith stuck it between his knees and hunched up into a ball, with Bell beating him wildly about the head and shoulders. UPI beat the AP by several crucial minutes on the story, and Smith won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Kennedy assassination.

Merriman was on the job from 1941 to 1970. He was an alcoholic, divorced, lost a boy in Vietnam, and shot himself after he learned he had incurable cancer.

Over forty years after Merriman’s exit from this vale of tears, newspapers still hunger after scoops, reporters dutifully report obvious bullshit just to insure that they aren’t scooped (whatever happened to Romney’s “Saturday surprise”?), reporters are often strange and damaged people often motivated by triviality, and everyone wants a Pulitzer Prize no matter how they get it.

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Reader Interactions

27Comments

  1. 1.

    JMG

    July 29, 2012 at 9:27 am

    Dear Mistermix: As a former reporter, sports division, I had a boss once who had been a UPI reporter. He said that it was a legend there that when Smith called in the first report that JFK was dead, nine seconds or so ahead of AP’s report, without confirmation from two sources, HIS boss’s reaction was “You’d better be right.”
    I freely admit journalists are weird. Have to be. It’s an exhilarating way to live, but not often a healthy one.

  2. 2.

    rumpole

    July 29, 2012 at 9:27 am

    I posted the following to the NYT in response to a friedman column.

    Unfortunately, it seems to meet the Times’ standards of “abusive” and they never published it:

    Although relatively merciful on the English language, this could have been expressed as haiku:
    Funds are limited
    More war or old people?
    Tough choices abound.

    Thats the column, with plenty of time to go over to the post and read pearls before swine.

  3. 3.

    barath

    July 29, 2012 at 9:34 am

    reporters are often strange and damaged people often motivated by triviality, and everyone wants a Pulitzer Prize no matter how they get it

    Say by reporting on the Dickensian aspect of the tragedy of life on the streets of Baltimore.

  4. 4.

    Chyron HR

    July 29, 2012 at 9:38 am

    He trampled anyone and anything in his way; he once slipped and dislocated his shoulder on the way to the phone but dictated for an hour before passing out from the pain.

    If he was such a diligent reporter, why didn’t he carry his phone with him?

  5. 5.

    Alex S.

    July 29, 2012 at 9:38 am

    Well, getting it right is boring – everyone can do that – no, we want to be the FIRST!

  6. 6.

    mistermix

    July 29, 2012 at 9:38 am

    @JMG:
    @barath: Don’t get me wrong – I like reporters, generally, but there’s definitely a streak in them that is some of the worst of human nature. And, yes, a lot of the time that gets us some good reporting. But then there are the Brian Rosses of the Television Networks.

  7. 7.

    lamh35

    July 29, 2012 at 9:55 am

    wow so bibi slaps Current CiC w/Romney next 2 him & no one bats eye.  now what if candidateObama had done same??? int’l incident?

    BiBi- – Obama Sanctions Haven’t Stopped Iran..

    complete with pic of BiBi next to Romney

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    July 29, 2012 at 9:59 am

    “Get It First, But First Get It Right” was adopted by UPI as its motto when it got the ‘I’ as a result of the merger of UP and INS in 1958.

    It had been the motto of INS (Heart’s news service) from at least 1923.

    Walter Cronkite often cited a variation: “Get it first, but get it right.”

    In the 1990s, Clinton spokesperson Joe Lockhart admonished the press thusly: “I understand the competitive pressure that everybody is under, but I do think it’s a significant lowering of standards when getting it first supersedes getting it right.”

    With the near instantaneous broadcasting of breaking news in today’s media, the latter part of the old slogan has more and more been subsumed by the former half and standards have, sadly, fallen even more rapidly by the wayside.

    That there now seems little to no professional price paid for breathlessly disseminating false or incomplete (and consequently shallow) sensationalism in the rush to be immediate (and too often without background, context or substance) is sadder still.

    The old adage was “Act in haste; repent at leisure.” That repentance is so widely viewed as unnecessary, inimical, passé, trite and irrelevant may be the saddest thing of all.

  9. 9.

    Valdivia

    July 29, 2012 at 10:01 am

    @lamh35:
    Yep. Also contradicting everything our military thinks, by saying US approves any attempt to unilaterally attack Iran. Senor had to walk it back but it’s pretty clear Romney is giving Bibi more than a blank check.

    Worse yet, Bibi made Romney cancel a meeting he had scheduled with the head of Labor party.

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    July 29, 2012 at 10:04 am

    @NotMax

    No edit option. That should read: Hearst’s news service, not Heart’s news service.

  11. 11.

    Valdivia

    July 29, 2012 at 10:09 am

    ha ha ha. I called it! Romney goes to the Wall today (what an idiot!) on the day of mourning of the destruction of the Temple and as I thought people who understand what this day means in Judaism are not happy.

    see twitter discussion between Goldberg and Rubin. Loves it.

  12. 12.

    The Thin Black Duke

    July 29, 2012 at 10:22 am

    @Valdivia: Again, as I said in an earlier thread, anybody who votes for this dangerous idiot should be arrested for treason. If Romney got elected president, he would be worse than Bush, and that’s terrifying.

  13. 13.

    jp7505a

    July 29, 2012 at 10:22 am

    @lamh35: GOP is working overtime to be sure that American citizens can’t vote but BibI seems to think he has a veto on US policy and electoral politics. And Romney the spineless just stood there (hmmm was that a brown spot on Mitten’s nose)

  14. 14.

    Valdivia

    July 29, 2012 at 10:23 am

    @The Thin Black Duke:

    I completely agree. Romney will simply outsource all his foreign policy to Bibi.

  15. 15.

    Villago Delenda Est

    July 29, 2012 at 10:29 am

    I’m reminded of that hilarious scene from Airport (one of many, too be sure) where the press guys run to the phone booth bank and knock it over in their haste to be “first”.

    Oh, and fuck Bibi sideways with a rusty chain saw, then use it on Rmoney.

  16. 16.

    Nutella

    July 29, 2012 at 11:10 am

    @Chyron HR:

    If he was such a diligent reporter, why didn’t he carry his phone with him?

    Yeah, not much of a reporter if he didn’t invent the cell phone so he could get his calls done faster!

  17. 17.

    Henry Bayer

    July 29, 2012 at 11:25 am

    During this April’s “Obama Secret Service Prostitute Scandal” I was looking for this quote from the Crouse book to provide historical context. The Secret Service has always been this way, and Barak’s failure to personally supervise their private parts was another blatant fake outrage story for the right.

  18. 18.

    Henry Bayer

    July 29, 2012 at 11:29 am

    Oops. Barak? Barack? Must have been my hurry to get the scoop.

  19. 19.

    Wee Bey

    July 29, 2012 at 11:39 am

    This is a really fucked up post.

  20. 20.

    different-church-lady

    July 29, 2012 at 11:41 am

    The sad thing is that reporters in the old days had to go to such lengths to get truly important news out fast (or at all), whereas today we have the ability to communicate instantly in a way Merriman Smith could only dream of, yet it’s wasted on trivial shit and trash talk.

  21. 21.

    different-church-lady

    July 29, 2012 at 11:45 am

    Should I not be having a FYWP moment, I would edit my comment to read as follows:

    The sad thing is that reporters in the old days had to go to such lengths to get truly important news out fast (or at all), whereas today a reporter has the ability to communicate with millions of people instantaneously and directly from almost any place on earth, yet 99% of the time it’s wasted on trivial shit and trash talk.

  22. 22.

    Dr. SkySkull

    July 29, 2012 at 11:50 am

    The anecdote about Smith reminds me of the classic 1951 film starring Kirk Douglas, “Ace in the Hole”.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043338/

    Douglas plays an unscrupulous journalist who takes advantage of a miner trapped underground to give his own career a boost. He uses tactics such as making exclusivity deals with the locals as well as deliberately delaying the rescue.

  23. 23.

    wrb

    July 29, 2012 at 11:51 am

    who called him whenever the whores came up from Vegas in anticipation of the arrival of the Secret Service.

    mebbe the recent incident was just the exposure of tradition and standard operating procedure?

  24. 24.

    James E. Powell

    July 29, 2012 at 1:28 pm

    A system is set up that rewards certain behaviors, punishes some others, and does not punish some others. Or maybe it wasn’t set up but evolved that way. In either case, when easily predictable outcomes appear, we assign blame to the persons involved. Cf. Investment banking.

  25. 25.

    Rich2506

    July 29, 2012 at 4:07 pm

    When I was a young ‘un, I brought Mad Magazine and occasionally Cracked (I thought Mad had better comics artists) and noticed pretty early on that although Mad was slower to come out with movie parodies, they were usually funnier and more thoughtful. I gave up completely on Cracked when they came out with a parody of Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood (1991) and it was pretty clear they had only seen the advertising for the flick and hadn’t actually seen the flick itself.
    I see reporters “getting it first” and think of that in pretty much the same way. Yeah, your news service might be the first with a scoop, but your report may leave out critical details and not include crucial information.

  26. 26.

    Steverino

    July 29, 2012 at 6:30 pm

    I have a copy of Merriman Smith’s book, “Thank You, Mr. President,” about covering FDR and into the Truman administration. An interesting read.

  27. 27.

    article

    July 30, 2012 at 1:06 am

    I rarely leave a response, however I looked at some of
    the responses on this page Balloon Juice

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