On Thursday, June 7th, the New York Times
newspaper carried three large obits. While I did not count words
or column inches, eyeballing indicates that the one at the top
of the page occupied not quite one-third of the page. It was,
in other words, of significant length, and one presumes that placement
at the top means it was considered the most important one by the
paper. (Is this incorrect?) The middle one seemed to occupy not
quite a sixth of a page, which is also of significant length.
The bottom one occupied, roughly, a bit over one-ninth of the
page, which is not chopped liver.
Who, then, were these obits about? The middle
one was about Martin Meyerson. He was described as having coauthored,
in 1955, the "seminal book" on the (racially isolating)
effects on the poor of public housing projects comprised of "tall
buildings packed with small apartments." He had taught at
prominent schools: the University of Chicago, Penn, Harvard and
Berkeley. He had been appointed Chancellor at Berkeley in 1965
during, and had helped to calm the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley,
had been President of SUNY Buffalo from 1966-1970, and then was
the President of Penn from 1970-1981. (I personally remember reading
his name during that period.) While at Penn, he completed the
full integration of women into the University and began its first
affirmative action program.
Obviously Meyerson was an accomplished and prominent
guy, and one can understand giving him a major obit that occupied
the second spot, on about a sixth of the page.
The obit on the bottom was, in essence, a human
interest matter. It was about an ordinary native New Yorker named
Arnold Lappert who, as an army radio man in Hawaii in 1942, had
received the last messages from Corregidor, including the very
last message sent just before the surrender. The messages had
been sent by a radioman on Corregidor named Irving Strobing, who
was also a native New Yorker. Both Lappert and Strobing were Jewish
as well as New Yorkers. They were brought together at a news conference
in Manhattan in 1946 by the Jewish War Veterans, and later reenacted
their experience at a pageant at Madison Square Garden which related
the contributions of Jews in America's wars.
Lappert's obit, as said, was a human interest
story, especially for a newspaper published in a city with so
many Jews - it is the New York Times, after all, even
if it is also a national newspaper. So it was comprehensible that
Lappert's obit received the third billing and one-ninth of a page.
So if it is comprehensible that the Meyerson and
Lappert obits were given significant length and placement, whose
obit was at the top of the page and was given about a third of
the page? Who was it that was of sufficient importance to merit
this? Jim Clark. That's right, Jim Clark, the brutal Selma, Alabama
sheriff who beat the living crap out of civil rights demonstrators
in the 1960s. Jim Clark, who punched a civil rights leader so
hard that he broke his own hand. Jim Clark, who joined in what
has gone down in history as Bloody Sunday (March 7, 1965), when
marchers trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge were violently
attacked. Jim Clark, who wore a "lapel button emblazoned
with a single word: 'Never,'" with "A billy club, pistol
and cattle prod often dangl[ing] from his belt." Jim Clark,
who said as recently as last year that, "Basically, I'd do
the same thing today if I had to do it all over again." Jim
Clark, that fine upstanding citizen who, a decade after the civil
rights movement, in 1978, was indicted by a federal grand jury
for conspiracy to smuggle Mary Jane (marijuana) and spent about
nine months in the slammer. This is the fine individual who, the
Times believed, deserved an obit twice the size of the
highly accomplished Martin Meyerson's (and more than twice Lappert's)
and placement at the top of the page.
Wow!
What can be said in favor of the Times
peculiar (shall we say) news judgment regarding placement and
length? Well, I suppose that, if the Times were defending
its actions, it would say something like the following (through
its apologist-in-chief Bill Keller?): "As said in the obit,
Clark's violence contributed to the success 'of the voting rights
movement.' As also said in the obit, Bloody Sunday was called
'an American tragedy' by President Johnson and 'was considered
a seminal force behind Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights
Act in 1965.' Clark, however inadvertently, played a major, if
despicable, role in some of the most important events of our time.
We cannot choose to omit and shorten an obit because the deceased,
though a person whose actions were of great consequence, was a
bad person - should we have carried only short obits of Hitler
or Stalin or Mao or Nixon? What's more, it is no bad thing to
remind people of the terrible things done by Southern officials
of those days."
All of this might at first sound pretty persuasive.
But upon reflection, no. The basic facts that made Clark "worthy"
(a strange word in the circumstances) of the Times' obit
could have been stated in just a few paragraphs. There was no
need to "glorify" Clark, as it were, by the very act
of putting his obit at the top of the page and giving it a third
of a page, by saying, as the Times did, that news accounts
from the period said he could be courtly and charming in private,
by talking about his service in the war, by explaining how he
came to be the sheriff, by telling what job he held after being
sheriff, and so forth. This was a truly bad human being, a vicious
bum. He beat the living shit out of civil rights demonstrators.
He viciously abused them physically in other ways. His actions
were so terrible that they were instrumental in securing enactment
of the Voting Rights Act. This guy's obit doesn't deserve to be
ahead of Martin Meyerson's or Arnold Lappert's. It should have
been about a quarter or a fifth of the size it was, and it should
have been at the bottom of the page rather than at the top. One
has to question a news judgment that "rewards" evil
by size and placement, while placing achievement lower down and
giving it less play.
BC columnist Lawrence R. Velvel,
JD, is the Dean of Massachusetts
School of Law. Click
here to contact Dean Velvel. |