The leaves are just starting to turn in New England. In a week or so, some should be as red as the collective face of the city`s media, which just blew the state`s biggest story.
Michael Dukakis, the amazing shrinking governor, opted not to run for re- election because it was unclear if he`d have the support of more than his immediate family. The ”Massachusetts Miracle,” which helped propel him to prominence, is gone, replaced by a huge economic mess and a sense that Dukakis was not forthright about shaky state finances.
Last week brought the Democratic and Republican primaries, with most attention in a largely Democratic state focused naturally on that party. Francis Bellotti, a longtime pol and exemplar of the state`s deeply cronyist aesthetic, faced John Silber, the intellectually formidable, irreverent, conservative and, some say, off-the-wall president of Boston University.
Silber, who had never run for office, used that fact as his prime selling point in a throw-out-the-bums campaign that included what media tagged
”Silber shockers.” These were impolitic remarks about foreigners, the elderly and welfare recipients, among others, that left liberals groaning overheatedly that Hitler in pinstripes was in their midst.
Going into a final debate between Bellotti and Silber on Sept. 11, polls commissioned by the city`s papers-the long-dominant and snoozy Boston Globe and the more vigorous Boston Herald-claimed Bellotti to be ahead by anywhere from about 10 to 20 points.
Late in the evening debate, moderated by Marvin Kalb, the former CBS and NBC reporter now at Harvard University, Silber was asked why he hadn`t given a big speech in several Boston areas with huge crime problems. He replied:
”There is no point in my making a speech on crime control to a bunch of drug addicts. I think it is far better for me to stand on the steps of the State House and make my speech there.”
Typically, the tabloid Herald, whose local coverage is far sharper than the Globe`s, kicked the Globe`s derriere to somewhere in the vicinity of suburban Newton. It went overboard, whipping off at least 12 stories and columns in the face of late-night deadlines, but looked superior compared with the Globe`s one, leaden effort, whose opening paragraph missed the obvious news about Silber`s remark.
But more important, both assumed that long-shot Silber was dead. The Globe intoned that Silber had ”failed to score the decisive breakthrough”
that analysts believed he needed.
The Herald was worse. A front-page analysis was headlined, ”BU chief`s remark cost him `ball game.` ” Columnist Leonard Greene wrote that Silber, needing ”a knockout punch,” had delivered: ”Only he hit himself.”
The Herald`s Peter Gelzinis wrote a column that noted that, as soon as the debate was over, reporters joked about writing a lead paragraph saying
”Bellotti Wins by a Suicide.” The consensus was ”that the doctor had been mortally wounded by his own soundbite.”
The Globe reiterated that conclusion the next day as it employed a predictable gambit of big, self-satisfied newspapers: enlist a big-gun reporter for a Big Picture opus, one that`s punchy enough so editors can rationalize the woeful effort of the day before.
Here, the journalistic Stealth bomber was reporter Curtis Wilkie, a longtime top national political writer, who opened with prose that might be characterized as quasi-hysterical. One might have wanted to inject lithium into one`s copy of the front page as these words came bouncing off:
”John R. Silber insisted on live television coverage. Over the past 24 hours he got it, and in the process he exposed a Massachusetts audience to the self-immolation of his campaign.”
Wilkie got screechier, declaring that Silber had probably blown his last chance to win any new supporters and that the performance was ”almost as sensational and ruinous as the acts of Buddhist monks in Saigon who once set themselves on fire in front of cameras in an ultimate statement of protest.” Sept. 16`s final newspaper polls (done with local TV stations) had Bellotti up by either 11 or 14 percentage points. Reporters blithely assumed the polls were correct.
Well, Silber creamed Bellotti by about 10 percentage points Tuesday in a vote that reflected an alienation with state politics as personified by Bellotti (and, for that matter, Dukakis). The press called it a ”stunning upset.”
Was it? The Herald`s Gelzinis, amid those mentions of suicide jokes, also had written after the debate, ”What about the public? You know, all those people out there who weren`t allowed into the hall (without) an invite.
”What about the public who see absolutely nothing weird in what John Silber said about all those `drug addicts`? How much of the public will care? And how much will simply wink as they whisper to themselves: `That`s OK, John, we know what you meant.` ”
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Up in Amherst, tucked 90 miles away into the bucolic enfolds of western Massachusetts, Howie Ziff ambled about the University of Massachusetts campus with blue windbreaker and a dilapidated White Sox hat.
It`s professor Howard Ziff, actually, stalwart of the university journalism department, and a bear of a fellow who, says a local professor, tends to talk in paragraphs and was inclined to ruminate about last week`s election.
”Dukakis` inability to govern is the ultimate loss of the Eastern business and professional elite,” says Ziff, a man apt to quote the likes of mid-19th Century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins out of the clear blue.
”Any overall vision, beyond a purely technocratic one, was missing. He disdained the traditional grass roots of the party and morally bullied people.”
All interesting, but not the real reason for a visit. Donning the Sox hat was apt, because Ziff, 59, will head to Chicago Oct. 6 to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the City News Bureau of Chicago, of which he`s an alumnus.
City News, a local news service whose clients include the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and seven TV and 20 radio stations, is the long-valued training ground for reporters who don`t mind toiling hard for a mere pittance. Notable alumni include Charles MacArthur, co-author of ”The Front Page,” Mike Royko, Seymour Hersh, Tribune editor Jack Fuller, and Roger Simon, along with novelist Kurt Vonnegut, artist Claes Oldenburg and the late actor Melvin Douglas.
Ziff came to City News by accident in 1954 as a young Korean War-era veteran and Amherst College graduate. He was visiting his brother at the University of Chicago. Having worked during the war at Stars & Stripes, he got a job at City News for $27.50 a week and instantly proved an oddity, given his college degree.
Royko, who worked with him at both City News and the Chicago Daily News, calls Ziff one of the most talented reporter-editors he came across. Admittedly, he could strike colleagues as abrasive and condescending, at times showing a melodramatic flair (he did some acting in later years) that could elicit groans.
Once, when a big story broke, he raced toward his desk, feeling compelled to leap over a chair on the way. During the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention, he was working the Daily News city desk one night when he looked out over the city and intoned gravelly, ”I feel like Gregory Peck in `12 O`Clock High,` waiting for the planes to land.”
If some found him too self-assured, he admits to no small insecurity when he got to City News.
”I was frightened,” he recalls. ”Not only didn`t I have street smarts in a reporter`s sense, but I didn`t know where the streets were.”
Early on, he called in notes on a story from ”Almond Street,” only to
”be reamed out by Charlie Nicodemus,” now a Sun-Times reporter. It was Homan Avenue. He covered a criminal case, screwing up the key names and thus having the defendant sentencing the judge.
But by the time he left the Daily News in 1968, he had proven himself a formidable desk man, far overshadowing a bizarre stint as a Page 1 weatherman. ”Ask Mr. Ziff” was the paper`s doltish attempt to compete with a new genre, the TV weatherman. Its author split to teach at the University of Illinois, then to the University of Massachusetts to be the cornerstone of its journalism program.
Ziff believes that he and his City News colleagues were eager but woefully naive about ”the bigger forces at play” in society. Yet he looks back fondly because of help received from people such as editor John Danovich, a ”big, tall, 6-foot-4, 280-pound Russian from Hartford, Conn., who knew the city with such complete intimacy. He could be blindfolded and figure out what part of the city he was in just by the smell of a bakery.
”The help I received at City News was invaluable,” he says.
When he hears from former students, Ziff concludes that most are left to sink or swim. Few papers, he notes correctly, spend time counseling on writing. For every editor who complains about journalism schools not teaching writing, Ziff says, he hears from a student complaining about editors offering no help.
The City News celebration will be at the Westin Hotel and reservations can be had via 312-782-8100.
Maybe Howie Ziff will tell you about that landmark in American criminal justice, the day a defendant sentenced the judge.
