In my last piece, I wrote that names make news and filled up one of these essays with examples. What was more interesting was the occasion on which somebody did not want his name to make news.
In small towns, news about some events spreads with the speed of sound without mention in the local newspaper. These related to some form of misbehavior, such as auto collisions where the person who caused the crash was driving drunk. The newspaper’s policy was to report the accident but not to fix the blame, even by quoting the police record. As my editor observed one time, the guilty party was our biggest advertiser. Another time, I was threatened with a beating by one of my high school classmates if I wrote about his brother being arrested for drunk driving.
Accidents were not the only verboten items. The pastor of one of our churches had a series of affairs with women in his congregation. When several of the husbands threatened to beat him, he left town literally overnight. A month later, when the church obtained a new pastor, our brief story made no mention of the departed one. When the sheriff died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress, we reported the death but not the circumstance.
A bit later, when I was covering the county courts in another town, the owner of a savings and loan company was indicted for embezzling funds. His lawyer, who had usually been very helpful to me, asked me to not write about the indictment. When I said that would not be my decision, he called my editor and threatened him. The editor replied that the story would include mention of the lawyer’s threat. The lawyer thought about it and apologized. The editor wrote a brief story. A month later, on a plea bargain, the indictment was dismissed, and we wrote another brief story.
The new local radio station started a program to help people who felt treated unfairly by local merchants. It did not last long. Most of the complaints were against advertisers who indicated that they would stop being advertisers.
In my first public relations job, I was assigned to gain attention for state medical society meetings. The meetings were small, the speakers were not outstanding, their topics were more refresher courses than new discoveries, and most of the local newspapers had no medical writer. I wrote most of the articles and the papers published them verbatim.
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