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Show I Oil ES . ! BECAUSE WE BELIEVE i '! ( I Newspapermen have been up to a lot lately, j They save been digging busily into the Watergate affair and probing police performance in New York City, ! looking into the financial details of Boys Town out in Ne- I braska and checking the purity of municipal water supply uown in Mami. And a number of them have been going to . jail- (Oh, you know about that? About Watergate and the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Sure, a notable piece of reportage they did, and the Pulitzer Prize board agreed. f 1 Journalism is proud of them, as it is always proud of j hard-working, un-afraid reporters and editors who dare to j ptei the wraps off a difficult story. . j But the "big story" is just part of the story of Amer- I I ica's newspapers and the people who devote their lives to if i the public interest these days. ; Prizes and honors please newspaper people as much as anyone else. They highlight the journalistic homerun, re- : ward extra effort and recognize exceptional performance and professional competence. But, as we said, they only tell part of the whole story. While Bernstein and Woodward of the Big Washington Post were winning a Pulitzer for reporting, did you notice that the Pulitzer for editorial writing went to the tiny Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfjeld, Mass., or that the prize for feature photography went to Brian Lanker out in Topeka, Kans.? The point is that in almost every corner of America dedicated men and women, working on papers ranging in size from the Nashville, Indiana, Brown County Demo- i. crat to the powerful Chicago Tribune, labor earnestly for their communities and in a variety of ways, j : From the printer who volunteers his time to coach a Little League team to the advertising solicitor who gives i one evening a week to advising a Junior Achievement com- I pany, from the publisher who rejects the ease of the popu- I lar view to back a controversial editorial stand to the re- ! porter who puts his personal freedom on the line to pro- 1 tect his sources, newspaper people participate person ally as well as professionally in the community life that is the bedrock of America's strength. And very few of them do it for the occasional prizes; indeed, we're more accustomed to brickbats. We do it because we believe. We believe in the Con-I Con-I stitution and the First Amendment and "freedom of the press." We believe that freedom of the press is not our freedom, but your freedom, and if we lose it, none of us will be free for long. But we do it also because we believe that professional profession-al commitment alone is not enough. For America's newspapers, news-papers, large and small, and for America's thousands of newspaper people, ours is a personal commitment of both work and service. Newspaper Week 1973 is the occasion we use to renew and reemphasize that commitment. The Anniston Star Anniston, Alabama |