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Show John harr ington Newspapering, Professionalism and Park City No matter where you ply your trade in this business, if you try to follow your instincts and sense of fair play, you make enemies. Usually, the enemies come from the ranks of people who have been written about in news or sports stories with which they disagree. Sometimes not. But reporters, if backed by their news organizations, carry with them an unseen shield. If you want to have at them, you will be disadvantaged in that they work for the newspapertelevision or radio station and you don't. One example of shooting-mouth disease came a few days ago when Deputy White House Press Secretary Larry Speaks decided NBC reporter Chris Wallace was "out of business" because Wallace told Speaks he thought a statement by the Administration was a lie. ' "Screw you, then," Speaks told Wallace, who is the son of (and somewhat a copy of) Mike Wallace of CBS' 60 Minutes. Chris Wallace and NBC will be around a lot longer than Speaks, or Reagan, and Speaks will come to regret the way he handled that interview. Which brings up a point. In Park City, things should be more sedate. That does not mean, however, that coverage should be anything less than independent, clear and blind to who is the subject. This newspaper controls its own editorial policy. Its staffers sign their columns, initial editorials. Our news hole is tight. It must be used to reflect all things fairly. A newspaper is its readers, it is an information cooperative. Writers must be trusted to do the right thing, to never personally profit from a story. Professional journalism in Park City should mean more than knowing the in crowd and local power brokers. Professional is keeping at arm's length from your sources. If you report the city, you don't go to parties and rub elbows with the people who make news on your beat. You sacrifice that for objectivity, as fleeting as it often seems to be. Professionalism is not plugging your outside financial interests. A professional rule of thumb should be: accept invitations to any function only to attend in a professional capacity. If you get it for free, you better need if for your story. You never write a story to personally profit from cash, goods or services. The smaller the town, the less social you should be in said town. You listen. If you are writing about someone who is allegedly doing wrong, that person, given the proper amount of journalistic rope, will usually dangle. It can even happen to a president. I was once told by my friend and former boss, the late editor Cliff Cheney, that I was to be a "mirror with brains." Said Cliff over a bourbon late one night: "Don't just reflect what's there to see, reflect what is happening." Once, "Utah Holiday Magazine" ran me over the coals for a story I wrote about an illegal surveillance conducted by the U.S. Forest Service on one of its Ogden employees. The woman who wrote the "Utah Holiday" piece was the daughter of the Forest Service security chief who organized the operation. "A giant conflict of interest," I ranted. I was livid and wanted to take action. Murry Moler the retired associate editor of the Ogden Standard Examiner and a world-wide veteran of United Press International, gave me ? some sound advice. "Never get in a (urinating) match with a skunk," he said. Which brings me to the thought that cheap shots in retaliation may seem smug and cute at the time, but unless one has the professional background to back it up, that type of action will return as a ghost. In my travels through radio, television, newspapers and a wire service, I have seen a lot of solid fakes. And some easy to spot. I was raised in an east-coast home where we took six daily papers, some of them regarded as the finest examples of newspapering in the country. And I always loved the newspaper wars they had. It was interesting to see how many upstart papers would chip away at the established newspapers for circulation and advertising. And, then, after enough of the petty little sniping, the established papers would wake up, notice the annoyance, and swat it like a bug. As for newspaper sniping and smug lines in Park City, "Never," my college football coach once said, "should we ever do anything to give our opponents a reason to get mad at us. All we need to do is beat them." ?i r c ,.r..4 , |