On this date in 1986 I took my seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun.
I had been a copy editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer for six and a half years and had tried out at The New York Times, which told me to get a job at a paper that took editing seriously and call again in two years. I had done the first part, and the second proved unnecessary.
In thirty-four years at The Sun, nearly half my life, I saw serious journalism and became head of the copy desk as it developed a national reputation for effective editing, so much so that The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others poached one editor after another.
A reverse arc was also occurring, as feckless corporate gits at the Tribune Company steadily reduced the staff through buyouts and dropped content while charging readers more, because the newspaper industry failed to adapt to changing conditions. The company we worked for was for a time even called tronc, which sounds like an unimpressive video game.
Finally, in 2021, when vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired a diminished Tribune, I took a buyout and retired. And now since the purchase of the newspaper earlier this year by David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting and Armstrong Williams, I read the paper with the same fascination that leads drivers to slow down and gawk at smashups on the highway.
Ignoring Williams’s otiose maundering on the op-ed page is easy. I was used to disregarding The Enquirer’s editorial page, which was also dominated by right-wing cranks. Once in the mid-1980s, The Enquirer editorialized about the spread of AIDS, saying that the disease was painful and incurable, combined with a social stigma. Nevertheless, the editorial concluded, “if apprehension of contracting AIDS should lead people to forgo promiscuous sexual intercourse, then the disease will have served a useful social purpose.”
Appalling as they are, not even Smith and Williams have yet endorsed a disease.
Now each morning, fortified by two cups of strong coffee, I am greeted with shoddy coverage from FOX45 and Sinclair. As one of a rapidly dwindling handful of seven-day-a-week print subscribers, I wonder why I subject myself to this (though masochism cannot be ruled out).
There are still people at The Sun attempting to do responsible journalism under adverse circumstances, and I salute them, and pray for their deliverance. For that reason, the day to call and cancel is not here, though it may not be far off.
ADDENDUM: Fellow copy editor David Benson has corrected my misremembering about that Cincinnati Enquirer editorial. It ran on Monday, June 21, 1982, and concerned herpes, not HIV. The final sentence: "But to the extent the threat promotes abstinence in any age group may it serve a useful purpose, sparing individuals and society enormous costs."
Note that in recasting it from memory, I sharpened the editorial board's writing.
