Overview

"For nearly twenty years Robert H. Phelps ran interference for, cheered on, and sometimes scolded star reporters and top editors at the """"New York Times"""". Starting his career as a cub reporter for the """"Providence Journal-Bulletin"""", Phelps joined the """"New York Times"""" as a copy editor, eventually serving as the """"Times"""" news editor for the Washington bureau. Along the way he struggled with balancing his moral ideals and his personal ambition. In this compelling memoir, Phelps interweaves his personal and professional experiences with some of the most powerful stories of the era. With candor and keen observation, Phelps chronicles both the triumphant and the tragic events at the """"Times"""". He explains the missed lessons of the """"Pentagon Papers"""", why the """"Times"""" played catch-up with the """"Washington Post"""" on the Watergate scandal but eventually surpassed it on covering that seminal story, and how the """"Times"""" failed to report a key element of the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention. Phelps offers mixed appraisals of such luminaries as A. M. Rosenthal, James B. Reston, E. Clifton Daniel, and Max Frankel, and expresses great admiration for Seymour Hersh, Neil Sheehan, and Bill Beecher, three unlikely scoop artists. As Phelps settled in at the """"New York Times"""", journalism became the religion he had searched for since his adolescence. Over his tenure of nearly two decades, however, Phelps found that journalism's stark emphasis on fact was insufficient to address many of life's dilemmas and failed to provide the sustaining guidance he envied in his wife's Catholic faith."

Full Product Details

9780815609148

Table of Contents

Reviews

This is the best, truest, most revealing insider's story ever published about life at the New York Times during the golden age of print journalism.... Phelps was in the thick of it all and tells it with the care and precision of a great editor. - Russell Baker, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Growing Up

Phelps looks back on a long journalistic career, focusing on his 20 years at the newspaper industry's famous Gray Lady.The author covers all the requisite bases, beginning with childhood, early struggles over spirituality and schooling and the conflicts he experienced as a pacifist serving as an enlisted navy correspondent. Phelps found his calling as a slave laborer at United Press, then was a copyeditor at the Providence Journal-Bulletin for a few years. The bulk of the memoir concerns his years at the New York Times, where he became news editor of the Washington bureau in 1964. In a clear, professional voice, he writes of bringing balance to reporting, getting the facts straight and digestible and generating the trust that readers must have with their paper of choice. He honed those skills at a time when Vietnam and Watergate were undermining American citizens' innate faith in government. Phelps explores the Times' scoops and snafus during that seminal era, as well as dynamics within the organization that shaped how news was gathered, framed and delivered. Profiles of Times characters, from A.M. Rosenthal to Max Frankel, are trenchant, as is the author's dissection of newsroom politics, but what sings is his short course on the journalistic everyday: The lesson of the Pentagon Papers went beyond distrusting government sources. Whistleblowers should also be distrusted and should be checked as vigorously. A reporter should not assume the role of a defense attorney, avers the author, but of a judge, making sure all questions are answered. In 1974 Phelps moved to the Boston Globe, where he played an instrumental role in the paper's Pulitzer Prize - winning coverage of school desegregation. Though he describes this period as a coda to his Times career, it produces some of his most impassioned writing on the responsibility of newspapers to convey information as objectively as possible, so readers can make fully informed judgments.A methodical, sober eyeful for Times devotees and a guiding light for aspiring journalists. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Robert H. Phelps was the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times from 1965 to 1974. He left the Times to join the Boston Globe, where he led coverage of school desegregation, for which it won a Pulitzer Prize. He is the coauthor of Libel: Rights, Risks, and Responsibilities and editor of Witness to History.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available