Critique

> With supervisors filling in for striking staffers, United Press International last week was tricked into a textbook journalistic boner. Finding a press release on Senator Edward Kennedy's letterhead in the U.P.I. Senate press-gallery box, Marty Houseman, normally U.P.I.'s bureau manager in Puerto Rico, rapped out a story based on the release's startling contents: Kennedy had told a visiting group of high school students that he was reconsidering his noncommittal stance on the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1976. As word of the U.P.I, "exclusive" spread, Kennedy and his office staff were besieged by reporters asking what was up. The answer was simple: U.P.I, had been victimized by a hoax. Some suspect that it was the work of a striking employee or sympathizer wishing to prove that the fill-in reporters do not know what they are doing. If that was the point, it was well made. Houseman did not notice that the bogus release was typed rather than mimeographed, and he never checked the item with Kennedy's office. An embarrassed U.P.I, alerted its subscribers to kill the story 90 minutes after the first dispatch had sped over the wire.

> Editors of the Chicago Tribune last week wished that they could have called back an item in their March 24 Sunday magazine. Appearing five days after the death of former NBC Anchor Man Chet Huntley, the piece related an interview with Huntley last fall, including some critical remarks about his battles with conservationists over a planned Montana resort ("In the past three years, Huntley has gone from being a national hero to something of a local villain"). A prefatory note told readers that Huntley had undergone surgery for cancer last December and quoted a friend as saying "He has not slowed down at all." The execrable timing of the story was caused by early deadlines. That issue of the magazine went to press March 6, well before Huntley's death, although an item in that same day's Tribune about the newsman's failing health might have alerted editors to the risk that the story posed. After Huntley's death the Trib decided not to cut the piece out of the already printed copies or yank the magazine entirely--at an estimated cost of $100,000 in production fees and lost advertising. Magazine Editor John Fink defends the decision to print and then stick by the article: "It was basically a story on Huntley and his life, and it seemed to me that if he should die before publication, it could be something of a final statement." The headline on this "final statement": CHET HUNTLEY IN HOT WATER.

> Eric Shuman, editor of the Los Angeles local wire service, was out of a job last week for refusing to follow his publisher's order. The order: distribute the full text of a two-day-old speech by Los Angeles Police Chief Edward Davis defending President Nixon against the "jackals out to impeach him." Like all other L.A. news organizations, Shuman's 25-man City News Service had overlooked the chiefs speech to members of the police academy. Davis later complained to City News Service Owner Joseph Quinn, who promised to make amends by sending the entire speech out to subscribers, along with a note recommending it to editors' attention. That was when Shuman balked. The news service, which feeds national wire services and local papers and broadcast stations, had never before run the full text of any speech and had never inserted editorial plugs for stories. "It was," Shuman says, "a classic confrontation between an owner and his editor." Shuman lost: "I quit, but he forced me to. He told me it was his news wire and he could do whatever he wished with it."

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