Mr. Herbert Brucker This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. www.ananews.com

   www.ananews.com/awards/zenger/ - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/20/2008   Last Visited: 5/20/2008

   1959 -- Herbert Brucker, Hartford Courant
   
   1958 -- John Moss, U.S. House Govermental Information Subcommittee

2. 2. ananews.com

   ananews.com/Foundation/Zenger. - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/7/2007   Last Visited: 8/14/2007

   1959 Herbert Brucker, Hartford Courant
   
   1958 John Moss, U.S. House Govermental Information Subcommittee

3. 3. Guild Reporter - April 16, 1999 Issue

   www.newsguild.org/gr/gr99apr1. - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/26/1999   Last Visited: 8/14/2000

   For the benefit of those members of the American Newspaper Guild who do not realize what they have gotten into, I take as my text this morning some passages from a book published last month, Freedom of Information, by Herbert Brucker, editor of the Hartford Courant. With the happy air of a man who has just discovered that the binomial theorem is cockeyed, Mr. Brucker discloses that the Guild has long since become an out-and-out labor union..
   
   Most of you, I suppose, have never thought of the Guild in quite this light before. And from some of the more brazen fellows in the class I can hear the murmured query, Is that bad?.
   
   Is is bad? Boy, oh boy, just listen to what Mr. Brucker says about it : Only one who has experienced it personally can know what it means to have a good man become more interested in the union than in his work, and to see him put the fire in his soul into the cause of the union rather than into his job. Often, indeed, the man involved is himself only partly aware of his sharply lowered usefulness, because he continues to go dutifully through the motions of doing his work. If the employer dismisses such a man he finds that the union runs to the law for help, and in all probability gets it, on the ground that the firing was animated by hostility to the union..
   
   It is the principal thesis of Freedom of Information that America's great contribution to journalism is the tradition of objective reporting and that the fostering of this tradition affords the best hope for the future of the American press.
   
   But objectivity is not easily, or cheaply, come by. It demands both conscience and competence. And I wonder if Mr. Brucker would not agree, although his book nowhere makes mention of it, that the American Newspaper Guild has done a great deal to promote the increased objectivity he discerns in the press simply by making it economically possible for competent and conscientious men to work for newspapers.
   
   In the good old days, before Heywood Broun propounded his subversive idea of a decent wage scale, the newspaper game (as we all loved to call it then) employed a distressingly high proportion of beaten-down hacks or juvenile romantics. The former had only the objectivity of apathy, while the latter tended either to take to cheap liquor or to get into some more remunerative vocation.
   
   Well, the American Newspaper Guild did manage to boost the pay of working newspapermen-not so high, perhaps, as to make them completely objective but high enough so that they could begin to think of newspapering as a respectable career, one in which they might even hope to support families and take responsible positions in the community.
   
   The result of this was a pronounced advance in the caliber of the craft. More men of ability were drawn into it and more of these were enabled to stay in beyond their salad days.