Page:Columbia Journalism Review volume 2 issue 1.djvu/37



Debaters about the impact of television debates may wish to note February 6, 1963, as a milestone. On that day the television revolution in public debates was extended to the press, when newspapermen took a newspaper squabble to the public over the air.

With the trappings of the 1960 "great debates," two newspapermen argued issues of the strike, then sixty-nine days old, against Cleveland's two daily newspapers. The city's three television stations and the major radio stations carried the event in evening time. The debate pitted Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press-News, against one of his employees, Noel Wical, a copy-reader and chairman of the Press-News unit of the American Newspaper Guild.

Within hours after Seltzer's challenge to a public discussion, broadcasters rushed to offer facilities. The logical choice for a neutral ground was the City Club, a Cleveland institution with a fifty-year tradition of weekly forums and election-year debates. The agreed rules for the one-hour meeting specified a twelveminute opening statement from each side, followed by a five-minute rebuttal from each, then questions from the audience.

The Guild was not the only union halting publication of the Press and the Plain Dealer, but the Guild's strike had received the most attention. Moreover, television coverage of the strike had made some of the Guild's spokesmen familiar figures. Wical was among them, although he had hardly mastered a confident manner. In the first days of the strike, he shied away from answering questions unless they were put to him in advance. "I'm not a TV star," he said. Seltzer was a more experienced public speaker. He had been a familiar figure on civic luncheon programs and had occasionally appeared on network television.

According to custom, the City Club chose its president as moderator for the debate. This year, he happened to be Barton R. Clausen, editorial director of KYW radio and television, which originated the "pool feed" to WEWS and WJW-TV.

Both debaters, by agreement, addressed themselves primarily to one issue: the question of a union shop for commercial employees at the Press. Seltzer, in his opening statement, hammered at one main contention: that a union-joining requirement would lead eventually to a stifling of a free press. Naming well-known reporters who opposed the union's stand, he called the strike "conceived in a lie, fathered by malcontent, born of trickery, deceit, and treachery."

Wical opened with a detailed review of the strike's history and union demands, meanwhile denying Seltzer's charges. He called it "sheer nonsense to suggest, that somehow a free press would be less free if future commercial employees pay their fair share" of union costs. The willingness of Guildsmen to forgo paychecks for two months, he said, "should prove this is not merely a union matter but a deep personal one."

In his rebuttal, Seltzer elaborated on his charges that the combination of editorial and commercial employees in the same union formed an inherent danger "'as a device to gain compulsive control of the editorial department of American newspapers."

Wical used his rebuttal time to counter a number of lesser arguments offered by the editor—notably the role of the union's national offices in Washington.

Each speaker seemed to this viewer to be talking to the other, ignoring the audience at home. Viewers who had hoped to understand an already confusing strike must have been left further confused.

The question period was more lively, but most of the subject matter still seemed very special for public consumption. Only one questioner summed up public Spring, 1963 35