Page:Columbia Journalism Review volume 2 issue 2 (summer 1963).djvu/6

PASSING COMMENT union to make any inroads. The management is much more lenient on such matters as sick leave and leaves of absence than one could expect with a Guild."

These reports present a picture of diversity—some enthusiasm and credit to the Guild for past achievements, but also cases of deteriorating or dead locals and low morale. It scems fair to say that the palsy of New York and Cleveland is not unique.

'The future One of the sharpest recent criticisms of the Guild was an article in The Reporter, during the New York newspaper strike, by Milton Bracker, a member from The New York Times. Bracker pleaded for independence of response in labor crises. Only journalists, he said, were interested in maintaining the flow of the news; commercial employees in the Guild cared not His solution: the agency shop, in which journalists would pay dues to the Guild for its services, but would not be bound by the obligations of membership.

In effect, Bracker asked for the dismantling of the Guild on the editorial side, his assumption being that the Guild had no role left in serving interests closest to the hearts of journalists. It can in fact hardly be denied that newsmen must look closely to find anything of professional interest in Guild activities. No journalist has headed the national Guild since 1951, and its public spokesmen are usually men who are or who have become trade-union professionals.

The rumblings in New York, Cleveland, and elsewhere may show simply that the Guild —like many another union—has made its members so well off that it has endangered its own existence. Yet this hardly seems possible when many newspapermen are not well-paid and Guild negotiators are still winning substantial gains. Is there not another possibility that with the growth of professional spirit and practices among newspapermen there has developed a schism? That the issues of unionism, the primary concern of the Guild secretariat, are merely irritating to journalists who are members?

This irritation probably runs deeper than discomfiture at not working during a strike. Most members will support strikes, given the urgency of the cause. What they will not support is conflict over issues that appear to them obscure or irrelevant

What is relevant? Many members, no doubt, would be happy to have the Guild confine itself—even more strictly than it does now —to business concerns. Yet such concentration could well lead to further deterioration, for it involves those very union issues that members now decline to pay for or to support with good will.

The Review would be sorry to see such a decline in the Guild, for it has served and continues to serve a useful "yardstick" function for the whole newspaper business. But the Review editors doubt that cither the agency shop or pure trade-unionism will be sufficient either to allow the Guild to continue to fulfill this limited function or to fulfill other functions that could be expected of such an organization.

In other words, there is something special about the Guild. It is the only coherent national body that includes so large a share of shirt-sleeve journalists. It is the only such body that maintains a considerable degree of independence of the corporate powers of journalism. It is the only national organization that has a history of deep-seated bias in favor of the individual journalist.

Given such a framework, it would seem natural to recommend that the Guild establish a professional subdivision—a national subsidiary for the journalists in its ranks that would concern itself with guaranteeing professional standards. Already, in fact, there have been flickers of interest in the subject. A contract clause in Denver protects reviewers from tampering. Kenosha, Wisconsin, now has a "news integrity" contract clause that purports to guarantee that no member can-be ordered to distort facts. It came before the national convention in July for adoption as part of the union-wide bargaining program.

Yet it must be admitted that the overall outlook is poor for the growth of the Guild into such a professionally oriented organization as one finds in, say, the countries of the British Commonwealth. The character of the Guild leadership, the long affiliation with the labor movement, the policy of not discriminating between journalist and non-journalist members, and

not least—the feeling of newspaper managements that news standards are their business alone—all these will work against any change in the Guild's emphases or interests.

Still, not to explore the possibilities of such change, in the Review's opinion, is to ignore the unique qualities the Guild could bring to standard-raising. The Review puts forward these observations, not as a nostrum for the Guild, but merely to offer a reminder that in thirty years the Guild has become part and parcel of American journalism. It has made contributions to those thirty years; the question now is what it will do with the next thirty. 4 Columbia Journalism Review