What's News? A newsman's story of life in the Newsroom today

[Old and In the Way]

This reporter broke the Bush DUI story in 2000, well respected reporter in Maine's largest newspaper. He blisters the Blethen Corporation handling of "news" today, in this story.

http://www.portlandphoenix.com/features/top/ts_multi/documents/03759706.asp

What’s news?
How George W. Bush brought down a newspaper
BY TED COHEN

Imagine George W. Bush behind the wheel, his car weaving back and forth on the road, his eyes bloodshot. His life, and his car, are out of control. Bush is drunk, and he’s not far from his Daddy’s house in Kennebunkport, when the cops turn on the blues, pull him over, and place him under arrest.

It happened in 1976, but the story didn’t become public for nearly a quarter century, when Bush was running for President of the United States in 2000.

I am the reporter who first discovered Bush’s arrest record. But my employer, the Portland Press Herald, under editor Jeannine Guttman, failed to print it, deciding it wasn’t news.

The lack of control that a drunken Bush had over his car that fateful night in 1976 has become an embarrassing, lasting, painful metaphor for Guttman and Maine’s largest newspaper, not only for the way the paper fumbled the story in 2000, but for the way they have failed to regain whatever footing they had before blowing what one prominent media analyst called the "stunning scoop that got fumbled."


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