I was faced with a variation of fake news 50 years ago, soon after I showed up at the Associated Press bureau in Concord to begin a reporting and editing job that lasted 39 years.
The late William Loeb, ultraconservative publisher of the Manchester Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News, the only papers in the state served by both United Press International and AP, was known for the epithets with which he tarred and tormented politicians and public officials. There was “Kissinger the Kike,” “Wifeswapper (Nelson) Rockefeller,” “Dopey Dwight” Eisenhower, among others. More often than not these appeared in front-page, above-the-fold editorials.
Loeb also used the front page to excoriate news organizations other than his. It’s hard after decades to recall the exact headlines, but if he didn’t like the way the wire services covered an event, the AP or UPI story or both would be headed something like “Here’s how the Assassinated Press (or United Press Incredible) Covered the Governor’s Tax Speech.” Adjacent to that column, there would be an article declaring “Here’s What the Governor Really Meant in his Tax Apology” and Loeb would lace into the reporters by name. Before Twitter.
Although we sometimes anticipated these side-by-side expositions or similar explosions, they could spring out of nowhere (akin to Donald Trump’s Twitter feeds and off-script utterances confronting today’s journalists). I used to open the AP bureau in the Concord Monitor building on North State Street at 5 a.m. and dread scanning the Union Leader for the latest Loebism.
If there was a Loeb outburst, it meant that AP editors in New York and Boston would want a story. I suspected that the out-of-town editors found Loeb’s version of the news and editorials amusing if not outrageous. But it was we, the AP’s Concord editorial “staff” of two, who had to chase these contretemps while competing with UPI to cover the Legislature, presidential primary candidates, traffic fatalities – feeding what a colleague used to call “the insatiable maw of AP” for constant news for newspapers and radio and TV stations.
While in his newspapers Loeb could be nasty, in person he was charming and urbane. My first non-news conversation with Loeb was about my background as a World War II refugee. We chatted when I and the UPI bureau manager showed up at Channel 9 in Manchester to receive the papers’ annual “Citizen Hero” awards. (The UPI guy and I had been fishing July 4, 1970, when we saw a car slide into Deer Meadow Pond in Chichester and pulled the driver out as the car sank.)
And Loeb was generous. People I’ve met who worked for him called him a good boss. For decades under his tenure union benefits at the papers were among the best in the Newspaper Guild. Local union lore has it that when Loeb bought the newspapers in 1946 he insisted that the employees be represented by unions, while other New Hampshire papers were breaking unions and firing employees who even breathed of unions.
For years, the Union Leader was the only newspaper in the country that devoted a weekly page to union news and labor issues.
And his newspapers were kind to me. During the Guild’s 1969 strike against AP our office was in the Monitor building. While the publisher of the Monitor threatened to have me arrested if I picketed in front of his building, Bernie McQuaid, a founder of the Sunday News, hired me to cover the Legislature during the strike.
(Adolphe Bernotas lives in Concord.)