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OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Turning points

6 0
07.11.2024

In November 1988, I wore good suits to work.

I was in charge of three small-town newspapers in east Texas. I wasn't quite 30 years old and was the boss of some people who were more than twice my age.

I had ambition. During that presidential campaign I sat down with Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen. Lee Atwater, the campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, set me up to spend a couple of days traveling with the candidate's son George W. Bush, who was then putting together a a group of investors to purchase a controlling interest of Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers.

I had taken as my mission the professionalization of the newspapers I oversaw. While some of our reporters were neophytes whose employment was subsidized by federal on-the-job training funds, I hired a veteran Dallas journalist to train and edit them. I instituted editorial and op-ed pages in them. I convinced my publisher that we needed to discontinue the practice of including an uncritical front-page story about a candidate's platform in the campaign advertising package we offered. I convinced my sports editor that we should include the scores of high school soccer matches in the newspaper, though I allowed him to refrain from writing about them on the religious grounds that soccer was a communist plot designed to sap American's of their upper body strength.

I rented a nice house on the edge of a small town for about half of what I'd paid for an apartment in Shreveport the year before. My neighbors raised chickens and had truck patches. There was a Dairy Queen within walking distance. I was extremely........

© El Dorado News Times


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