You cn't please everyone

 

I do my best to avoid controversy with this column. But in over 60-plus years of writing, it is impossible to stay completely out of trouble. Now it’s confession time:

--In 1964 my publisher wrote an editorial against me when I sided with the city of Dover, Del., after It refused residents’ request to widen a street. That’s OK—he wrote editorials denouncing his wife too!

--I only heard the expression “Stop the Presses!” Once in my career. It wasn’t my doing, but the Pittsburgh Press dropped a line out of a recipe. Now that is serious!

--Once I wrote “Continued on Page 4” in editing a front-page Press story in 1966, and it was really continued on Page  11. My editor told me, “Mike, 40,000 people are going to be mad at you!” I quit shortly afterward.

--I announced the wrong date for a nuclear test in a  Las Vegas story for The Associated Press in 1966. Coincidentally, I had an interview with the local atomic energy director the same day, and it kept getting interrupted by phone calls from confused news media.

--I called the FBI after I opened the mail at the San Francisco bureau and found a threat from the notorious Weathermen in 1970. But I ignored the second letter I opened, a death threat against the visiting prime minister of Japan. “This is just some nut,” I decided. But others found the note later and got the FBI hoppping again.

--The Carter administration got upset when I wrote in Washington that Americans were not keeping up with inflation in 1978. They sent one of their experts to “educate” me. But I was right!

--In a report on Appalachia in 1984, I wrote that I had seen “people with corn-cob pipes.”. A U.S. News & World Report reader insisted I made that up because that never happens. I think he was right-I felt bad about it. Fake news!

--We got sued for a derogatory article about Vietnam veterans that I excerpted for a “Publisher’s Memo” that I wrote in the publisher’s name. But since it had his name on it, he had to testify in court in 1985, Avoided that one!

--I got dozens of angry phone calls at Satellite Orbit magazine when we dropped the TV listings for a religious channel in 1991. Apparently we were the only publication that listed them.

--But sometimes there was vindication. I wrote that the EPA was going to to impose tough sanctions on Philadelphia because of its air pollution. The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article saying I was wrong. My boss stood by me. But several weeks later, the sanctions were handed down. A loyal reader of the Kiplinger Letter in Philadelphia faxed me the true story. “Doan was right!” He wrote.  Yay!!!

--Drawing by Ron Miller

 

 

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