As the Guild heads toward its 80th anniversary in 2013, we’ll be sharing photos, articles and other treasures that tell our story. Today, we’re sharing an extraordinary editorial from The Cleveland Press, which was the city’s last afternoon newspaper when it folded in 1982. The April 22, 1946, editorial illustrates that there were, once, newspaper managers/editorial board members who weren’t afraid to publicly praise the Guild. It’s also a powerful statement about fact-gathering, and a glimpse of labor history before the AFL and CIO were united. Like many of the past documents, you may wince at the less-than-gender-neutral writing, but that’s part of history, too.
“There is a professional analogy between the surgeon and the newspaperman….
“The newspaper reporter in quest of information for his paper maintains the same professional attitude. It is the reporter’s sole mission to establish the facts in a given situation, to search out the truth as nearly as he can find it. Like the doctor he does not concern himself with race, religion, political or economic beliefs of those who happen to be figuring in a given set of circumstances.
“This relationship of the newspaperman is so universally accepted that the Catholic reporter covers Protestant meetings, the Republican reporter covers Democratic meetings, the non-Jewish reporter covers the B’Nai B’rith meetings, and so on, across the entire fabric of democratic life in America. The main fact about fact-gathering is the establishing of fact. That is the ultimate test of a newspaperman.
“For more than 10 years, the editorial employees of the Cleveland newspapers have been represented in their effort to improve working conditions and wages by the Cleveland Newspaper Guild, affiliated with the C.I.O. In all of that period of time, the management of The Cleveland Press has not observed a solitary example of any reporter for this newspaper doing less than his complete professional job of getting the facts.
“The Press is proud of the high professional standards and devotion of the men and women who represent it, and who permit literally nothing to intrude upon their completely objective search for the facts.
“We think, therefore s, that the Cleveland Federation of Labor is ill advised in its action forbidding Cleveland newspaper reporters to attend their meetings because these newspapermen are members of the Guild, which, in turn, is affiliated with the C.I.O.”
NOTE: The editorial itself is in Guild archives, but the text was re-typed, documented and filed with other copies of historical documents.