Word: beacons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...signs and badges on newsstands, delivery trucks and employees' lapels, the Wichita, Kans. evening Beacon last week proclaimed "Wichita's New Freedom." What the Beacon was so happy about was a consent decree just handed down by a U.S. circuit court against the rival Wichita paper, the Eagle, which was ordered to cease and desist in its longtime practice of forcing subscribers to take both its morning and evening editions and requiring advertisers to take space in both editions or none at all. Moreover, the Beacon (said the Eagle) had sicked the Justice Department on the Eagle...
Talons over Talent. The Wichita battle started in the '20s when the Beacon was taken over by brothers Max, John and Louis (who died in 1953) Levand, who had learned the newspaper business under Publishers Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen in the carnival atmosphere (1895-1933) of the Denver Post. The Levands jazzed up the Beacon's copy, said that they would run the Eagle off the streets. The Eagle, under Publisher Marcellus Murdock, fought back with talons rather than talent, screaming: "Since the Levands came here ... a new word has come into use in Wichita...
...bitterness intensified, the Beacon backers accused the Eagle of injecting anti-Semitic lines in its news columns (the Levands are Jewish), while Eagle staffers spread rumors that the Beacon was getting ads by threatening to publish photographs of solid citizens surprised by Beacon photographers in compromising situations. The Eagle wrote balefully of "the threat of Levand influence," went out of its way to talk about "Max Levand of the Wichita Beacon, who owes the Government nearly $10,000 in taxes." When Marcellus Murdock's daughter went East and married a Jew, the Eagle said nothing, but the Beacon told...
Bottom of the Barrel. The Beacon's circulation reached its peak in 1949 (106,757 v. the Eagle's morning-evening average of 58,000), has since fallen off to 98,311, while the Eagle has built itself up to an 88,455 average. But the real result of the vicious war between the two papers is that both have settled to the bottom of journalism's barrel. Trying to outdo each other in sensationalism, they reach desperately for banner headlines, inflate in significant news, and spend most of their time shrieking at each other...
EXECUTIVES OF EAGLE BRANDED AS LEADERS OF ABORTIVE POLITICAL PLOT. Last week the Beacon ran more than 16 columns on the court decision against the Eagle-and with the Eagle sure to find some way of retaliating, Wichita will just have to go on enduring its two papers that are, quite literally, the spoils...