Word: berte
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...same chaotic pattern of collective bargaining that produced the present shutdown," Reston wrote. "The present system is intolerable for the public, the unions and the publishers alike. The President of the U.S. cannot censor the New York papers. The Congress is specifically forbidden to abridge their freedom. But Bert Powers, the boss of the New York printers, cannot only censor them but shut them down. What is 'free' about a press that can be muzzled on the whim of a single citizen...
...acceptable situation in a meat factory or a steel mill, but newspapers are not pork chops or iron fences. Unless everybody from Jefferson to Mencken and Gerald Johnson has been kidding us. our job is to print the news and raise hell, with the kind permission of Bert Powers if possible, but without it if necessary...
Scant hours after Reston's message went out from New York, prudence overtook the management of the Times. Fearing to upset Bert Powers and his printers at a time when it might still be possible to settle with them, the Times sent out a mandatory order to kill the column. A few papers, such as the Houston Chronicle, had already gone to press with it. The Kansas City Star protested the kill order, but the Times's own outposts printed nary a word. And Scotty Reston. who never before had a column suppressed by the paper...
...true that neither has made a significant move toward settlement. In recent sessions, the publishers and the printers shifted positions slightly, but only by inches in a dispute that called for seven-league strides. The printers dropped their demand for an extra week's paid vacation-something that Bert Powers had not expected to get anyway. The publishers withdrew their resistance to "bogus"-a printers' make-work practice of unnecessarily resetting some advertising type...
That man was Bert Powers. The strike, said the judges' report, was "a deliberate design" to "postpone any negotiation until a time when the publishers would be forced to surrender under the economic pressure of threatened extinction...