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...Oney's report on the Atlanta tragedy took a form very different from daily newspaper accounts. As the murders increased in the early spring until one was occurring every three days, swarms of story-hungry journalists trailed every detective and hounded every victim's family. Many turned family funerals into what Oney calls "public carnivals...

Author: By Paul A. Engelmayer, | Title: Covering the National Drama | 9/25/1981 | See Source »

Disgusted by such reporting, Oney sat down and cranked out a 60-page magazine piece that spotlighted the participants in Atlanta's trauma as "characters in a national drama" and which "tried to tell you what the people are really like." The product of a solid month of research, "Oney's piece recounted the vigil of a Black family with a missing child; of the family's last-ditch hope that hiring private detectives to scour Atlanta would help; and of the "absolutely surreal" atmosphere that took hold of the city in early spring and did not let go until...

Author: By Paul A. Engelmayer, | Title: Covering the National Drama | 9/25/1981 | See Source »

...Oney recalls that atmosphere: "Every night on the news there were artists' conceptions of the killer" based solely on psychics' hunches. Billboards around the city bore only one word: "Survival." Every weekend a posse of 100, armed with sticks and flashlights, would scour a town "in a military-type search," turning up "all sorts of weird things" but little evidence. In short, Atlanta, Oney recalls, "turned in on itself looking for a killer--everyone became a suspect...

Author: By Paul A. Engelmayer, | Title: Covering the National Drama | 9/25/1981 | See Source »

Though the Atlanta story was probably the most publicized of Oney's journalistic efforts, it certainly wasn't his only poignant piece about life in the Deep South. A reporter who prefers delving into issues of local concern to covering national media events, Oney won a prize for the best Sunday magazine story of the year with a lengthy impressionistic piece on Leary, Ga. Leary is a remote town some 60 miles south of Plains, where Oney lived for several weeks to research his piece. The quiet and reflective mien he assumes when discussing what he observed in Leary leave...

Author: By Paul A. Engelmayer, | Title: Covering the National Drama | 9/25/1981 | See Source »

...incident in particular encapsulizes the sadness Oney found in Leary. Oney stopped into a bar--"a little tar-paper walled shack"--one evening and struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Black man who worked in a peanut warehouse. The two men became hungry, and drove some 30 miles in Oney's car to a steak house. But as the men got in line to order, Oney suddenly realized from his companion's confused look that his new friend was illiterate. Oney's discomfort grew when the two reached the salad bar--and he realized his acquaintance "didn...

Author: By Paul A. Engelmayer, | Title: Covering the National Drama | 9/25/1981 | See Source »

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