Word: press
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Genial, gentle Eddie Guest was born in England, came to Detroit with his parents in the 1890s, dropped out of high school before graduation, and washed glasses in a drugstore. He landed an office boy's job with the Detroit Free Press, worked his way onto the news staff and became a first-rate police reporter. But life's seamy side was not for Edgar Guest; he asked for a change of assignment and was moved to the exchange desk-where a steady flow of incoming verse inspired him to try a hand himself...
Such verses carried Eddie Guest to fame and wealth. With the Free Press as his home base, Guest at one time saw his verses syndicated in 275 newspapers. He filled 25 books, and some 3,000,000 people bought them, as before they had bought Ella Wheeler Wilcox and James Whitcomb Riley. A Heap o' Livin' ("It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home/A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye sometimes have to roam") alone went through 35 printings, sold more than 1,000,000 copies...
...smart, hardworking newsmen on the daily Columbus (Ohio) Citizen (circ. 85,942). But once each week the two slip off duty and into the harness of the Columbus C.I.O. News, a weekly organ for organized labor. There Reporters Franken and Grove conduct a column called "Checking the Press." Its purpose: to appraise the performance of the Columbus daily press, including their own Citizen, A recent example of their work in the C.I.O. News: "The Citizen has more and more sugar-coated its stories, has spent more and more time on the goody-goody type stories ... It gets downright sickening...
Such backbiting has been going on since 1954. when Reporters Franken and Grove, both members of the American Newspaper Guild, a C.I.O. affiliate, offered their services-at $5 a week-as undercover editors of the C.I.O. News. The column "Checking the Press" had been introduced in 1950 with the News's hope that it would "succeed in forcing the daily papers to report the news that they now suppress...
From their vantage point inside the Citizen's city room, Franken and Grove expanded this charter into a broadside attack on the faults of the Columbus press, peppering not only the Citizen but its bigger rival, the Dispatch (circ. 185,437): "We believe the Columbus Dispatch has been grossly unfair and inaccurate in its reporting...