Reporting, truck driving: Honest dollars and a few bumps in the road

By BILL ARCHER

By way of comparison, I drove a tractor-trailer for a much shorter length of time than I’ve been a newspaperman, but longer than I worked construction on Denver, or on a ranch near Johnson City, Texas. I’ve been able to find work about everywhere I’ve been, but I’ve always been willing to settle for the job I could find, rather than refusing to accept a position that I felt I was over-qualified for.

Some of the other truckers I knew rode me pretty hard about the fact that I had a college education, but I settled for the life of a trucker. In their minds, I was doing something that was beneath my level of education, but I made more money driving a truck than I’ve made in any other occupation, and outside of the minor boundary adjustments I often made to my log books, it was a job where I could be honest and honorable all of the time.

During the one semester that I tried to be an adjunct journalism teacher at Bluefield College, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would approach the spring term. Unfortunately, not enough students signed up in advance for the second part of my one season as an academician, and my dear friend, Dr. John Tresch told me during the BC Christmas party in December 1990, that I wouldn’t be coming back and that I would miss out on that extra $200 per month. I was crestfallen.

I was teaching a three-hour night class, one night a week, but it was hard for me to come up with three hours’ worth of astute observations and clever repartee to keep my charges motivated through the entire experience. As a result, I started searching for movies about the newspaper industry with the idea of using them to augment my erstwhile mundane professorial presentations.

One time I told a Graham Middle School shadow student that the key to being a good journalist was learning the lyrics to the “Do Wah Diddy” song. You know: “There she was just a walkin’ down the street singing ...” That song.

I really wasn’t qualified to be a college student, but I managed to graduate because I was stubborn — not talented or smart. I was much less qualified to be an adjunct professor, but I did it for the same reason as I drove tractor-trailer ... to earn an honest dollar in order to support my family. Of course, I also got to pay taxes and do all the other fun things associated with working. I wasn’t motivated by any desire to inspire young minds to go out and change the world. However, if any of them did that, it would have been OK with me.

That’s a paraphrase of a line from one of the movies I planned to use in the second-half of my journalism class — “Absent Malice.” The Paul Newman-Sally Field movie is all about 1970s-vintage journalistic ethics. There were enough old school pressroom images in the movie to make it worthwhile, but the more pressing questions in the movie deal with the ethical side of the business. Sally Field’s character wrote a story in the Miami paper that made it appear as though the U.S. Justice Department was investigating Paul Newman’s character for alleged connections to organized crime.

The ambitious assistant U.S. attorney in the story leaked the information to Field’s character intentionally. She ran it by her paper’s legal department. The lawyer determined the story was “absent malice,” and the story ran.

Movies are fictional, and movie makers take a lot of artistic license to present a compelling story to the public.

Newspapers are non-fiction. A city figure confronted my friend Jim Terry once because he didn’t “tell what happened” in city board meetings. When Jim asked the board member to point out the inaccuracy in his story, the board member told him that he didn’t report the meeting “just like it happened.” When Jim asked the official for an example, the official said: “Just like it happened: Abner Davis gave the prayer, Mayor Paul Cole led the board in reciting the pledge and the city clerk read the minutes of the previous meeting.”

Of course, that’s not what reporters do in any story. Readers don’t have the time to invest in reviewing the minutes of every meeting, and newspapers don’t have the physical resources to devote to recording every word of every meeting, trial, public event or interesting feature story in every quarter of the newspaper’s service area.

Working at a newspaper is a lot more like driving a tractor-trailer than most people would think. Reporters just don’t have to keep log books.

Bill Archer is a Daily Telegraph senior editor. Contact him at barcher@bdtonline.com.

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