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Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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hot issue and New York is a very big center, of course, of the textile industry. We can hardly write an editorial on this subject without getting either screams of protest or, very rarely, letters of approval from leading people in the textile industry. We can take up the smoking question, for example, and we will immediately get reflections from the cigarette people. And I might add in this particular case - I don't want to get off the subject but I think this is probably relevant - of the cigarette issue, because of both our editorial and news treatment, which had nothing to do with each other but nevertheless because of the fact that we began to give quite a bit of news coverage to the cigarette-smoking issue and also because we treated it editorially a number of times, we actually lost a very important advertising contract from one of the major cigarette manufacturers. This made absolutely no difference to me or to the management of the Times, but it's just an interesting indication of the effect - and here a very adverse effect - of an editorial position, although I think they were also angry at the fact that we had given so much coverage to the question.

Q:

Block-busting coverage to the Surgeon General's report.

D:

This was before that; this was a couple of years ago [1962]. And they suspended - this was the word they used - the big advertising contract and they never have fully come back into the paper since. This gets under the question which is related to what you asked, but not directly, of the relationship of advertisers to editorial policy. Our editorial policy is taken absolutely independently of advertising influence, and I cite the cigarette issue as the latest and most blatant example of an effort to put pressure on a newspaper, on the Times specifically, by an advertiser, who, incidentally, happened to be a very close personal friend of the publisher, it just so happens.





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