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Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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Part:         Session:         Page of 512

The trouble is, the inference is always unmistakable in the mind of not only myself but of the other one or two editors who are in on that kind of conversation, that after all, this was set up by the publisher at his request. We met in the publisher's office, not in the editor's office. Obviously, in my office, I would meet people from industry and all over the place, all the time, coming in to squawk or to give their views, but when this is done under the aegis of the publishers, as indeed on the bottle legislation, it gave it a certain extra push.

Q:

Yes, if he'd wanted to defuse it, he could have had it in the form of a debate.

Oakes:

Well, or could have just - it could have been done differently. Anyway, there were implications and inferences here that he felt that they were really right.

I was getting signals, so to speak, that we were perhaps too anti-business and that we should not be, we should after all be a little more sympathetic to business demands and so forth.

Q:

You would like to add, as an illustration?

Oakes:

I would like to add, as an illustration of the points that we've been discussing, the question both of sensitivity to business interests, and the news versus editorial. A rather interesting case occurred only a few years ago, in which we carried a news story about the position of the Business Roundtable, which is a very high level of top executives of the major American businesses, a sort of super-elite American business, and they had a





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