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meeting in which they were taking a position on some piece of legislation in Washington, and we carried a story by Eileen Shanahan on this meeting, which I felt was just incredibly heavily editorialized. Eileen Shanahan was then our principal economic reporter in Washington, whom I thought highly enough of to have asked her to come on the editorial board, on the grounds that, half laughingly, as I told her, she ought to really write her editorials on the editorial page instead of in the news columns. She did not come to the editorial board because she wanted to remain in Washington. But she, I felt, wrote highly editorialized news stories, almost always in the direction that I was sympathetic with - that was one reason I thought it would be better to have her on the editorial board.
And here was a very clear case, it seemed to me, of editorialization in the news; and on this one, I commented to the publisher on this, as I often did when I felt that my comments to the news department were just totally unavailing. And he too agreed. But also, at that time, he felt that we should not take an editorial position that was opposed to the point that the Business Roundtable was making.
We took positions particularly in respect to Wall Street and the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] - and this was quite recently, in the middle seventies, I mean only within the last few years - on which Punch had extreme cries of anguish. Yes. And he had in to lunch a leading Wall Street broker, head of a Wall Street house, whose whole purpose in coming to lunch was to raise hell with this particular editorial position. Normally, there would be nothing wrong with that, but this lunch, unfortunately, had been engineered by a public relations [PR] firm that the New York Times had engaged (this was publicly announced) to kind of improve our relations with the business community. The public
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