Want to Get to Heaven? Check Your Sources – Again.

By Fred Bruning

June 15, 2025

There was a legendary Newsday editor, Alan Hathway, who, when the newsroom suffered fewer inhibitions and bosses fretted less about this or that directive from Personnel, reprimanded a young reporter in a fashion not likely consistent with modern employee relations protocol.

This is an account passed down through the years, so there may be some slippage but as I heard it, Hathway asked the reporter how he knew a particular claim in his story was true, from whence, my boy, came the facts?

For anyone watching the scene, there would have been little question about the outcome of this sad episode: Poor kid.

“I just assumed…” the reporter was supposed to have said, a dreadful response for anyone hoping to remain employed for the rest of the day.

At this point, Hathway, described in a New York Times 1977 obituary, as a “burly, red‐faced, gravel‐voiced man,” sized up the novice and – I may be embellishing here, but this is how I heard it – with the ardor of a preacher warning sinners they must repent to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, narrowed his eyes, leaned forward and declared with unsparing emphasis, “Never assume a goddam thing.”

I was not that reporter – I missed Hathway by a few years – but if you joined Newsday anytime around this era, it wouldn’t take long before you heard the story and were advised to check every single word you put into copy because, around here, man, nothing else goes. Someone tells you his name is John Smith, better make sure it’s not Jon Smythe.

This came to mind the other night when my wife, Wink, and I watched the CNN broadcast of “Good Night and Good Luck” starring George Clooney, a remarkable, uninterrupted, free presentation of the Broadway play recalling Edward R. Murrow’s defiance of Sen. Joseph McCarthy who ruined lives in the 1950s with unfounded claims that the country was in danger of Communist takeover.

Early in the performance, there is an editorial conference at CBS, where Murrow worked, and a young associate refers to McCarthy’s charge that a woman was a spy because her husband had a job delivering the communist newspaper, The Daily Worker.

“He’s lying,” the fellow says.

Murrow knew McCarthy was incorrigible but there wasn’t yet enough to denounce him on the air.

“What’s your proof?” Murrow asks his junior associate.

“I think it’s pretty obvious.”

“Is that our standard now – what you think?”

“Does she look like a spy to you?” persisted the fellow.

“What does a spy look like?” Murrow says. Prove she’s innocent, we go with the story, he tells the other man. “Until then, you haven’t made your case.”

Eventually, the case was most assuredly made and Murrow exposed McCarthy as a fraud. Thanks to CNN for a reminder of how courage and constancy works – a lesson never outdated.

I am thrilled at all this, of course, and because, in old age, hostage of nostalgia, teary at a photo of Jackie Robinson stealing home, an old doo-wop number over the radio, a little human interest story proving we don’t hate one another, after all, I must compose myself – there on the couch with Wink – before muttering praise for the news business battered and beleaguered as it might today be.

“Great,” was all I could say.

“Noble,” says Wink of Murrow and the press.

Ah, the way it was in all those bygone newsroom days.

Invigorating – and unnerving, you betcha’– to be told “prove it,” and “who cares what you think, the story’s not about you,” and “you sure about this, make another phone call,” because there’s not much you can take on faith, after all, and, for sure, no one cares, or should care, about what you think, come back to Earth, pal.

Teaching for a few years at the Stony Brook J-School, I would tell students about Alan Hathway. I would tell them that however it worked in their other classes, here, in Reporting 1, there is no sliding scale, almost right is dead wrong. Getting an “A” won’t be easy. Guessing is a punishable offense. Assumption is our enemy. Trust the facts, nothing else.

Not a bad idea outside the classroom and beyond the city desk, seems to me.

As the world roars and thrashes around us, as reality shifts and illusion abounds, check your sources, ask Jon Smythe how to spell his name, never assume a goddam thing.

Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive