"You talk about type and belief and truth. Truth! You have the gall to keep on parroting those same old defenses about that electronic scrap heap you have the effrontery to call a—a Greeley! Elias Witherill thought Horace Greeley was a rotten newspaperman, but rotten or not, he was still too good to have that whining junkpile named after him.
"What does a tangle of wires know about newspapering. What does WPA know about writing a story? What do you know about news?"
"Now, Sara," I said.
"Don't now-sara me, dammit. You still fail utterly to realize that news is more than just what happened, when, where, to whom, how and why. It's what might still happen, even what might have happened otherwise or never did happen, if that's part of the story.
"The Edict forbids every bit of it!
"But most important, news is expressed—and this you simply cannot see—expressed in basic human terms, designed to arouse the basic human curiosity or sympathy that makes an abstract description palatable to people. If you like, it tricks people into informing themselves. The Sun, your wonderful Sun, sticks to facts and statistics, and make a hurricane dull. It doesn't tell about people, it lists numbers!
"Real news has, by God, Heart! Without it, a newspaper is just a list, a long, long list that ... nobody ... will ... READ!"
"Okay," I said. "Okay! This is better?" I tramped over to a framed Argus front page down the wall from Vol. 1, No. 1, that was dated April 17, 1904. She started to protest, but I overrode her. "Listen to this," I said. And read from a story given prominent play on the page:
NEAR-DEATH ... AND TRAGEDY
"WHERE'S TINKLE?"
HER FIRST QUESTION