James Stewart:
Engraved on his tombstone

by David A. Andelman

James Stewart could have been a lawyer, indeed for a brief time was in fact a lawyer. But he clearly should not have been a lawyer.

“I could tell you many stories that are unfortunately protected by the attorney-client privilege. But the behavior I saw there was like a postgraduate education in rich people behaving badly,” Stewart told the May luncheon meeting of The Silurians Press Club, describing his early days in a law firm—New York’s patrician Cravath, Swain and Moore (though in fairness he did not cite this firm in his talk). “Almost all of our clients were guilty. I saw that firsthand, and it was a little discouraging over the years to work and devote yourself to advocating on their behalf and then see them actually get off without having to pay any price for the bad behavior.”

Which says a whole lot about how Stewart instead became a journalist and the bane of so very many of his erstwhile colleagues. What he also learned from his earliest experience with the law, was “if you don’t love what you’re doing, it’s very hard to compete successfully with people who do love what you’re doing.”

James Stewart clearly loves taking down a whole lot of people who very much deserve being taken down. From his first real journalism job as executive editor of American Lawyer under the indominable Steve Brill, last month’s Silurian luncheon guest as winner of the Peter Kihss Award, to the Wall Street Journal as page one editor to Smart Money magazine which he founded, and now to The New York Times as a columnist, he has never stopped taking down the high and the sometimes mighty. And much of his more elaborate takedowns have come in the pages of his nine books—from Den of Thieves and Disney Wars to his most recent, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy that he wrote with co-author Rachel Abrams.

In his latest work, what started as a tale of sexual predation by one executive, Les Moonves, quickly morphed into a far larger and more epic tale of greed, lust and corporate malfeasance. “I was getting information that this was something very different than public perception had recognized,” Stewart observed, describing “a treasure trove of documents, emails, information related to this story” that began tumbling into his hands and those of his co-author. If you had any doubts about diving into this book, let Stewart’s confession offer a modicum of reassurance: “I can promise you, there are some astonishing actual events in there, I have to admit, and I think I have I’m pretty grown-up, and I’ve seen a lot in my life, but there were some things we just could not put in on grounds of taste.”

As for his main characters, Stewart seemed most sympathetic to Shari Redstone. “She was treated horribly. Sumner is a horrible person. Let me just say that flat out, and he treated her horribly, and yet she loved him. I think a theme in the book is the power of that. Sort of familial relationships. The father-daughter relationship, her craving for his love and approval which goes right up to the very last scene of the book, and I think anyone can empathize with her.”

Stewart wrote his latest book, as he did with his entire career-long oeuvre of ten volumes, with the voice of his first editor, the late Alice Mayhew, echoing in his mind. “She said never write a book because you think it’s going to be a best-seller. Write a book that you love writing, a book that you believe in, and then who cares whether it’s a best-seller. You have sitting on your shelf for the rest of your life, a book that you can be proud of. And by the way, who knows after your long gone, it could still be discovered, and people will recognize it for the great book that it is. I’ve taken that to heart and repeat that to my students at every opportunity.”

As for what would he like as his epitaph? For that, he would have to go back to his seminal work on Michael Milken and the decades-long court battle it took for him finally to win vindication for all he had written. “The judge wrote an amazing opinion in which he said, not only had I not been negligent in what I wrote, which would have won the case because gross negligence was the standard, but everything that I wrote was correct,” Stewart smiled thinly. “I’ve often said that I want that opinion engraved on my tombstone.”

Joyce Purnick’s Lifetime Achievement Award: A Lifetime of Firsts

by David A. Andelman

When it comes to Joyce Purnick, there are a multitude of firsts. As Silurians president Joe Berger pointed out, she was the first female City Hall bureau chief for The New York Times, the first female Metro editor of The Times, and in March, the last half of the first husband-wife team to win the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Silurians Press Club—bestowed at a luncheon ceremony at the National Arts Club.

But as anyone who has ever known Joyce Purnick, ever worked with her, certainly admired her, there is ever so much more to her than any litany of firsts. And Berger pointed all of this out in his introduction before presenting her with an honor that has also been bestowed, among others, on Walter Cronkite, Gay Talese, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton, and husband, Max Frankel before her.

As for Purnick, “fearlessly honest,” “tough, shrewd, and knowledgeable,” were the adjectives that leaped first to Berger’s lips, leading to his conclusion that in her wake she’s left “a trail of shattered glass given all the ceilings she has broken.“ It was a theme that resonated through the lavish encomiums lathered on her by one of her biggest admirers and oldest friends, another former Times City Hall bureau chief and columnist, Clyde Haberman.

Haberman described her in even more vivid terms. “She frankly had the best bullshit detector ever known in journalism,” he began. “And then there is her recipe for lemon meringue pie.” But he was particularly taken with a story from her youth, growing up in Queens where “there was this teenage kid about her same age who was completely reckless in how he drove through the neighborhood just terrorizing everybody, hot-rodding through in his sports car, heedless at everybody in his way. Joyce’s mother Charlotte, who sadly I never had a chance to meet, said to Joyce, ‘stay away from that snot-nosed kid.’ It’;s as good a warning as you’re ever going to hear about Donald Trump. And we’;re all still trying to stay away from that snot-nosed kid.”

Before turning the podium over to Joyce, Clyde thanked her “on behalf of all the city hall reporters who are in this room. I think every one of us learned basically almost everything we know from you personally. You showed us how to understand the city, how to understand power in this town in a way that most of us only understood a fraction of. She had no patience for shortcuts. When you look up synonyms in the thesaurus for integrity, the first option reads Joyce Purnik.”

And with that, Joyce took the podium in her own defense, or at least elaboration. She began, of course, with journalism. “The arc of my career reflects profound changes in our profession, not all of them for the good. Some, but not all, newspapers have changed, local coverage has changed. The definition of truth has changed in some quarters and journalists’ careers have changed. I have little doubt that if I came along today, I would be working in another profession. Unfortunately, journalism wouldn’t have me and maybe hard as this is for me to believe, I wouldn’t have journalism.” Yet back in high school, all she ever really wanted to be was a reporter.

“I was bad at math,” she smiled. “I was truly innumerate and allergic to science. So my wise mother, worried about my future, encouraged me to study music and art and to write. Writing stuck, and journalism was the right fit.” Watching President Kennedy’s televised news conferences, “I saw a few women sprinkled in among the men reporters, and I was hooked. That was it.”

At the Post, it was Dorothy Schiff who gave her a first break. “I typed up a week’s worth of TV listings. I wrote squibs about sitcoms and about old movies, not poetry, but it kept things interesting. I worked into the early morning hours in the composing room with printers, many of them who could not hear, and they labored over hot type. I learned to read upside down and backwards. I helped fashion writer Eugenia Shepherd select the photos that accompanied her stories.”

She got her first byline less than two years later. “I was a full-fledged reporter.” She paused reflectively. “Women at the Post were not limited to the ‘women’s pages,’ as they used to be called. We covered everything and that included my abiding interest in local government and politics. Writing about my city and state was what I had long wanted to do.” And she did that, at least until Rupert Murdoch arrived, buying the Post in 1976.

“One very sad thing that has not changed over the decades is Murdoch. He pursued profits and power—never truth or justice. I stayed a year hoping against hope he would not be as bad as his reputation suggested it would be. He turned the Post into the equivalent of a publicity sheet for Ed Koch. To preserve my reputation, I quit and joined the unemployed. I had been at the Post eight years.”

But it happened to be a fortuitous moment for Joyce, and a transformative one for the newspaper industry. At The Times, a number of women journos had just filed a class action sex discrimination suit and won—the paper settling with them. One of the deals was “to hire some women fast, and since covering New York was a fundamental priority of The Times in those days, I was qualified. I was hired one year almost to the day after the lawsuit was settled,” Joyce recalled.

Ed Koch was mayor. “Covering Koch was a kick because as those of you who also covered him will well remember, he was great copy. He could not stop making news. Front-page bylines, news analyses, week-in-review pieces. They never stopped, because he never did.” Coverage of Koch quickly morphed into bureau chief at City Hall, then a column, and then there was Max.

“I found the love of my life at The Times,” she smiled and looked over at him. “As most of you know, Max Frankel was a widower and the executive editor of The Times. I did not work directly for Max, but he was the top guy in the news department, and I was a member of the news staff. We knew. I knew. Our relationship was bound to be complicated, but we were willing to pursue it.”

Finally, Joyce turned to journalism today, what’s right and what’s not. “A lot that’s going on today is far from positive,” she began. “I will not dwell on it, but I wouldn’t feel right speaking to a room full of journalists without at least touching on the problems—the disappearance of local newspapers throughout the country and the cheapening and politicization of many of those that still exist. We all know that newspapers have always been political. But as I see it, the divisions today, the peddling of distortions and outright lies, thank you Rupert, is just plain ugly and destructive.”

What she would especially like to see is more coverage of Mayor Eric Adams. “As a reader, I don’t think I’ve read enough about Adams. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why the coverage of him is episodic, but I think there’s a lot more to know about him. And for some reason, we don’t know a lot about Adams, about the way he lives his life, about what he believes. The Times and other papers have shown the conflicts of interest quite well. But I'd like to know more about the man and his values and his history.”

But Joyce did have at least one positive message and a hope for the future of the career she has so wholeheartedly embraced. “The profession still attracts promising young talent,” she concluded. “I read and see and watch them and hear them every day. There are not enough of them in enough places, but I’m counting on them to turn things around someday. Happily, I lived through the Golden Age.”

The date: Wednesday, March 15, 2023
The time: Noon
The place: National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South

Jelani Cobb, Columbia’s New Journalism Dean, Talked of Pursuing Dreams and Being Able to Afford To

By David A. Andelman

The average journalist’s salary in New York hovers right around the $50,000 mark, though few entry-level spots are available for much more than $45,000. So how does Jelani Cobb justify what he admits is the cost of a year at Columbia University’s prestigious Graduate School of Journalism that he estimates at $120,000 and where he’s been named the new dean?

“It becomes unfeasible for a lot of people to stay in journalism if they walk out with 40 or 50 thousand dollars in debt,” Dean Cobb admitted to the January luncheon of The Silurians Press Club under questioning by Allan Dodds Frank, a former Silurian president. But Dean Cobb is doing his best to find ways to fix this tuition crisis. “One of my top objectives is to raise enough money to offset the cost of our tuition,” he explained.

Without question that is a key priority for many professional schools. New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine has begun awarding every student enrolled in their MD program full-tuition scholarships “so that any student can pursue the dream of becoming a physician without the burden of overwhelming student debt,” the school says. Indeed, one of Dean Cobb’s dreams, he explained, would be to “create a program where for every student that goes into local news or nonprofit news and stays there for five years, over the course of those five years we will pay off your loans.”

But absent that, for the moment, Dean Cobb is looking at a whole range of value-added skills and competencies that Columbia can bring to journalism and that the school can offer its graduates. “We have an embarrassment of riches,” he observed, “the reputation we have, and having the history and the tradition that we have, we have applicants from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of skill sets. So, I see a pool of student perspectives, students who are really clear about the social function that journalism serves.”

Then it becomes a question of how to arm them with the skills and the perception of their new calling that will result in a product that fulfills the needs of a rapidly changing society. “How do you teach these kids to  detect and ignore or challenge misinformation or disinformation—if there is, in fact, a difference between those two things,” Dean Cobb observed. “We want to see everyone more acutely informed about things like digital forensics. If someone is sending you a video and it purports to show Russian soldiers committing war crimes in Ukraine, how do you know that that video is what it says it is? How do you know that it is from January of 2023 and not from some unrelated conflict that happened two years ago?” Dean Cobb elaborated that students are being trained in “the forensics of where is the sun in this video? Where are the shadows? What time of day does it purport to be? Let’s get an atlas of the globe and see where the sun would be shining at that time of day, on that date. Are there serial numbers here? What kind of vehicle is that? When was that vehicle released? Is that vehicle a later model than it says it is?”

All of these skills, Dean Cobb observed are “a growth area.” And he points out, “Outlets are hiring in those areas.”

Dean Cobb was a product of New York schools, particularly his home borough of Queens, so he is acutely aware of one sad contemporary reality. “Less than 10% of the high schools in New York City have a school newspaper and those newspapers are disproportionately clustered at institutions that are in well-off communities,” he said. But in fact, this is not a new phenomenon. In the late 1990s, two of us who were senior editors at Bloomberg offered to help create a student newspaper at an inner city high school in Manhattan. It was a uniquely challenging task as there was no budget, no teacher with the most remote attachment to the craft. Persistence, though, paid off with a product everyone was proud to showcase.

But there is another skill, too, that Dean Cobb is most anxious to encourage and that springs from his own unique background with a Ph.D. in American history and deep roots as a New Yorker writer. “There are a lot of crucial histories that have been written by journalists and some pretty significant journalism that’s been written by historians,” he noted, pointing out that William Shirer who chronicled the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich and Barbara Tuchman were both journalists at their core. It’s the common theme of doing the kind of forensic work to find out information that has been obscured or that is not visible to the public, digging into archives which reporters may need to do and historians do frequently, interviewing people, creating a cohesive narrative, and engaging the public, which I think are core skill sets that they have in common. Those historians’ sensibilities were useful to me.”

In the end, though, it all comes down to money—at least for the moment.  “If I do anything as a dean that’s worthwhile,” Dean Cobb concluded, “it will be in diminishing the degree to which finances determine somebody’s ability to pursue their dreams.”

The date: Wednesday, January 18, 2023
The time: Noon
The place: National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South

By David A. Andelman

“For this crowd, you are our Taylor Swift, our number one rock star,” Silurians president Joe Berger proclaimed at the November 16 lunch featuring Maggie Haberman, chronicler of Donald Trump and all his peccadillos.

From the get-go at this memorable luncheon, with the largest in-person turnout since the onset of covid, Maggie was clear: “I try to stick to what I know.” And for 58 riveting minutes under the probing questions of former Silurians president Allan Dodds Frank, she unveiled some of her deepest secrets about a Donald Trump she has come to know more deeply than perhaps any other journalist today.

“He refers to us all as the enemy of the people,” Maggie observed. “One of my fondest memories of covering that White House was sitting in the Oval Office with my colleague Peter Baker and our publisher A.G. Sulzberger sitting across the Resolute desk from Trump, saying directly to Trump, ‘Your language about enemy of the people is enabling despots around the globe to engage in free press crackdowns.’ And Trump just kept responding saying, ‘I think I’m entitled to a good story from my paper.’ [That’s] how he views The Times, which is what his thing with me is about. He is uniquely obsessed with the paper, and I’m just the person who covers him more often than others.”

Which helps explain why Trump was so deeply unhappy about at least some of her reporting especially in her remarkable book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. “He’s been extremely angry at various aspects of the book including beginning with reporting from February 2022 that he had been flushing documents down the toilet in the White House,” which helps to explain, Maggie, says, why “I haven’t talked to Donald Trump since I interviewed him in September 2021.

And this despite the fact that she’s had access to his succession of cell phone numbers: “He has a different cell phone number now than he used to, because it changed in the White House. And there’s been lots written about his issues with cell phone use that his staff had to spend a lot of time tamping down. It’s just that it always seemed like it was a joke because so much of it ends up seeming, like it’s a running laugh track with him, but it’s not funny. Someone gave me his cell phone number, I’m not going to say who, and then someone gave me his new cell phone number.”

And then there are Donald Trump’s friends—if you could ever say he’s actually had any. As Maggie put it when the topic of Rudy Giuliani came up—a subject very close to many Silurians who’ve covered one or the other or both in the course of their careers. “They have a very transactional relationship, they were not friends,” she began. “This whole line that they were pals going back to New York, and Giuliani was a prosecutor and Trump was in a habit of trying to cultivate prosecutors for obvious reasons.” Then there was the money. “In 1988, Giuliani’s office got a tip about potential money laundering at Trump Tower. They looked into it, dropped it fairly quickly. There’s been claims that there might have been other reasons, which is that Giuliani wanted to have Trump as a fundraiser when Giuliani was about to be mayor. And this basically set the tone, I think, for this relationship.”

Inevitably, of course, there is the question of what the world, even journalists, all too often simply miss about Trump in their dealings with or writing about him. “He has only a handful of moves,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Everything is flat and the same and devoid of context—describing Meade Esposito as ruling with an iron fist, the same language that he uses to describe Xi Jinping. Everything is the same, and the context doesn’t matter. Donald Trump is the same in every single context. A letter from a notorious dictator written to a sitting president is the same as trading with Page Six to get them not to write a story about his making Marla Maples return two gold Lexuses—and instead giving them the fact that he was divorcing her, which is also in the book if you want to read about it. That’s the part that really gets missed about him.”

But perhaps the single most important observation, that she tossed off almost as an aside, was a simple answer to what could be a most complex question: on what is Donald Trump most perceptive? “What he’s very perceptive about,” Maggie answered quickly, “is the darkness in human behavior.”

The next question allowed her to elaborate. “Do you think Donald Trump understood the just-below-the-surface racism of many Americans?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Better than other people?”

“I think he was more willing to capitalize on it than other people.” It won’t end. “He has normalized so much behavior that had been relegated to the fringes of our politics,” she continued. “Over the course of decades, after the Civil Rights era, and after the 1970s and 80s, he is just sort of frozen in time in 1980s New York City. I write in the book that the only two politicians I ever heard publicly use the phrase ‘The Blacks’ were Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. He has a certain mindset. He is openly race-baiting Mitch McConnell’s wife, who was born in Taiwan. He described Governor Glenn Youngkin’s name as sounding Chinese on his social media website the other day. This is not going to a good place and to that end, just to close that thought, his chief policy advisor, Stephen Miller, has been just making increasingly overtly racist, appeals on Twitter. We got one of his mailers at our house in Brooklyn which was pretty striking, and it was all about anti-white and anti-Asian bias, and there will be more of that.”

But that’s only a part of his appeal to the nation, Maggie believes: “One of the things that was very hard for people around the country, when you would try having a discussion with them about ‘he’s not actually as rich as he says he is,’ well, he’s richer than 99% of the country. Because they can see Trump Tower, because they watch The Apprentice, and they thought it was real. Now he has been president, that’s pretty real. They all want a piece of Trump…that’s generally how he sells himself.”

Then there’s a base reality of the anger out there in America. “Why Trump won the presidency? I think that voters in red states who voted for Donald Trump wanted a quote unquote fighter and they wanted somebody who was voicing a level of anger, that a lot of them had in their lives, and Donald Trump came into political being during an enormous era of mistrust in this country, and he fueled it, he capitalized on it.”

So, what’s more important—fame or money? “He is a child of privilege who always had money and who always believed there was going to be a [safety] net there. What he didn’t have was fame. His father couldn’t give him fame. His father could give him connections, his father could give him loans, his father could co-sign agreements with banks and with landholders, but fame was something totally different.”

As for what’s next? Well, we might even have Maggie around to let us know, though she insists “at the moment I’m planning on doing what the paper asks me to do, which is be part of its politics coverage and that will include Donald Trump. But I will not cover him hour to hour the way that I did for the previous years.”

And indeed, there may be quite a lot to cover for a very long time. “The story of this book is about people writing Donald Trump’s obit, over and over and over, and he just finds a way to come back, and the things that matter to us in this room, you know, many of us anyway, do not necessarily matter to the people who cast the votes. He is still really strong. We will know more in the coming days, we will know how his fundraising going. Are donors fleeing, does he have any major donors left? Can he really get a campaign off the ground? Will he get indicted? We don’t know. But absent that, I would not write him off.”

Either way, we now have an absolutely indispensable guidebook to the land of Trump: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America from our own Maggie Haberman.

NEWMARK JOURNALISM STUDENT
CANDACE PEDRAZA
WINS 2022 DENNIS DUGGAN PRIZE

by Jack Deacy

Candace Pedraza

Candace Pedraza, who is in her final year as a student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, is the 2022 winner of the Dennis Duggan Prize.

The prize, which includes a $2,000 stipend, has been awarded annually by the Silurians Press Club since 2007 to an outstanding Newmark J-School student. Ms. Pedraza, 25, will be presented with the prize at a Silurians Press Club luncheon at noon on Wednesday, September 21 at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

The award is named in honor of Dennis Duggan, the well-respected and popular Newsday reporter and columnist who chronicled the trials and tribulations of everyday New Yorkers for more than four decades. Duggan, who also served two terms as president of the Silurians Press Club, died in April 2006 at the age of 78.

Ms. Pedraza, born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, attended PS 71 and Herbert Lehman High School.

“From a very young age I was always interested in current events, read newspapers voraciously and watched television news shows,” Ms. Pedraza said. “So it’s no wonder that I was drawn to a career in journalism.”

At the State University of New York at Geneseo, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications, Journalism and Media Studies. After a series of non-journalism jobs, Ms. Pedraza finally decided that a career in news was what she wanted and entered the CUNY graduate school.

As part of her studies at Newmark, she has produced stories for the school’s NYCity News Service, which is directed by John Mancini, a former editor of Newsday, who was a friend and colleague of Duggan.

“I know first hand that Candace’s reporting reflects Dennis’s generous spirit and his deep interest in improving conditions for New Yorkers whose stories are often overlooked,” he said.

Ms. Pedraza complemented her studies at Newmark with internships at City & State New York and The City, the nonprofit news outlets. She is also a writer and podcast co-host at The Knicks Wall, which covers the NBA team in depth. At Newmark, she is specializing in audio and data journalism, with a concentration in health and science reporting. Ms. Pedraza resides in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with her fiance and three cats.