By way of Jimbo, we learn that two WP employees, Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia, had a bit of a disagreement over the merits of a story co-written by Roig-Franzia. The Honorable Mr. Roig-Franzia allegedly called the Honorable Mr. Allen a “c—sucker”, at which point the Honorable Mr. Allen allegedly attempted to give Roig-Franzia high cause to seek out a periodontal reconstructionist.
This story has been covered here and here; in addition, Gene Weingarten of the WP (and a writer whose work I have a complicated relationship with) weighs in here. It comes as no great shock that Weingarten weighs in on the side of
Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story.
I understand Weingarten’s point of view. I grew up on Mencken and Liebling. There’s a big part of me that supports the whole “Break it up, you two, we’ve got a newspaper to put out. You can settle down at the pub after deadline.” side to this story.
But. I work for a company that’s close in size to the Washington Post empire. I’m pretty passionate about my job. I’ve had disagreements with people in other departments, too; disagreements that were serious enough for me to consider inviting them down into the parking lot for a frank and open exchange of views about the nature of the social contract. The key word there is “consider“.
If I called one of my co-workers a “c—sucker” (or, for that matter, a “bony-a–ed b—h”) I would expect to be fired. I would consider myself lucky to get merely a serious reprimand from HR. If I took a swing at one of my co-workers, I would be fired. Our visions of Hildy Johnson aside, why should newspapers be any different from any other business?
(I also wanted to call this out because Allen apparently called the story in question “the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years”, leading to much entertaining speculation about what the worst story was. The official answer appears to be something about Paul Robeson that was so error-ridden it was never printed. However, there’s lots of entertaining speculation at the links above, including multiple mentions of Sally Quinn.)