Drama of the Times

The tabloid New York Post, which likes murder stories and plays them big, last week chided the New York Times for its coverage of the Sheppard murder trial:

"From the time the case began we picked up our copy of the Times a little nervously each day, wondering on what obscure page we would find the Sheppard story. In the beginning there were whole days when not a word appeared, or when we could find only a lost, lonely paragraph. We know some small children are taught that nothing is news until it appears in the Times; could they have begun to wonder whether the rest of us were imagining the story? But answering reassurances came to us in jingle form:

Readers of the New York Times Are safe from news of sex and crimes.

"As the trial dragged on, however, our suspense mounted. Although the Times lengthened its Sheppard dispatches, it still relegated them to the back page, or some drab equivalent thereof. What, we mused, would the Times do on judgment day? . . . Each day that the jury remained out, the suspense increased. Elsewhere, millions of Americans might be asking each other what the jury would do; we kept asking ourselves what the Times would do . . . Finally the decisive hour struck . . . All the other gazettes blared the news of the verdict; our special suspense ended when our eyes reached the lower left-hand corner of the Times's Page One: whatever anguish he must endure in life, Dr. Sheppard had made it."

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