It has been reported elsewhere that Jerry Bledsoe has passed away. He was 84 years old. The Rhino Times and the Greensboro News and Record both have stories. Check out also the entry in Grokipedia regarding Bledsoe.
Bledsoe was best known for the book he wrote, “Bitter Blood”. In fact, he wrote many books. But he once was a journalist with the News and Record. As most readers know, that is a newspaper that has long had an extreme left-wing bias.
One of the aspects of Bledsoe’s career insufficiently discussed by both of the above articles was that he dedicated a significant chunk of the latter part of his career to correcting errors made by the News and Record when it reported local stories through the lens of its extraordinary bias.
One example of this was Death by Journalism: One Teacher’s Fateful Encounter With Political Correctness (2001). My recollection is that this was an attempt to correct what the News and Record had done to a regional community college instructor who presented a certain interpretation of slavery around the time of the Civil War.
But the best example here in Greensboro was his epic series in the Rhino Times, Cops In Black and White, in which he excoriated the city of Greensboro and the News and Record for their respective handling of the firing of Greensboro police chief David Wray and allegations within the department two decades ago. Some police officers’ careers were wrecked; and others faced malicious prosecution that was not justified. Ultimately, they were acquitted.
I have one personal note regarding Mr. Bledsoe. At the same time he was writing his series in the Rhino Times, I was covering the story regarding David Wray and The Greensboro Police Department at my blog back then. I wrote about the matter frequently because it was an obvious injustice.
During the early part of his series, I had begun to discuss the political aspects of the situation and openly named some of the political operatives who were responsible for what was done to former Chief Wray and the other white police officers involved.
Out of the blue, I received a phone call at my home from Mr. Bledsoe. I must emphasize I did not know him at that time. He exclaimed to me regarding what I had written about the politics, “You are right!”
He was attempting to provide me with reassurance and confirmation that I was headed down the right trail. At the time, I was receiving a great deal of criticism within the local liberal blogosphere for my writing, so his phone call was very much appreciated. It was obvious that he felt passionately about media bias and what had happened to these police officers.
Bledsoe was a great man who swam against the current. RIP.
Addendum: The News and Record has another story with much more descriptive information and history about the man and his career.
Your post and Grokipedia were both excellent compared with the shallow coverage in the N&R, TC.
I had the distinct pleasure of once meeting Mr. Bledsoe. Ned Cline was teaching a journalism course at UNCG with Jerry Bledsoe that evening. Mr. Cline invited me to meet Jerry prior to his lecture, which I attended. It was a memorable experience.
After that I had frequent email exchanges with him
Jerry was a super journalist and he will be missed. May he RIP.
One forgotten thought was his hilarious “Perpetual Betterment: Missing Chap. 9 Murder Mystery ”
Here goes:
The message light on his telephone was blinking when Seymour Albright finally got to his desk, still shaking his head in wonder and disbelief at what he’d just witnessed.
Wednesday mornings were always other-worldly at the Blather and Advocate, Greensboro’s daily newspaper, otherwise known to readers as The Daily Sedative, but this one had been even weirder than usual.
Prayer meeting, reporters called the obligatory weekly gathering. It was hard to describe to anybody who had not experienced it–a sort of combination high school pep rally, psycho-babble religious service, and Red Guard brainwashing ritual.
These excruciating sessions had been instituted nearly a decade earlier when the huge media conglomerate that owned the newspaper adopted a corporate religion called Perpetual Betterment.
Nobody knew what Perpetual Betterment meant, of course. It could mean anything–that was the point. But employees quickly learned that like most religions this one had one inviolate rule: it could not be questioned. Reporters who groused that the very role of a newspaper was to question were quickly summoned to private counseling sessions and warned that if such heresy continued they would question themselves right off the Blather & Advocate payroll.
It came as no surprise to employees that Perpetual Betterment, or PB, as it was known for short, was created by consultants. Indeed, the coming of PB had marked the beginning of an unending invasion of consultants dictating the newspaper’s ever-changing and, in the eyes of most of the reporting staff, increasingly-insane policies.
The PB consultants were the most distracting. Relentlessly bouncy, fanatically cheery and enthusiastic, they were always prowling the newsroom looking for lapses in team spirit and signs of discontent. They literally were living smiley faces–round, empty heads with perpetual silly grins. The reporters even called them Smileys, although not to their faces, of course, or within earshot of editors or management types.
As insufferable as the Smileys were, the time management consultants were the most despised. They were as silent and grim-faced as morticians, and they were always lurking over reporters’ shoulders, timers in hand, recording data in hand-held computers. Seymour even discovered one of these despicable characters timing his restroom visit one morning. “Little stove up today,” he muttered apologetically to him through the stall door. “Wouldn’t have any prunes on you, would you?”
The time management experts knew absolutely nothing about journalism, but that hadn’t kept them from devising elaborate charts determining to the minute how much time should be allotted to the reporting and writing of every imaginable type of newspaper story. Reporters who went over the limit were required to produce detailed reports explaining why. Readers, unapprised of this, never quite understood why stories in the paper seemed to be getting shorter and shorter with less and less meaningful information.
Frightening though the time management types were, they weren’t nearly as intimidating as the diversity consultants. These bruisers wore Armani suits and blue sunglasses and bore an uncanny resemblance to the bodyguards who always trailed along with boxer Mike Tyson and promoter Don King in TV shots. They arrived once a month in the back of a chauffeured limousine, spent 30 minutes haranguing the “majority” staff with racial epithets, then took their fees in cash, which they packed into a black satchel. Not even the most questioning of reporters had the temerity to challenge these guys.
It was the diversity consultants who had mandated that every story appearing in the paper had to contain at least one quote from a “minority” person. Whether or not the minority person quoted had anything to do with the story or knew anything about the subject was of no concern.
One brave reporter (not Seymour) finally found nerve enough to risk a question.
“We don’t identify people by race in the paper,” he said, his voice quaking. “Does this mean we’ll be doing that from now on?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, how will readers know we’re quoting a minority?”
“Use subtlety, you stupid honky &%$#@*^#!” snapped the consultant.
Fortunately for the reporters, most of them knew Skip Alston, the outspoken county commissioner and NAACP president, a recognizable minority who was always available and willing to be quoted on anything. This familiarity soon resulted in Alston being quoted 47 times in 33 different stories in a single edition of the paper–and in 18 of them he managed to work in a plug for his hot dog stand. Even the diversity consultants agreed that this was a bit excessive, and a memo went out restricting any single minority person from being quoted in more than 12 stories daily.
Ironically, the minority quote mandate proved to be a boon for Seymour, winning him the only honors he had received at the paper in recent years.
One day Seymour received a call that he had visitors in the lobby. He went downstairs to find his old friend Billy Ray Chavis. Chavis was grinning from ear to ear and holding a 12-pound smoked salmon wrapped in butcher paper under one arm. He was accompanied by a short, smiling, parka-clad man with eyes permanently squinted, as if he were perpetually gazing over a sunbathed snowfield.
Chavis was a Native American from the Lumbee tribe, a former state representative from Guilford County who insisted on being called an Indian and wrote angry letters to the paper every time it referred to him as a Native American. He was angling for a high level job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington at the time. This was while George Bush was president. He eventually got the job but held it only briefly, losing it as soon as the Clinton administration took office. He had failed to calculate that the Democratic Party’s concern for minorities extended only to those who were not Republican.
“I told you you couldn’t get away with being a Republican Indian,” Seymour told him.
“Well,” he said, “it was worth a try.”
Chavis had gone on to become a consultant to Native American tribes, whom he still called Indians, helping to arrange several lucrative casino deals, allowing him to prosper almost as much as if he had remained in government and politics. He had just returned from a Pow-Wow in San Francisco.
“Who’s your friend?” Seymour asked.
“Oh, this is Saunooke,” Chavis said. “He claims he’s an Indian but I think he’s really an Eskimo. I met him in a bar at Fisherman’s Wharf, and he followed me home. He don’t say much, but he’s good company. Sucker knows his salmon, I can tell you that. You want a bite?”
Seymour recognized opportunity when it squinted at him. His focus editor had just assigned him to produce a story about the availability of multi-cultural foods in Greensboro. Later, amidst his descriptions of pickled hyena feet, fresh piranha fillets, and dried Cambodian parrot tongues to be found in local markets, he worked in a lament from Saunooke about the total deficiency of whale blubber in the Triad.
This set off an unprecedented race between the Fresh Market and the Harris-Teeter on Friendly Road to be the first to fill that gap in upscale grocery marketing. Both took out ads in the paper promising Native American processed blubber flown in fresh daily from icy Alaskan waters.
Seymour had been taken by surprise when the publisher himself showed up at the next prayer meeting to honor him.
“That’s just the kind of reporting we want to see more of,” the publisher proclaimed, “the kind that produces revenue.”
One of the Smileys placed a crown of plastic laurel on Seymour’s head and he stood with a vacant smile on his face as the other reporters joined hands and danced around him, singing the company praise song.
To this day, Seymour remained the only reporter ever to get a minority quote from a suspected Eskimo into the paper.
Seymour had gotten through that embarrassing episode as he did all the PB sessions–with help from the self-hypnosis course he had taken in the New Age Studies program at UNC-G. It had been his salvation for years, perhaps the primary thing that kept him from “going postal,” as he put it, and by that he didn’t mean taking a new job as a mail carrier.
Indeed, Seymour would have taken a new job long before–even as a mail carrier–if that had been a possibility. But he was a 55-year-old reporter without technological skills or aptitude. The only other employment prospect for somebody in that situation was as greeter at Wal-Mart. But the waiting lists for those positions were hopelessly long, Seymour knew. He had checked.
In the beginning Seymour only had to hypnotize himself to get through the Wednesday morning prayer meetings, but now he sometimes spent entire work days in a self-imposed trance, especially on TM Days. TM was short for Team Management, which was another aspect of Perpetual Betterment. This concept had been created to give employees the illusion that they actually had some role in how the company was run. Some employees, however, suspected it really was a ploy to use employees themselves to come up with justification for eliminating their own jobs.
All employees had to spend half a day each week in team meetings, usually wracking their brains to find ways to save the company minute amounts of money.
Seymour once had served on the Paper Clip Reclamation Team, which after a year of struggle had produced the now infamous Mr. Clip report, written by his current clipped-brain focus editor, the team leader, a woman clearly destined for higher management. She personified the paper clip in the report, and in breathless prose described how heartbroken Mr. Clip was when he was tossed away after only a single use, or was linked together in useless chains, or straightened to serve as toothpick or fingernail cleaner, and how joyous he was when conscientious employees took care to remove him from paper bundles and put him into the proper slots in their desk drawers to be used again and again, just as Mr. Clip was meant to serve. For this, she not only was lauded at one of the Wednesday PB sessions, she also received a bonus in an amount that would have supplied the company with paper clips for years.
For the past two years, Seymour had been frustratingly serving on the Excess Newsprint Modification Team, which some reporters snidely referred to as the Sandpaper Imposition Team. This team had been charged with finding some way to recycle the leftover paper on newsprint reels into “tissue” for company restrooms. But after endless hours of study and debate, they still hadn’t been able to figure out how to efficiently transfer the paper onto those tiny dispenser rollers.
Only in recent days had Seymour learned that he was being assigned to the newly formed Multi-cultural Insertion Team. He couldn’t imagine what those duties might entail. It sounded like some ideological surgical unit, going around implanting multi-culturalism into unsuspecting people. “OK team, we’ve got him down. Hold him! All together now. Lift! Heave! Push! Push Hard!”
Nobody dared question their TM assignments. That was because of what ensued when the Future Prospects Team turned in a report suggesting that the company might be better served if reporters and editors actually spent their time reporting and editing instead of frittering it away in consultant-imposed team meetings and pep rallies. For this the team leader was demoted to the paid obituaries desk and all six team members were sentenced to attend six weeks of “management appreciation” classes. All were required to wear dunce
hats at the Wednesday morning PB sessions during the rehabilitation period.
Employees never knew what they might have to endure at the weekly PB events. Sometimes they had to suffer a high-wattage motivational speaker with a brain-cell switch permanently set on dim. Other times they had to chant corporate mantras, channel the spirits of great corporate leaders back from corporate nirvana, sing corporate hymns, shout corporate cheers, or twist themselves into corporate yoga positions.
But at least they didn’t have to do that balloon thing anymore. That had been dropped after bringing the paper a considerable fine and even more embarrassment.
In the early days, employees had to sit through PB sessions holding clusters of helium-filled balloons bearing the name and logo of The Blather & Advocate. At the end of each session, the outside door would swing open, and the Smileys would bounce happily into the parking lot in their Blather & Advocate cheerleader outfits, shaking pompons and shouting through megaphones. They were followed by their stumbling, reluctant charges feigning enthusiasm and clutching desperately to their gaily bouncing balloons. Once in the parking lot the group released the balloon clusters in unison with a joyous corporate shout.
This was supposed to represent the newspaper’s soaring aspirations, as well as to inspire the employees to ever higher goals and efforts.
The problem arose when a frantic matron in Irving Park called 911 to report that somebody had strewn her spacious lawn with dead geese wearing green condoms, another first for the 911 record log.
“How do you know they’re condoms?” the dispatcher asked.
“Young lady, I was not born yesterday,” the matron responded haughtily.
“Somebody has covered her lawn with WHAT?” radioed the officer who was assigned to check out the call.
“Dead geese wearing green condoms,” the dispatcher repeated without so much as a snicker.
“So much for safe sex,” deadpanned the officer. “Did she say what made her check?”
Investigators found that the geese weren’t wearing green condoms after all. Their beaks and heads were plastered instead with the remains of green Blather & Advocate balloons, which had blinded and smothered them, sending them crashing into the green, green grass of Irving Park.
After considerable questioning of reluctant newspaper executives, detectives finally learned about the weekly balloon release and theorized that a flock of innocent geese had happened along just as the balloons were let go and plowed right through the exultant swarm to their deaths. No criminal charges were filed, but the Irving Park matron, a major contributor to Ducks Unlimited and the SPCA, notified federal environmental authorities who levied a stiff fine and issued a stern warning about Perpetual Betterment overexuberance in the great outdoors.
Seymour had no idea what to expect when he arrived at the rally room on this particular Wednesday morning. He was prepared for anything. It turned out to be a party of sorts. A festive cake topped with green icing and the words “Seize Success!” adorned a table next to a bowl of green punch. There were little paper cups of green jellybeans, green party hats and paper whistles bearing the newspaper logo. The publisher, J. Fulton Teach, was even there, but he usually turned up whenever cake and punch were served.
Seymour slipped into his hypnotic safety zone, donned his party hat, accepted his cake and jelly beans, and sat with his fellow reporters to see what was up.
Teach had come to announce yet another total remake of the newspaper, yet another major initiative to spread its influence through the Piedmont and stem its persistently swan-diving circulation. This had to be at least the fifteenth total remake and major new expansion initiative Seymour had suffered through in his 25 years at the paper, but this one was to be launched in a little different manner.
After completing his statement, the publisher paused, walked to a nearby table, opened a big cardboard box, removed several items, lowered his head and began changing his appearance, like a comedian about to go into an impression.
The reporters looked from one to another, wondering what was next.
When Teach whirled back to face his audience, a red bandanna was tied around his head, he was wearing a fake black braided beard with a maniacal grin, a dagger in his mouth, and he held a glinting broadsword high above his head. Suddenly, he was leaping all about the room, waving the sword menacingly, shouting “Ahoy, mateys!” and “Raise the mizzen!” and “Man the gunnels! and “Loose the first volley!” although it all was a little garbled and hard to understand because the dagger in his teeth kept thwarting his lips and tongue.
This performance even startled Seymour out of his trance. Reporters were exchanging furtive glances, not knowing whether to laugh or to run for their lives
Everybody knew that Teach claimed to be a descendant of Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard the pirate, and that he was so obsessed with his supposed buccaneer heritage that the only major reporting project the newspaper had undertaken during his five-year reign as publisher had been a 12-part series on Blackbeard’s life and travels–which still could be read on the paper’s internet site, complete with treasure maps and animated drawings–but they hadn’t expected him to become Blackbeard.
When Teach stopped his leaping and flailing, he removed the dagger from his mouth and threw his head back in a howling, evil laugh. Then he stuck the point of his sword into the floor, leaned forward on the handle, sweat pouring profusely, and looked earnestly from face to face. Surely a move he’d picked up in his classes at the Center for Creative Leadership.
“Now what am I trying to say here….? he asked somberly.
That you’re even loonier than any of us ever imagined? Seymour thought, but did not speak.
“What I’m saying is that this newspaper is just like Blackbeard’s old ship Queen Ann’s Lace…uh…Revenge. If she goes down, we all go with her. But the treasure is out there, Mateys, ours to seize. We’ve just got to have the guile, and the gumption, and the ingenuity of Blackbeard (not to mention the ruthlessness, Seymour thought) and it’s ours. Need I say anything more?”
With that, the Smileys broke into loud applause and bravos, and the rest of the staff joined in.
“An extra cup of grog for all hands!” Teach shouted, smiling broadly and lifting his sword high.
“Have you ever seen anything like that in your life?” another reporter whispered to Seymour as they made their way back to the newsroom.
“Wonder if he knows that Blackbeard ended up with his head on a stick?” Seymour said.
Seymour found twelve messages on his answering machine when he got to his desk. The third was from Rob Inskeep in the Guilford County DA’s office.
“Sy, give me a call. I’ve got a good one for you.”
Inskeep, an assistant prosecutor for more than 20 years, was an old drinking buddy. Utterly without political ambition, he was nonetheless a keen and witty observer of the local political scene. He had been Seymour’s source for many good stories, including several award winners, back when the paper still bothered with that sort of thing.
“Rob, sorry it took so long to get back to you, but it’s been a weird morning here,” Seymour said when he finally got his old friend on the phone. “What’s up?”
“You think things are weird over there?” Inskeep said. “Let me tell you weird. I take it you haven’t heard about the murder in the library over at UNC-G.”
“There’s been a murder in the library at UNC-G? When?”
“Two days ago.”
“Why haven’t we had it in the paper?”
“You tell me.”
“This damn worthless newspaper!” Seymour muttered with utter disgust, slamming his fist onto the desktop. His outburst prompted him to quickly scan the newsroom for management types, Smileys, or other consultants who might have overheard him and taken note.
“Who’s the victim?” he asked after regaining control.
“Some old guy whose identity is still uncertain. Supposed to have been killed over an unpublished O. Henry manuscript, a novel, which the killers took with them. And there’s something about a perpetual motion machine here in Greensboro. But that’s just the beginning. Our star eye-witness, a young librarian, apparently has been kidnapped. And now the primary detective on the case has turned up missing. With all the weird stuff that’s going on it wouldn’t surprise me if subterranean monsters started popping out of manholes on Elm Street. I’m telling you, man, this one will make a movie.”
“It would need to be a book before it became a movie,” Seymour said, his head already swimming with the fantastic possibilities. If it panned it out, this story just might be the one he’d been long awaiting, his bestseller, his escape from all this corporate insanity, his ticket out of this miserable excuse for a newspaper.
“That’s what I mean,” Inskeep said. “You interested?”
“Am I interested?” Seymour said. “Am I interested? Does a goose wear green condoms?”
“Meet me at Robinson’s Restaurant in ten minutes,” Inskeep said, “and I’ll give you what I’ve got.”
I
That’s hilarious, Fred. He was obviously a very gifted man. He also obviously had suffered through the lefty management culture at the N&R when he worked there.
I think the instance when he called me was the only time we had ever spoken. He and John Hammer were aware I was posting summaries of his installments of the “Cops in Black and White” series in Rhino. I heard secondhand, through the grapevine, that they were not opposed to my doing so because they thought it might be helpful, at least in some way.
That was quite a time. But I had enormous admiration for Bledsoe’s work when he produced that series. There was so much painstaking research and reporting.