The Post always prides itself on carrying the battle for the common man--the working man.

Well, I'm a working man and it is part of my job to get my clients into the newspapers.

You have every right not to carry anything on my clients, but you have no right to give me the brush, as you did in my two recent phone calls.

No one is that big or that busy not to respond to a phone call.

DEAR B----: Your letter is a grossly insulting thing but I have elected to answer it.

You have a perfect right, in pursuit of your liv1ng, to submit a publicity picture, however poorly contrived and unimaginative, to a newspaper. You have no right to expect that under some divine or regal privilege you can then enter into active negotiations with the person the picture is addressed to.

Beyond that, you have no right to expect that a man otherwise engaged, a big man or a small man, must perforce drop everything and reach for the phone when B---- calls. There might just be something else going on.

I concede you the privilege of the U.S. mails and the privilege of directing abuse towards any target of your choice. I defend that privilege for you and all the other working men of the world. I also defend my own. It is my privilege to reject your abuse. I am unwilling to account to you for the time in my day.          

Mr. K. Brooklyn College of the City
University of New York
Bedford Avenue and Avenue H
Brooklyn, New York 11210

Dear Mr. K.:

I am afraid I cannot help you. I have been on the inside here almost without exception since 1948, and even for parts of some of the years before.

I suspect that what you are looking for is one of the full-time investigative reporters around the city, and you find that in the Year of Our Lord 1976 nearly everybody is an investigative reporter. There is almost no such thing as a just plain reporter.

The investigative reporter is being advertised, mostly by investigative reporters, as some new breed possibly akin to a gift from the heavens. The simple truth is that there were investigative reporters long before the much-heralded tribe of today. Like there was a guy named Jacob Riis who went into the slums of this city – possibly around the turn of the century, if I recall it correctly – and put some startling facts on the public record. There was also a man named Lincoln Steffens who did not confine his labors just to this metropolis but went to many places and investigated many things. The World papers back before the 30’s investigated a great many things, including something called the Ku Klux Klan, and laid them all bare for the nation and the world to see. Since that time all of the New York Papers, living and dead, have been investigating all manner of things without a moment’s rest. I am burdening you with all this information only so that you do not fall into the common trap which besets so many people nowadays when they talk about the fine art of investigative reporting. I believe that this exhausts my efforts on your behalf.

Very Sincerely,

PAUL SANN      

PS:h