The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich

did.
    Judy and Pat nervously paid a visit to Fay at her immaculate Upper East Side apartment, the parlor floor of a brownstone filled with antique furniture. Little did they know that Fay had been seething for years about the condescending way research was regarded at the newsmagazines. In October 1964, Otto Friedrich, a Time editor, wrote a famous piece in Harper’s magazine titled “There are 00 Trees in Russia: The Function of Facts in Newsmagazines,” which infuriated Fay. Friedrich’s article argued that the newsmagazine fetish for “the facts” did not necessarily represent the truth. He explained that Time and Newsweek had evolved “a unique system which makes it theoretically possible to write an entire news story without any facts at all.” By putting in “TK” for “to kum” (“kum” being a deliberate misspelling of “come” to warn copy editors and proofreaders not to let the word get into print)—or, in the case of statistics, “00,” to be filled in later—it enabled the writer, he said, “to ignore all the facts and concentrate on the drama.”
    To guard this fact “fetish” at newsmagazines, Friedrich wrote,
There came into existence an institution unknown to newspapers: the checker. The checker is usually a girl in her twenties, usually from some Eastern college, pleasant-looking but not a femme fatale. She came from college unqualified for anything but looking for an “interesting” job. After a few years, she usually feels, bitterly and rightly, that nobody appreciates her work. The beginning of the week is lackadaisical and so is the research, but toward the end, when typewriters clack behind closed doors and editors snap at intruders, there are midnight hamburgers and tears in the ladies’ room. For the checker gets no credit if the story is right, but she gets the blame if it is wrong. It doesn’t matter if the story is slanted or meretricious, if it misinterprets or misses the point of the week’s news. That is the responsibility of the editors. What matters—and what seems to attract most of the hostile letters to the editors—is whether a championship poodle stands thirty-six or forty inches high, whether the eyes of Prince Juan Carlos of Spain are blue or brown, whether the population of some city in Kansas is 15,000 or 18,000.
    Fay wrote a scathing letter to the editor of Harper’s that was published in the December 1964 issue. “As the researcher (not checker, please) who arrived at the number of trees in Russia, permit me to say that Otto Friedrich’s article is enough to send any researcher to the ladies’ room for a few tears,” it read. “Aside from his insulting remarks about what we do to earn a living and how we do it, Mr. Friedrich says we are not femmes fatales, which is most ungallant, and ‘unqualified for anything,’ which is untrue. We can be quite fatale in circumstances other than telling a writer that his story is all wrong (perhaps none of us ever trained her guns on Mr. Friedrich), and as for our training, researchers by and large have the same education as the writers they are working for, if not a better one.” She ended the letter by citing four facts in Friedrich’s article in need of correcting. At the bottom of her letter was his reply: “I am mortified at the accusation of ungallantry and, if guilty, deeply apologetic. As for the rest of Miss Willey’s ‘corrections,’ I say, ‘ Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. ’” (He who excuses himself accuses himself.)
    When Judy and Pat discussed our plans with Fay, she was cool to the idea of taking legal action. She herself didn’t want to become a writer, but she did feel women should be allowed to write. What she wanted was for research to be more valued and for researchers to be considered as important to the magazine as the correspondents in the field. She was particularly unhappy that the editors entertained her sources at Newsweek lunches and didn’t include her. Fay had been horribly