Word: bensonized
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...RAMSEY BENSON...
...Minnesota, where Farmer-Labor Governor Elmer Austin Benson has been branded a friend of "Reds" in his campaign for reelection, most of the newspapers have frankly slanted news and headlines to favor his youthful, gladhanding, Republican opponent, Harold E. Stassen. (A notable exception: the Cowles-owned Minneapolis Star.) The angry Governor did not help matters by declaring that every daily paper in the State was a liar except the Willmar (Kandiyohi County) Tribune (circulation: 4,562). Ordinary newshawks took this as a slur at their bosses rather than themselves, gratefully remembered that friendly Elmer Benson as a U. S. Senator...
Last week a committee of 51 reporters, copyreaders, rewritemen in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth broke journalistic taboos by publishing a pink-covered campaign booklet called "Deadline," crammed with the pro-Benson opinions their papers did not want. First edition ran to 100,000 copies. Excerpts: "We've written about Gov. Elmer Benson for two years. We know he is going forward. . . . The Red menace was a red herring. And smelled even fishier...
Most laudatory passages in "Deadline," however, were from Benson obituary notices which reporters swiped from their publishers' newspaper morgues. Typical hold-for-death quotes from anti-Benson newspapers: "Elmer A. Benson will go down in history as one of Minnesota's outstanding Governors. . . . Governor Benson displayed courage, forcefulness, and never yielded in his fight to aid the common man. . . . Even his enemies called him great...
This week Governor Benson's newshawk friends scored a scoop on their own papers when George W. Kelley, their Duluth cochairman, received the following wire from Franklin Roosevelt: "If the political writers on Minnesota papers are inferring that I have deliberately withheld approval from or disapproved candidacy of your Progressive Governor for reelection, they are of course misinterpreting my attitude. I have repeatedly indicated the high esteem in which I hold Governor Benson...