A profile of New York Daily News reporter Juan González, who has been working in journalism for more than 30 years, and was an activist during the late ’60s and early ’70s:
“‘Some of the editors started quashing my columns,’ says González. ‘They killed two of them and relegated the others to the back pages. So I went to Ed Kosner, the editor in chief, and said, “Ed, why are you holding up my columns?” And he said, “Well, the EPA says the stuff that you’re writing isn’t accurate, and so does the Giuliani administration, and besides, the Times isn’t writing anything about it.” And I said, “Since when do we decide what we’re going to write based on what the Times decides to write? You have to trust my reporting.” So we went back and forth, and I finally said, “Ed, you don’t know me well. And I don’t know you well because you’ve only been here a couple of years. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to keep writing on this topic. I think it’s important, and when a lot of people start getting sick ten or fifteen years down the line, I don’t want it to be on my conscience that I didn’t do what I needed to do as a reporter.”‘
“Five years later, as people started getting sick, the paper, under different editors, ran editorials exposing the problem. For this, the Daily News won a Pulitzer Prize.”
