Zenger zinger

CBSNews.com: Blog

I have no formal journalism training, though social anthropology is a good place to look for the story behind the news. Horace Greeley told us to go west and grow up with the country, which might still be good advice from his couch in NYC's City Hall Park where he watches the passersby, on-top of the First Almshouse cemetery I've had to dig in. Nathan Hale's statue, who regretted having one life to lose, was moved to the front of it, across the street from Benjamin Franklin who also had a small press in New York once and almost stopped the bloody revolution at the Conference House at the tip of Staten Island, but alas a compromise was not to be had, and the attendees went on arguing whether the windows should be open or closed. Not far from Horace Greeley, Ethan Allen was tortured by a British Major Cunningham in a "hole blacker than any black hole of Calcutta" according to the NY Times in 1903. A small monument to Joseph Pulitzer too, is in the park, within "earshot" of Mr. Greeley's effigy both alongside the infamously costly, "Tweed Courthouse" finished by Mayor Fernando Wood. Journalists and publications, like John Peter Zenger, a monument to his arrival, a "swivel gun" on the southern end of Governors Island, need protection by the public and by the government, as the exhibit at St. Paul's church, where the contested vote was cast, is kept to inform our "freedom of the press".