Explore "Eight Keys to Eden" by Mark Clifton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On ordinary days there were only the usual few science reporters in the press room of E.H.Q. These held their jobs by the difficult compromise between the scientists' insistence upon accuracy and their publishers' equal insistence upon sensationalism.
Since the publisher paid the salary; since rewrite men, like television writers, maintained their own feeling of superiority to the mass by writing down to the level of a not very bright twelve-year-old; since the facts had to be trimmed and altered to fit the open space or time slot; even these reporters had a difficult time of maintaining the usual odds -- that there is only a twenty-to-one chance that anything said in the newspapers or on the air may be accurate.