Making is not the same as breaking a news story.

• Author: Cary, Michael
• Position: Bestselling author Jerry Bledsoe's disillusionment with the newspaper trade

Jerry Bledsoe's voice whips through the phone line like a tornado. The topic is journalism - his former career - and he discusses it the way a divorce might discuss his ex. "Newspapers get their ideas about journalism from Fox TV. All they care about is controversy because most editors these days couldn't spot a good story if they had to," he says from the Asheboro office of Down Home Press Inc., a book publisher he founded a decade ago.

Bledsoe, author of 1988's best-selling Bitter Blood, was an award-winning reporter and columnist for the Greensboro News & Record and The Charlotte Observer. He left the business in the mid-'80s because, like many ex-newspapermen, he tired of the industry's growing "corporatization" and "mediocrity."

His disillusionment wasn't helped by a recent News & Record story on a Civil War class at Randolph Community College's Archdale campus. The nine-week adult-education course, North Carolina's Role in the War for Southern Independence, was developed and taught by members of the activist heritage group Sons of Confederate Veterans. Officials with the group say they merely want to honor their Confederate forebears. But metro reporter Ethan Feinsilver saw things differently when he sat in last fall.

His story, which appeared on the local-section front Nov. 15, starts: "A course at Randolph Community College teaches that most black people were happy under slavery and that tens of thousands of black men fought for the Confederacy because they believed in the Southern cause." He quotes volunteer instructor Jack Perdue as telling the class, "We cannot allow political correctness to rewrite history or wipe out our heritage." His story also included reactions, which he characterized this way: "Southern history experts are calling the teaching 'pseudo-history' and pro-Confederate 'propaganda.' Civil rights leaders are calling it offensive."

The story got play in The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post and on talk radio. The NAACP met with school officials, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights scheduled a public forum on the issue. All of which the News & Record reported in follow-up stories.

Those involved with the course argued that Feinsilver's depiction was inaccurate. In a guest editorial in the paper, Herman White, one of the lecturers, said he told students that a researcher looking at 1930s interviews with ex-slaves found that more than 70% "had only good experiences to report about their life as a...