The First Baby story bugs me every year. It is so artificial that it is the very definition of junk news – trying to attach significance to a meaningless fact.
I understand the story’s point is to allow television stations and newspapers to show pictures of a beaming mother, sighing with relief that the pain of childbirth is over while she is holding her newborn baby boy or girl, who is at that stage in life when – even if kind of ugly – the baby’s still cute.
But in the overall story of life, there’s little difference between the baby born at 11:57 p.m. on Dec. 31 and the one born at 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 1. There’s no Tens of Thousands of Dollars in Cash and Prizes awaiting the parents of the First Baby.
But hospitals take the story so seriously. Each of them wants the free publicity of being able to say their doctors delivered the First Baby.
Think I’m kidding?
I still remember 1989’s First Baby in Chicago story very well. Back then, I was a reporter for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago, and that was the year of my life when I worked extensively on the overnight shift.
So when 1988 became 1989, I was working. Because senior editors all had holidays off, I was actually in charge that night in determining which stories were covered by the wire service.
So in the 20 or so minutes right after midnight, the City News Bureau got several telephone calls from area hospitals. Memory says seven hospitals had their public relations people call us to claim they had babies who were born in the minute or two after midnight.
One hospital official wanted to know how much she would have to adjust the official time to get their newborn baby into the running to be THE STORY as First Born Baby in Chicago for 1989.
In the end, we had two hospitals both claiming to have had babies born within 10 seconds after the stroke of midnight.
I went ahead and made a judgment call. It’s a tie!
That’s how the City News Bureau reported the story. That’s how news radio stations picked up the story in the morning. Later in the day, Chicago’s television stations sent news crews out to talk to both sets of parents, and the newspapers the next morning recognized our self-declared tie as the official result.
What is sad about all of this is that a third hospital called in after the initial outburst of telephone calls, and after we had made the call that the First Baby was a two-way tie. That hospital was claiming to also have had a baby born in the first minute after midnight, and they wanted to be included.
I ultimately took it on myself to say, “No Way!” They were late in notifying us, and who’s to say just when each of these babies was really born. Changing the story at that point just to massage the ego of another hospital seemed absurd.
What is even more absurd than that?
How about arguing with a hospital director at 3 a.m., who started using some pretty vile language to complain about what he perceived as my snub of his hospital’s public image. We quarreled. I refused to make any change. There was no three-way First Baby of Chicago tie in 1989.
Now some might say that I manipulated the story. But for real manipulation of a First Baby story, one has to look at what happened in Peoria, Ill., the following year.
The Journal Star newspaper reported a story of the first baby born in an area hospital, showing a nice, young couple with their child. Later, we learned the actual first child born in Peoria that year came to life in an ambulance en route to a hospital, a couple of hours before the official child. The reason officials ignored that baby is because the 16-year-old mother’s life story was deemed too depressing and irresponsible to put in the newspaper.
So I ruined a three-way tie for First Baby. Elsewhere, a mother was considered “too ghetto” to be in the newspaper with her baby.
I’d like to think my refusal to play along with a hospital administrator’s ego was more responsible than what happened in Peoria, particularly when one considers that, at heart, the First Baby is basically a fake news story.
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