Electronic Journalism

"My Fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk with you about a subject that is both painful and important. We live in a time when many of our basic institutions are changing, and often in directions we don't like. We have seen this in our schools. We have seen it in the courts. We have seen it even in some churches. And, my friends, we see it perhaps most vividly of all in the press and on television.

"We have been engaged in a long and dreadful conflict in Southeast Asia, a conflict made all the more protracted and all the more difficult because many of our citizens at home have felt they could not support the war. One must ask why. Why were the American people, who were steadfast in World War Two and resolute during the Korean War, so divided on Vietnam? Perhaps it was because they were told only the negative side of that story, the destructive side, while the courage of our fighting men and the nobility of our goals were ignored.

"My friends, the facts were twisted and the whole story not told, and the blood is on the hands of the twisters--in the press and on television...."

Who said that? Nobody--yet. But a growing number of those who report the news are becoming aware that someone, either a Democrat or a Republican, may say something like it in 1972.

A Johnson Administration official has said that if there had been television news cameras at the Anzio beachhead during World War Two, the public would have withdrawn its support of the war. Richard Nixon has said that he will be satisfied as long as he gets the chance to present himself directly to the American people. And any stump speaker of either party will tell you that knocking the papers and the commentators always gets a good hand these days.

The controversial CBS News program The Selling of the Pentagon didn't help. Some of the editing in that show came dangerously close to the ethical line, in my view, and the uproar that followed in the Congress made matters worse. CBS compounded the problem by issuing an almost theologically complicated directive to its news staff on how to edit film--a directive that made the network look guilty as charged. CBS was courageous in its refusal to turn over private papers on the program to a Congressional panel; but its victory in that fight left a lot of people in Congress more hostile to television news than they had been before.

The publication of the (continued on page 216)Electronic Journalism(continued from page 121) Pentagon papers was held up for two weeks by the courts--a demonstration of prior restraint unprecedented in our history. American freedom involves the right of a person to publish what he pleases; though he may go to jail for it later, he can't be stopped beforehand. But the Pentagon papers were stopped, temporarily, at least, and the opinions written by the Supreme Court Justices who finally allowed publication are by no means reassuring to us First Amendment types. In fact, it can be argued that in both The Selling of the Pentagon and the Pentagon-papers disputes, we won the battle but moved in the direction of losing the war.

Walter Cronkite says he thinks there is a conspiracy in the Administration to discredit the news media, and maybe he's right, but I see the current anti-news campaign as more fundamental to the character of the President and the men close to him. Nixon is leading an adversary Administration, one that sees the world as a patchwork of battlefields, or football fields, in which the good guys are playing the bad guys in a thousand different contests. There is little room for amelioration or compromise in this viewpoint, hardly any possibility of "bringing us together," since everything is seen in terms of one side against another, winning or losing.

One of the conflicts is the Government versus the news media. Since the President himself is fond of sports analogies, let us recall that for years he stood outside the ball park asking to play in the big leagues. And after getting in, his team got into trouble in the second inning. He was watching television during the peace marches; the White House was having a very hard time. Manager Nixon sent someone out onto the field to say the umpires were fixed. That someone, of course, was Vice-President Agnew, in his first attack on the newspapers and network instant analyzers.

A word about instant analysis, since I am the senior man on that assignment for NBC News. Who are we, Agnew demanded to know, to appear on television after the President and tell the people what he has just said? Well, for one thing, quite often the people don't understand what he has said. An example of this was Nixon's sudden midday appearance not long ago, when he read a very carefully worded statement of agreement with the Russians to move ahead on the limitation of strategic nuclear weapons. The statement had to be identical with one being issued in Moscow, which meant that, like most diplomatic language, it had a sort of Delphic quality about it. It had to be analyzed and explained--immediately--and that's just what we did. When we engage in that kind of instant analysis, or talk about Henry Kissinger's secret mission to Peking, the White House is all smiles. But when we say that the President ducked some questions at a news conference, there is a certain amount of glaring the next day. In that sense, the President's men are very human.

But the Vice-President is something else: He is close to being European--and radical--in his attitude toward the media. In many countries of the world, the newspapers are ran by and for political parties. Many state-operated television systems are controlled by the politicians who happen to be in power--the government-run, government-censored television news operation of Gaullist France being a vivid example. What characterizes the news in these party newspapers and on these politically controlled television programs is bias; the news is put out by true believers for the faithful--and it usually ends up not being news. In some countries, one must go through four or five papers a day, reading between the lines, to get a coherent idea of the real news.

Mr. Agnew would take us in that direction. It seems to be his assumption that all journalists are dominated by their prejudices--right-wing journalists and left-wing journalists alike. When the Vice-President says it might be valuable to see the people who broadcast the news every evening examined by a panel who would question them on their personal political beliefs, he is saying that you can't understand the news unless you know the political values of the people reporting it. That is a very European view, and it ignores the fact that American journalism is known throughout the world for its unusually high ethical and professional standards.

One of the basic elements of the New Journalist is his commitment to a political idea; he is identified with one side of the story and interprets it from that side. This isn't reporting, it's essay writing, and it has produced, from Jonathan Swift to Nat Hentoff, some first-rate essays--but not good daily journalism.

Would we be better off if we had a left-wing Associated Press and a right-wing United Press International? Or a right-wing CBS and a left-wing NBC? I don't think so. Moreover, the professional craftsmen who process the news in daily journalism would themselves reject that, since it would conflict with the centrist politics most of them embrace.

I am a member of the extreme center, and that's because my life has shaped my politics. I have been a reporter all my life, and my experiences as a reporter have given me a set of political beliefs. I began as a police reporter, the classical basic training, and I saw crime, corruption, brutality and racism. I was a war reporter, and I learned about men and courage and waste and tragedy. I was a foreign correspondent, and I learned how other countries and other people organize their lives. I lived in Moscow and learned what totalitarianism means and how journalism can be twisted and distorted by forcing it to serve what are called the needs of the state. I was a political reporter, and I learned the differences between oratory and truth, between the promise and the payoff. I was a Washington correspondent, and I learned one or two things about power, how it is gained and how it is used.

I have spent 20 years in professional association with problems, conflict and change, and there are thousands like me--men and women who are paid to go out into the field and see how the society is working. What kind of people are we? We have a basic distrust of officials, bureaucrats and politicians. We have a deep dislike of fools and phonies, and probably a greater admiration than most for the occasional good man or woman. We tend to side with the underdog, with the poor and the oppressed. And we favor activists who try to bring about social change, since journalists know more than most people that the society is in profound need of renovation.

At the same time, most journalists reject radicalism and violence, simply because we have seen too much of it to believe that it can work. And, in my experience, most reporters don't join causes nor political parties, perhaps because we are forced to listen to too many speeches. So the group of journalists I know best, who cover national and international affairs, are people of the center, perhaps more skeptical and pragmatic than the average American, but reasonably close to the norm in a moderately liberal country.

Critics of journalism never take into account the fact that journalists are moved by ordinary emotions. The American people respected Eisenhower; so did the press. The American people loved John F. Kennedy; so did the press. The American people were suspicious of Lyndon Johnson; so was the press. About half the American people don't seem to like Richard Nixon, and that's probably the breakdown in the press.

Popular Presidents get a good press, and even a popular action by an unpopular President will get a good press. The Nixon Administration may believe that it's dealing with a hostile press, but what about the general reaction to Kissinger's visit to Peking? Or to the wage-price freeze? In truth, the Nixon Administration is getting quite a good press in many ways. Nixon is winding down the war, and most of the newspapers and radio and television programs are treating him with respect on that issue. His foreign policy, from disarmament to the Middle East, is reported and discussed with little criticism. Nixon got a very bad press when he sent the names of Haynsworth and Carswell up to the Senate; but, looking back, on it, even some Nixon loyalists admit that the two nominations were a mistake. In fact, the President is not getting the critical attention he deserves in the areas of race, poverty and the cities.

The attacks on the press and on television by Agnew and other politicians are made in defense of an Administration that has, in the main, been treated with fairness. To what degree is that fairness a result of the Agnew attacks? From where I sit. the answer is--not much. The network news programs seem to be operating as they were before the attacks. The major newspapers and magazines seem about as they were, although one or two conservative columnists are doing better, in terms of circulation, than before the Agnew attacks. That's good, and if Agnew is responsible, he deserves our thanks. But in news coverage generally, we have not entered an Agnew era of a muzzled and subservient press. The disastrous "incursion" into Laos is an example: That was a gamble that failed badly, and there was no lack of critical comment (partially caused by the Government's own heavy-handed attempt to restrict the coverage).

Yet, having said this, no journalist is unaware of the hostility toward our craft that exists in the minds of many Americans. It's difficult to say whether this is growing or diminishing. A recent Harris Poll on the public's confidence in the network newscasts was very encouraging, but the over-all indications are mixed. The fact is that the world is in a period of hard times, and most of the news is bad. This makes life especially hard for television journalists, since we are the ones in the living rooms every night with the bad news.

It's especially hard because the television set is a brutal way to get the news. You can read a newspaper when you want to; you have to take a television report when we give it to you. You can skip the war news in a newspaper and read only the comics, if that's your mood. The options on a television news program are to sit through the war news or to turn off the program. You can't duck it, or put it away for another time.

This situation isn't going to change until we get some good news, and there isn't much of that on the horizon. The end of the Vietnam war is likely to help, but offsetting that could be a series of nasty political campaigns this year. The cities are still falling apart, crime is a disaster, the blacks and other minorities are still shut out of the mainstream and millions of young people are trying to get some genuine satisfaction out of a dehumanizing life.

Against this background, there is no shortage of politicians willing to say that the divisions in our society are the result of the news media telling it like it isn't; powerful men in both parties will do that if they get into political trouble. There is no shortage of true believers, right-wing and left-wing, who condemn the media because the centrist American press does not share nor fully reflect their views. And there is no shortage of weak, venal and incompetent newspapers and television news programs, particularly on a local level, that make thoughtful citizens question their sources of information.

This is a distressing combination, especially in a time of intense social change. It has been said that journalism should give men a picture of the world upon which they can act. That has never been more difficult than it is today. The most important element of journalism is trust: trust between sources and journalists, trust between journalists and the public. And trust, alas, is what we seem to have too little of these days.

Is that all there is?