Covering the Capital

An early presidential press conference, According to Washington legend, was held involuntarily by John Quincy Adams. While swimming bare-buff in the Potomac, he was spied by an intrepid woman reporter, Anne Royall, who sat on his clothes on the bank and would not let him out until he had answered her questions.

The presidential press conference nowadays is more formal and better attended. Last week, when President Truman faced 180 reporters in the old State Department building, he carefully read a prepared statement, then was bombarded by 31 questions. It was all over in eleven minutes; the reporters hustled for the door, raced for the twelve telephones in the hall outside. Within a few hours, the President's comments on Iran, Korea, price control were headlined across the front pages of the U.S.

The job of covering the President's press conferences--along with everything else that the capital brass says, thinks, plans or does--has become one of the most important journalistic assignments in history. But among the 1,500 Washington correspondents who file 700,000 words of copy a day there is no general agreement on how well the job is being done.

Thumb-Sucking. In fact, some of the more thoughtful and honest among them think the job is being done badly. The sins of commission & omission they cite make a long list. Instead of reporting, they say, an increasing number of newsmen are taking sides and slanting stories, e.g., forming a protective ring around Arkansas' likable Senator William Fulbright to keep him out of hot water by not reporting his indiscreet frankness.

There is lethargy, dependence on government handouts, press conferences, tips and gossip. Too many stories are written on the formula of "fact-plus-hunch-plus-opinion," notably by the pundits and columnists. Says Columnist Doris Fleeson, the capital's top woman reporter: "There's too little reporting, too much thumb-sucking in this town." Many correspondents are not in Washington to report; they are there to give their papers prestige, run errands for the publisher and lobby for his pet ideas, or to make routine checks.

The most telling criticism is that too many newsmen hide behind the cloak of "objectivity," merely report the "who, what, when & where." They leave the much harder and more important job of telling the "why" to a small, hard core within the corps.

The Explosion. But it is also true that there are enough hardworking, intelligent newspaper reporters in the Washington press corps to let it be said--with much justice--that Washington is the best covered city in the world. The shortcomings in coverage are not always the fault of reporters; they are due to the size of the job. In two decades the Federal Government has swollen like an explosion. And there just aren't enough reporters around to do a thorough job.

Once, an able correspondent who was on good terms with Cabinet members and Senators and could find his way around a smoke-filled room could pretty well cover the town. But the New Deal brought a new journalistic era. When the U.S. went off the gold standard, for example, most correspondents knew it was big news, but precious few could tell their readers why. New Deal measures forced reporters to become experts on economics, finance, farming, law, foreign trade; World War II added military strategy and nuclear physics; the cold war brought the problem of "security" in peacetime, a magic word some bureaucrats have misused to suppress legitimate information.

The Leak. As the Government expanded, it developed a slick technique of professional pressagentry. Sometimes the pressagents do a helpful and necessary job of briefing reporters on complicated subjects. But too often they plug only the Administration's side of a crucial Government issue, hope the reporter hasn't the sense or gumption to dig up the other side. The Federal Government now employs about 5,000 full-and part-time pressagents, spends an estimated $65 million a year on salaries and printing. The payroll is still growing fast; in a year the number of pressagents in the Defense Department and armed services alone has nearly doubled. In addition, nearly every high Administration official has a press-relations adviser who masquerades as a "special assistant," feeds the press a constant flow of "don't-quote-me" background information or "leaks" calculated to prove that 1) the official is wonderful, 2) his opponents are not to be trusted and 3) all is well in Government. For example, Lieut. Colonel Ted Clifton, special aide to General Omar Bradley, is known as "Bradley's leak," Paul Duncan as Price Boss Mike Di Salle's.

Newsmen occupy a higher position in Washington than anywhere else. They are wined, dined and courted endlessly, not only by bureaucrats but by politicos, lobbyists, ambassadors and hordes of pressure boys who want the Government to do--or not to do--something. They belong to such exclusive clubs as the Metropolitan, where it is usual to see Columnist Walter Lippmann sitting down with an ambassador. They are even decorated by foreign governments.

News Lid. The press corps has tried to cope with these problems of size and propaganda by narrowing the fields it can cover efficiently. Reporters concentrate on Capitol Hill, the White House, State Department and Pentagon. They look in on most of the other departments only when there is news breaking, make little effort to dig it up. Competition, in many cases, has given way to the "pool," where all reporters share & share alike, or to cliques that work for the defeat of outsiders.

The tightest clique is in the White House, where Press Chief Joe Short tries to maintain an air of impartiality to all newsmen. Actually, he slaps a lid on formal news announcements until he can reach Merriman Smith of the United Press, Robert Nixon of International News Service and Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press, or call in substitutes from their bureaus. But even Joe Short can't shut off leaks. Louis Johnson, an expert on leakage, admitted that he had discounted all the reports that he was being fired as Secretary of Defense until he read an exclusive story by the A.P.'s Vaccaro.

In theory, the presidential press conference is open give &. take, but actually it has now become almost as prearranged as a meeting of diplomats. Before each conference, the President is carefully briefed on the questions likely to be asked; sometimes a planted question is given to a friendly reporter, to draw out something the President wants to say. Sometimes correspondents help by telephoning their questions ahead. (Their excuse: this is the only way to get a thought-out answer from slow-thinking Harry Truman, who might otherwise muff a complicated question thrown at him suddenly.) And the President is not above giving reporters a misleading answer to sticky questions if he thinks he can get away with it.

The Formula. Like the White House, the State Department has an official "spokesman," Press Chief Mike McDermott, who has been in the department for 31 years. But soon after Dean Acheson became Secretary, State installed a young man known to the staff as "the high-level leak," to give major correspondents as much "background" information as he thought necessary to put over State's point. When State's troubles multiplied, Acheson and his high command took to talking to reporters and selected pundits in relays, have-now staged nearly 1,000 such off-the-record conferences.

Under this adroit propaganda system (which recently caused the Washington Post to cry that the "real news of what is happening in the Capital ... is more & more limited to mouth-to-mouth circulation"), big policy stories follow a pattern. First there is the informed tip, carried by favored columnists and correspondents, next the background briefing, resulting in a rash of dope stories. Then, if the idea has been well received, comes the fanfare of formal announcement.

The Confidence Game. Guidance sessions (which sometimes bring more than 400 newsmen to the Press Club to hear a big wheel) often permit correspondents to seem wiser in print with "dope" stories than they really are. And the confidence game has also brought a great evil in its train: the camaraderie between officials and newsmen encourages Government officials to keep facts off the record which should be published, enables them to dodge responsibility for phony stories, permits unscrupulous bureaucrats and politicos to backstab opponents with impunity. Furthermore, even competent correspondents who are constantly being "guided" by off-the-record conferences occasionally miss real news. For example, State Department correspondents had so often been confidentially told that the U.S. planned to get tougher toward Communist China that they missed the story completely when Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk finally made the "get-tough" speech (TIME, May 28).

But such bloopers are becoming rarer as reporters learn to detect the booby traps. The heartening fact is that in the years when history has borne down on the U.S. like an express train so many Washington correspondents have caught so much of the news.

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