A Question of Zeal

Nixon partisans who accuse the press of recklessness in its Watergate coverage have been getting reinforcement from unlikely places. Columnist Joseph Kraft, an Administration "enemy" whose home telephone was once tapped, last week wrote of the "spirit of rivalrous competition and self-important narcissism now so rampant in the fourth estate." Managing Editor Howard Simons of the Washington Post, the most tenacious newspaper on the Watergate trail, spoke recently about "shark frenzy"--the urge among some newsmen "to rush in to get a bite of that bleeding body in the water."

Kraft was criticizing the coverage of the Watergate grand jury's confidential report to Judge John Sirica, which was handed up along with the indictments. Though his column did not offer examples, he said later that he was thinking of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, James Naughton of the New York Times, Newsweek and CBS. The network had speculated--erroneously, as it turned out--on the number of people who were about to be named as defendants and coconspirators. The three publications, and others as well, discussed the grand jury's deliberations over whether Richard Nixon should be indicted.

With few specific exceptions, grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret. Kraft conceded that in the earlier phases of Watergate, while the cover-up was partly working, journalistic enterprise was necessary to get at the basic facts. Now that the official inquiry is being conducted vigorously, he said, the "traditional inhibitions on reporting" should be applied. Abandoning that restraint, he warned, endangers individuals' rights to due process, threatens to wreck the prosecution's case on procedural grounds and gives journalism a bad name.

Though Simons was commenting earlier and more generally about the mood of the Washington press corps, he raises what amounts to the same complex question. When does reportorial zeal violate the canons of fair play? Journalism's first mission, to publish all important information that can be learned, occasionally conflicts with other imperatives that must be considered. The press is universally barred from grand jury proceedings, for instance, partly to guard the reputations of people who may never be indicted. Secrecy also protects the prosecution's case from premature disclosure.

It is true that there have been leaks from all sides in Watergate, that the news profession dearly loves exposes and scoops, and that the heat of competition sometimes melts good judgment. Last week, for instance, the Washington Star-News disclosed a private communication from Sirica to his fellow judges in which he mentioned Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's confidential estimate of the number of indictments to come. Though newsworthy, the story also intruded on grand jury privacy while adding nothing substantive to the public's knowledge of Watergate.

Yet Kraft's demand for restraint, which would be unexceptionable in most cases, raises its own problem in the very special circumstance of Watergate. This unique scandal is far more than a criminal proceeding. It has involved not powerless defendants but some of the nation's most influential officials. There have been repeated attempts to suppress evidence, minimize the case's importance, deflect guilt and hide behind the shibboleth of national security. These factors at first inhibited the press. Now the urge is to print everything obtainable in the belief that self-censorship would be itself a kind of coverup. In this atmosphere, there will doubtless be some excesses. Though Kraft is right in warning against abuses, the entire history of the Watergate mess is an argument for the fullest possible disclosure.

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