DON'T LOVE THE PRESS, BUT UNDERSTAND IT

By Henry Grunwald

Americans have always had mixed feelings about their press. In folklore, the reporter is Superman's alter ego, but he is also the Front Page cynic who would trade in his grandmother for a scoop. By way of a more elevated example, almost everybody (at least among journalists) remembers Jefferson's famous remark that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he would pick the latter. But few recall that Jefferson also wrote on another occasion: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."

Thus attacks on the press are a good old American tradition, and the press should be able to take it. Journalists deserve much of the criticism directed at them and ought to examine themselves and their practices far more carefully rather than wrapping themselves in the First Amendment at any sign of hostility.

But in recent years, attacks on the press have taken on a new dimension and, particularly over Watergate, they have become mindless and reflexive. This is true not only of Richard Nixon's bedrock supporters but of many others--including, recently, Archibald Cox. The press should never expect to be loved or admired. But it has a right to be understood, and too many Americans do not seem to understand what the press is about and what part it must play in the American system. An estrangement between the press and large numbers of Americans is dangerous, not merely to the press but to the country.

True, the nature of the American press is confusing. It is a profitmaking enterprise, but it is not judged chiefly by commercial success. It performs a public service, but it is neither regulated nor licensed. Journalists have considerable power to help or hurt, but there is no code, no professional association to judge their performance. Paradoxical though all this may appear, it simply means that the American press is free--and would lose all its value to the country if it were otherwise.

That freedom raises many moral ambiguities about the source and limits of the authority of the press. One way in which these are frequently expressed is through the question hurled at newsmen: Who elected you? The answer is nobody--and that's the way it should be. No one should want a society in which all positions of influence and power are filled through the political process alone.* A diverse society needs all kinds of people--businessmen, professionals, artists--who are not chosen by the ballot. But while not formally elected, they all have their constituencies upon whose approval they ultimately depend. If the approval is withheld, they can hardly continue to function--and this is true of the press.

Further moral doubt about the way in which the press exercises its power is summed up in another frequent question: Why don't you treat a man as innocent until he is proved guilty? In short, the press is widely accused of having already condemned Richard Nixon in print. The fact is that the innocent-until-proved-guilty rule is a courtroom rule that does and should apply in judicial proceedings, where both sides have certain rights, including subpoenaing evidence, cross-examining witnesses, etc. It cannot apply in situations that are essentially political debates, and it certainly should not prevent newsmen from using their eyes, ears and heads to form conclusions. Actually, even the most hostile segments of the press have not proclaimed Richard Nixon's "guilt." Those who believe that he should resign have concluded from the known facts that the country would be better off without him--an opinion shared for some time (according to the polls) by a majority of Americans. Those who call for his impeachment want his guilt or innocence established by a trial in the Senate.

Not that the moral dilemma ends there. Newsmen constantly wrestle with the problem of how to find their way among the innumerable shadings of truth and the often agonizing choices about what to print and what not to print. Despite the public's frequently naive faith in "objective," just-the-facts reporting, every newsman must interpret and judge; which things to put in among various indisputable facts and what to leave out often constitutes the most important form of judgment of all.

In the Watergate coverage, such judgments must be made repeatedly in connection with leaks. As the accompanying cover story points out (see pages 68-73), the reporter's and editor's decisions must depend on many factors--the nature of the leak, its apparent accuracy, on whether it comes from a judicial body or otherwise. He must weigh the possible damage to individual reputations against the public interest. The journalist cannot assert the right to print everything and anything; he must decide each case on its merits, while remaining accountable to his editor and, ultimately, to his audience. The decision is usually a battle of conscience waged by journalists far more seriously than most outsiders realize. In general, the American press today is far more responsible, far less "yellow," than at any time in its agitated history.

The great freedom given the U.S. press requires self-restraint, and during Watergate--an exceptional national crisis--some of that restraint has disappeared. Against this must be poised the fact that from the beginning, the Administration had conducted a massive campaign of deception to hide its actions and defame the press. It is clear from the tape transcripts that the President himself withheld evidence from the public. It has long been clear that his principal aides lied and lied again while accusing the press itself of lying.

If the press sometimes seems obsessed with Watergate, the reason is partly to be found in the default of other American institutions, including Congress. No thunderous moral voices have lately been heard on Capitol Hill. Congress seems to be floundering, anxiously listening for public opinion. Any one of several Watergate developments was devastating to Nixon--including the Saturday Night Massacre, the famous "gap" in the tapes, the tape transcripts so strongly suggesting the President's complicity in the payment of hush money, his indisputable determination to cover up the entire affair, even to the point of condoning perjury by his aides. Yet Congress, and to some extent the country, has become so inured to these enormities that it seems hard to sustain indignation or even attention. To an apparently irreducible number of Nixon supporters, the President literally can do no wrong; for many others, in and out of Congress, it almost seems as if new outrages were required each week to keep the whole case real. This has created a moral and psychological vacuum that the press has filled. Congress, long subdued by the presidency and unaccustomed to lead, has been quite content to sit back and let the press perform as the cutting edge against the Watergate scandals.

The entire debate is beclouded by the tendency to see the whole press--or at least the "Eastern liberal wing" of it--as a monolith and a monopoly. That picture is grossly misleading. True, there are more cities now than ten years ago with only one major newspaper publisher (the total number of papers has stayed about the same in the past decade; current total: 1,774). True, TV news is largely controlled by three networks. But the American press is in fact extraordinarily diverse. This is the case both as to ownership and intellectual attitudes. People tend to overlook this, in part because of the ghastly term "the media," which suggests that all conveyors of information are alike--one great impersonal blob. The barbarism of speaking of the media in the singular ("the media is . . .") reinforces that impression. Americans have fought and even died for free presses and a free press; can one fight and die for something called the media?

At any rate, "the media" are a great many large and small, often contradictory if not warring, newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, columnists, editorial writers, reporters, publishers--together providing a mass of reportage and opinion that defies any single bias.

Ultimately, Watergate raises the question of what role the press is to play in American political life. To an extent, the adversary relation between the press and Government is right and traditional. But it is a relation easily forgotten in quieter times. In the past the press has often been faulted for being too complacent and too easily accommodating to power. Thus, in a sense, Watergate has distorted the true challenges that face the press. When Watergate is behind us, the American press will have a twofold task. It will have to carry out investigative reporting in areas far less obvious than the Watergate abuses. Even more important than investigation will be explanation. A shortcoming of the American press probably graver than any faults displayed during Watergate is the lack of expertise in many fields, a failure to develop the techniques necessary to inform the public on highly complicated subjects, to lay out the alternative choices and possible solutions in an increasingly baffling world. Cliche thinking and reporting are a far greater danger than bias.

At the same time, the press will have to re-establish some sort of balance with Government. As Paul Weaver, associate editor of The Public Interest, points out, in the American liberal tradition "the relationship between newsmen and source, between press and government, is one of structured interdependence and bartering within an atmosphere of amiable suspiciousness. Each side knows its role." The U.S. Government has generally been far readier to give access to the press than governments in Europe or elsewhere; at the same time the American press is far less ideological. Continues Weaver: "The press can make its contribution to the system only by maintaining close access [to government]-- a closer access than can ever be provided by law. The price of such access is some degree of cooperation and sympathy for government--not a slavish adulation, as it is sometimes said, but a decent respect for authority, a willingness to see government and persons in government given the opportunity to do their job."

This will be possible only if the Government in turn is reasonably open, does not cheat as a matter of habit, does not use appeals to national security and secret classifications as a means to hide from the people or protect it self politically.

Beyond all this, the press will have to help rebuild an American consensus, a new agreement as to the country's meaning and goals. That will require a tremendous effort, perhaps some new habits of thought and work on the part of the press and new, broader ways of giving the public access to print or to the air. While last week's Supreme Court decision struck down the notion that the Government can enforce anyone's "right to reply" in the press, a responsible press will have to ask itself whether it offers enough chances for "replies" to be heard.

The public in turn will have to make a greater effort at understanding where the press fits in our system. Mark Twain said that the most important function of the press is to keep people in love with their country. This statement is wrong if one assumes that love is blind. It is a fetching definition if one assumes that love includes being critical. The audience will have to learn, or relearn, that printing optimistic pap is no service to the country, while exposing the dark side of a society or a government can indeed be an act of love and loyalty.

An occupational disease of journalism is self-righteousness, an occasional belief that the Constitution was created only for the sake of the First Amendment and that to paraphrase Charlie (General Motors) Wilson, what's good for the press is good for the country. Yet with all these qualifications duly made, it is still true that when people irrationally attack the press, they attack America, or at least a vital part of it. Though they may pay lip service to a free press, they perhaps fail to understand not just the press but freedom. It is no trick to believe in freedom when it is comfortable. The whole point about freedom is that it must include the uncomfortable, the disturbing, even the dangerous. Freedom of the press exists not for the pleasure and profit of journalists but for the benefit of the nation. James Madison wrote: "Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of everything, and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided by the practice of the States, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigour of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any who reflect that to the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?" Hardly anyone would dare talk so glowingly about the press these days. But the principle Still applies. qed Henry Grunwald

* The French Utopian socialist Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) actually proposed that in the ideal society, editors should be chosen by popular ballot.

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