Trying to Be Wise Three Times a Week

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

The judgment of one's peers is often the toughest there is.

So it is with the Washington press corps. Five graduate students at American University have interviewed more than a hundred members of the press corps on how they rate their colleagues. In the Washingtonian magazine, some of the press corps' views on Washington's star journalists are pretty devastating:

Most overrated: James Reston. Most respected: David Broder. Least respected: Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Most pretentious: Joseph Kraft. Most thoughtful: Richard Strout and John Osborne of the New Republic. Most predictable: Patrick Buchanan and Tom Wicker.

Scotty Reston of the New York Times overrated? This seems a melancholy assessment to those many who have long regarded him as Washington's ablest journalist--the role model of an aggressive competitor and fair reporter, with great sources, literate style and Calvinist integrity. The Washingtonian quotes one Reston colleague: "His problem is over-access. He gets to see people others can't see and he believes them and blows their horn." But surely, to be able to quote Carter's or Kissinger's private comment accurately is to provide valuable information. Reston's real problem is that like most other columnists, he writes too often. On the days when he has nothing special to say, his complacent commentaries suggest a comfortable Virginia squire more than someone in touch with agonizing concerns.

To call Joe Kraft pretentious, in a capital that also contains Marvin Kalb of CBS, is surprising. Ambitious might be a better word for the hard-working Kraft. He aspires to be as wide-ranging as Walter Lippmann once was but lacks Lippmann's rumbling, reflective authority. He gets around as Lippmann never did. Kraft can dispose of Jerry Brown one day, the Federal Reserve or neutron bomb the next, argue in another column that Carter follows "a policy of divine misguidance" (he has from the beginning condescended to Carter), then emplane to the Horn of Africa to see things for himself. Kraft talks to everybody and is well informed, but his judgments are made on the wing and are frequently undeserving of such certitude. David Broder, the "most respected" of reporters, confines himself to the U.S. political scene he knows so well and mines so thoroughly.

The Washington press corps seems unduly hard on today's columnists ("A few are fine writers, but none are great thinkers"), harder than are the editors I've talked to around the country. But by their own new choosiness about whom and what they publish, editors are in effect recognizing, and ratifying, the decline of the Washington columnist.

In the heyday of the Washington column, Lippmann embodied the word pundit. He made colossal misjudgments but never lacked audacity. As a young man, back in 1915, he defined his craft ("You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think") and admonished political writers: "The truth is you're afraid to be wrong. And so you put on these airs and use these established phrases ... You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions."

Nowadays, in many major newspapers, a Washington columnist can't even count on appearing regularly. Michael Gartner, editor of the Des Moines Register, subscribes to "a passel of them" and pays but $25 a week for Kraft, $20 apiece for Broder, George F. Will and Mary McGrory. He does not always run the columns he receives and often prints only three or four of their "most important paragraphs."

Other editors feel bound to run a writer's column completely or not at all, but they too pick and choose. "You get a little flak from older readers who want to read the same columnists every time," says Edwin Guthman, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "but we pick the four best things every day. One of the problems is that so many write about the same thing." Adds Anthony Day, editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times: "We go by interest and topicality, not by name."

Editors often have their enthusiasms--the literate George F. Will is one among newer columnists--as well as particular grievances. The vigor of a columnist's views doesn't trouble them, since with an avoidance of judgment that they call being open-minded, editors now seek for their pages a "broad spectrum" of attitudes. But they are wary of prejudicial opinions in the guise of reporting and most often cite Evans and Novak. The Los Angeles Times (whose own Washington bureau is highly regarded by the Washington press corps) dropped Evans and Novak because, in Editor Day's words, "we want to be responsible for the authenticity of things presented as fact." In Carter country, Editor Hal Gulliver of the Atlanta Constitution dropped William Safire for ignoring fact and truth while writing constantly in "the context of convoluted conspiracy."

It may be that the very Washington columnists who have enthusiastically chronicled the diminution of public trust in Congress and the presidency are themselves suffering from the current animus toward Washington-knows-best. More charitably, editors don't think that any Washington columnist, no matter how energetic and wise, can be knowledgeable and reflective on important matters three times a week. So for their Op-Ed pages, editors now look around for speeches or articles by specialists to cover many subjects. "The Washington column is over the hill a little bit," the Chicago Tribune's editor Clayton Kirkpatrick believes. "The world is more complex, the issues are more varied. Mark Sullivan used to write fundamentally about politics, but that was before politics became so embedded in science, in economics, in sociology."

It's not that journalism is no longer capable of growing giants, but that giants can't cover all the territory any more.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.