A Tilt Called Cynicism

By Thomas Griffith

In politics, candor is what comes later, after the fact. Or, as Richard Nixon said on Good Morning America: "You have to dissemble, you have to recognize that you can't say what you think about [an] individual because you may have to use him or need him some time in the future. There's a lot of hypocrisy and so forth in political life." Nixon is world class in dissembling (thus the Watergate shock about his private language). But other political figures in their new memoirs are now talking with some candor about--among other things--what they think of the press. They fear it, they resent it, they feel ill used by it.

Jimmy Carter, in Keeping Faith, acknowledges: "We were somewhat ostentatious about setting a high moral standard for ourselves, and so my Administration was not to be given any room for error by the press." He quotes a good crack by his press secretary, Jody Powell: "There never was a honeymoon with the press, but just a one-night stand." Characteristically, Carter criticizes the press in the words of a "small group of senior political advisers" he had summoned to Camp David: "Everyone agreed that the news media were superficial in their treatment of national and international events and tended to trivialize the most serious problems with a cynical approach."

It is left to Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief adviser, to make Carter's point for him. In his own memoirs Crisis, Jordan says: "Jimmy Carter underestimated--as all Presidents do--the aggressiveness and hostility of the White House press . . . I believe that Watergate and Viet Nam pushed the American media from wholesome skepticism and doubt into out-and-out cynicism about the American political process generally and the presidency specifically."

Both Carter's and Jordan's memoirs are appeals for a review of sentence by political figures whom contemporary opinion judged to be losers. The effort and intelligence that high officials brought to such intractable problems as the hostages and the economy get more sympathetic treatment in their books than they had in the press. But it is no full answer to blame the cynicism and hostility of the press for this. Both men are themselves amalgams of idealism and pragmatism; even in their own telling, the high road of public service and the low road of political advantage seem inextricably intertwined. On any given day in Jordan's diary, it is hard to tell whether he considers Khomeini or Teddy Kennedy the greater enemy.

Neither writer, in criticizing the press, goes as far as Nixon, who in his memoirs RN argued that "the media are far more powerful than the President in creating public awareness and shaping public opinion, for the simple reason that the media always have the last word." Like many of Nixon's "simple" reasons, this isn't so. (In Nixon's own case, it was the combination of the press, the courts, the Congress, and finally the facts that did him in.)

To exaggerate the importance of the press, as many of its critics do, leads inexorably to charges that it is "unaccountable" and needs somehow to be sat upon. In its own interest, the press itself should do less swaggering around in white hats. Election Day at the networks was an orgy of self-inflation, from the competitive glitziness of the stage sets to the frequent announcements that ABC or CBS, not the voters, had decided that this Governor or that Senator had been elected.

Carter's and Jordan's criticisms are a reminder that the Washington press does have an occupational tilt. Many reporters feel that any Administration has vast resources in speechwriters, press secretaries and propagandists on payroll to disseminate the party line. To counter this barrage, the press concentrates on what is being concealed, evaded or denied. Jordan might call this emphasis cynicism (seeing everything tinted by one's own crabbed view), but it can as well be skepticism (doubting, and waiting to be convinced). When press and officeholders contend, readers and viewers should be the final skeptics.

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