Newswatch It's News, But Is It Reality?

By Thomas Griffith

Just about the most annoying question a journalist faces is, Why don't you print more good news? This question assumes that reporters get a kick out of reporting the bad, have some political motive for doing so or know that sensationalism sells papers. Journalism answers testily: Do you want to avert your eyes from reality and live in a dream world? We have to report the good and bad.

When stated this flatly, the press's side of the argument seems to be the better. The press has a harder time coping with critics who concede that of course the bad must be reported too, but is the right balance being struck? Does the news on the air or in print truly reflect reality?

When Dean Rusk was Secretary of State during the Viet Nam years, he angered the press by asking a persistent reporter, "Whose side are you on?" In a deposition he made in General Westmoreland's libel suit against CBS (it was not quoted directly in court), Rusk was asked whether the Johnson Administration deliberately minimized the war's bad news and emphasized the good. His answer:

"Imagine Franklin Roosevelt going on nationwide radio hook-up . . . and saying the following three months after Pearl Harbor: 'My fellow Americans, Hitler's armies are smashing at the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad. Russia will be knocked out of the war in the course of the next six to eight weeks . . . The Japanese have just destroyed the heart of our fleet at Pearl Harbor and we see no way to stop them.'

"Now had he said that in March of 1942 . . . in certain present-day standards of something called 'credibility,' he would have been telling the quote truth unquote. But . . . he would have been telling a profound lie because he and Churchill and Stalin and millions of us mobilized faith and hope in necessity . . . Now, you must not expect people to try to poor-mouth % what it is they are trying to accomplish. Nobody else does it. Why should we in government do it?"

There is a kernel of truth in this that transcends the usual press charge that government lies, conceals, misleads. Press skepticism has actually increased since the Reagan Administration developed into a high art form the symbolic rituals of optimism and a talent for minimizing embarrassing news. We now get government salesmanship by pageantry, which television feels compelled to present while trying to offset it by commentary. The result can hardly be called reality.

"And that's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite used to sign off his newscasts, implying you were getting it all, the good and the bad. But this can hardly be true when so much of the world is off limits to reporters and cameramen. From these areas the bad news filters out only gradually, and usually without pictorial evidence. The recent commemorations of two past wars prove the point. We relive the painful memories of American soldiers torching a village but see no comparable footage of the North Vietnamese committing atrocities. The result is a distorting imbalance. So much around the world goes on out of sight. The horrors of the Nazi death camps, discredited as rumors at the time, became convincing, documented reality only when they came within range of cameramen advancing with the Allied troops at the end of the war.

Perhaps, like the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packages, each news program and newspaper should carry a notice: "Warning -- this is only part of the day's reality. We try to show the good and bad where we are allowed to roam freely. Where we cannot, we show mostly what dictatorships allow us to cover -- state funerals, ceremonial occasions, circumscribed tours. We can only conjecture what miscarriage of justice took place last night in Tashkent or Kiev."

With such gaps in its coverage, the American press often seems to be overemphasizing the negative. But do people really want the good news stressed and the bad slighted? In countries where the press is controlled and only news considered upbeat by the regime is permitted, readers have to fathom what is being concealed, rumors get undue credence, and, at some personal risk, thousands listen to foreign radio broadcasts. They too are seeking reality.