Celebrating a Media Maverick

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Against this background, it is easy to see why the average Washington correspondent is content to write what he is spoon-fed by the government's press officers. Especially since the press is largely Republican and this is a Republican Administration, there is little market for 'exposing' the government. Why dig up a story which the desk back home will spike?

It was this astringent view of our profession and its circumstances which I found lacking in the newspapermen's testimony which opened the investigation launched here by a special House subcommittee on government 'information.' The most perceptive of the witnesses, and one of our very best reporters, James Reston of the New York Times, put his finger on the vital point when he said that worse than suppression was the 'managing' of the news by government departments. But the news is 'managed' because reporters and their editors let themselves be managed.

The State Department is an outstanding offender. Very often, for example, newspaper readers get not so much what actually happened at the UN as the 'slant' given out in the corridors afterward to the reporters by a State Department attach?.

The private dinner, the special briefing, are all devices for 'managing' the news, as are the special organizations of privileged citizens gathered in by State and Defense Departments for those sessions at which highly confidential (and one-sided) information is ladled out to a flattered 'elite.'

As a reporter who began by covering small towns, where one really has to dig for the news, I can testify that Washington is in many ways one of the easiest cities in the world to cover. The problem is the abundance of riches. It is true that the government, like every other government in the world, does its best to distort the news in its favor-but that only makes the job more interesting.

Most of my colleagues agree with the government and write the accepted thing because that is what they believe; they are indeed-with honorable exceptions-as suspicious of the non-conformist as any group in Kiwanis.

Though the first day's witnesses included the best and boldest of the regular press, no one mentioned the recent deportations of radical foreign language editors and of Cedric Belfrage of the Guardian. No one mentioned the Communist editors and reporters prosecuted-for their ideas-under the Smith Act. No one mentioned the way McCarthy 'investigated' James Wechsler. Surely thoughtful men, as aroused as these were over the future of a free press, might have given a moment's consideration to the possible danger in such precedents. Did they feel it would be indiscreet to go beyond respectable limits? That such fundamental principles are best left for orations on [journalists John Peter] Zenger and [Elijah Parish] Lovejoy, both conveniently dead?

The Beginnings of a Revolution

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