Presswatch / I'll Be Lying at State
Ledeen, Michael
I'LL BE LYING AT STATE by Michael Ledeen From the Washington Post, recently stung by the discovery it had not checked its stories carefully enough, comes a new phenomenon in journalistic ethics:...
...And since the Post is something of a bellwether, alas, I expect to see other papers using the double-whammy sandbag: Promise a source confidentiality, and then print his picture...
...The fact of the matter is that no one who knows France well feels inclined to make any definitive statements yet about the new Socialist government, and this sense of uncertainty should have been the keynote of our reportage...
...and she cheerfully accepted press accounts of a list of supposed members of a supposedly secret lodge of Italian Masonry...
...The first paragraph and the first sentence of the second paragraph are strikingly similar to the beginning of the Sawyer story (the page 10 article was signed by John M. Goshko) Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr.'s recent charges about big new arms shipments from Cuba to the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador are an exaggerated picture of the situation, according to U.S...
...Consequently, far too much of what appears in printed and broadcast journalism is simply politics by another name...
...Peter Sutcliffe, the new British "ripper...
...Worse by far was her treatment of the attempted assassination of the Pope a few days earlier...
...In the course of her ruminations, McGrory botched the name of Italy's leading newspaper (making it La Corriere della Sera rather than Corriere...
...Here we learn that the would-be assassin "is clearly a fascist,'' although the intelligence officials in Western Europe- and the Italian police-have reached no such conclusion...
...While the press should not always be merely a passive transmission belt, it should do that a good deal of the time...
...It began, "A Labor Department official yesterday revealed a list of tentative regulatory changes...
...Fair enough (aside from the grammar, but that is the subject of another, longer, column), but then the Post printed a photograph with the unusual caption, "Labor official who briefed reporters under a condition his name not be used...
...The award for wish-fulfillment goes to all those correspondents who believed Francois Mitterrand's cabinet to be "moderate" rather than "radical...
...As you will have gathered, I feel that the press is in terrible shape in this country, and the poor state of the press helps the government perform badly, since the government has to cater to the needs and follies of the journalists...
...In the case of Northern Ireland, an American journalist fabricated the existence of a British soldier, while international photographers (mostly French, according to Palmer), paid Irish children to stone-or worse-British soldiers...
...You may be certain that Ben ("Janet Cooke's a hell of a writer'') Bradlee would go all the way to the Supreme Court to protect Goshko's sources...
...The second story ws anri administration and anti-Haig, and so the sources got full protection...
...To round off the picture, the newspaper in Britain that denounced these ghastly procedures was none other than the Daily Mail, which itself had just paid enormous sums for the stories of the relatives and friends of Mr...
...Such practices will destroy us all, for they demonstrate that there are no longer any reliable standards in the journalistic profession, and that protection of sources, respect for "background," etc., depend in all likelihood on the caprice of a given editor or journalist...
...Just as Walter Lippmann observed repeatedly, there is a sort of Gresham's law at work in the media: Shabby ideas drive out good ones, and high quality becomes ever rarer...
...The passing of John Osborne, the one and only high-class White House correspondent left in America, marked the end of the great era of American journalism...
...Now perhaps the Post tried hard to get photographs, and simply couldn't get them by deadline, but I doubt it...
...That it is spreading here is cause for profound alarm...
...We also hear that "the Italians . . . are extremely sensitive about their inability to catch their own terrorists, including the murderers of Aldo Moro...
...These officials, who declined to be identified, are in the State Department and the intelligence community...
...There are no pictures of the officials from State and CIA...
...But the Labor Department spokesman got sandbagged without mercy...
...Some of our friends in Europe have noticed this trend, and have drawn the obvious conclusions...
...Awards for the Month: The best column comes from Ellen Goodman, who pondered the conflict between the desire to have our doctors, lawyers, and other professionals be compulsive workers, and the desire to have our husbands and wives be normal, well-rounded people...
...The lust for scandal is currently far too great, and the drive for "scoops" too overpowering, for the press to pay attention to simple reportage...
...The New York Times and the Washington Post failed to tell their readers that Mitterrand had selected the infamous Regis Debray (hagiographer of Che Guevara) as one of his top aides...
...Yet the accused murderers of Moro are currently in prison, awaiting trial, along with more than 1500 other accused terrorists, facts that McGrory apparently didn't dig out...
...If you read on in the Post of May 16 to page 10, you will find a story with a headline: "Haig Charges on New El Salvador Arms Flow Called Exaggerated...
...In her column from Rome published in the Star on Sunday, May 24, she gave a supercilious, faintly bemused treatment of a scandal that two days later brought down the Italian government...
...If it grows unchecked, this attitude will soon lead to a war of all against all, where each faction will have its own set of loyal journalists and editors...
...In an article written for Le Matin (Paris), Professor Michael Palmer of the University of Aston observes that while the American press may have reason to believe it is a veritable counter-power, "there are journalists who have mounted such enormous hoaxes that they leave one gasping.'' Palmer notes that hoaxes-or worse-are now widespread...
...No body wants to be married to a doctor who works weekends and makes house calls at 2 o'clock in the morning...
...She was one of the most honest columnists during the last presidential campaign, she has real spirit, and she loves Italy, as do I. So when she took off for Rome for the Washington Star to cover the assassination attempt on the Pope, I was pleased...
...Reflections: As I will shortly be working in the State Department, this will be my last "Presswatch" for a while...
...She did not say "alleged members," and piously concluded her coverage by stating "the real question is not whether Italy will go communist, but if its public officials will ever go straight.'' One might have hoped she would have waited for some convictions, rather than accept the street wisdom that all the accused (900-odd individuals) were involved in some chicanery...
...In many foreign countries, this war in the press merely reinforces the fractious-ness of the broader political culture...
...officials familiar with intelligence from Central America...
...On Saturday, May 16, the Post printed a story on the third page signed by Kathy Sawyer...
...But every patient would like to find one...
...The point, I suppose, is that the next time you talk to a journalist from the Post, and wish to remain anonymous, you had better say, "you can't use my name, my picture, a tape recording of my voice, or any other identifying element...
...At the end of the first paragraph we learn that the source "allowed himself to be taped [sic!] . . . but asked that his name not be used...
...The guy- in the Labor Department wasn't liked, for some reason, while the leakers from State and CIA were protected.I have a guess, but only that I think the Labor guy was carrying out orders, and that the Post didn't want to give the administration the privilege of "using" the press on a background basis (lots of good journalists and editors rail against such practices...
...Mary McGrory Department: I have a soft spot for Mary McGrory...
...Respect for the rules thus seems to depend upon the editor's attitude toward the source and the story...
...I'LL BE LYING AT STATE by Michael Ledeen From the Washington Post, recently stung by the discovery it had not checked its stories carefully enough, comes a new phenomenon in journalistic ethics: the double-wham -my sandbag...
...If I had to summarize my concerns, I would say that journalists have lost sight of one of their many obligations: to transmit simply to the citizenry the thoughts and actions of the government...
...The result of operations like Kathy Sawyer's is that sources in the government will simply stop talking to the Post...
...The results, however, have been mediocre-to-embarrassing...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
