Presswatch/J.C. Superstar

...The last reflection of the Janet Cooke story is the "racism" angle...

...My guess is that every paper can find at least one full column per week in order to correct past errors...

...The only measures that would encourage me are those aimed at establishing a proper respect for the truth...

...I watched Dan Rather excoriate Alexander Haig for confusing the chain of command (or Constitutional authority) in the executive branch, and then heard Jeff Greenfield a couple of days later on CBS say that Rather had "cooly" discussed the event...

...The second is the story of the Gulag Archipelago, only presented by Solzhenitsyn a few years ago...

...But there is no question about the fact that equal opportunity programs have sometimes led to a decline in standards, especially here in Washington where everyone in the government bends over backwards to avoid the slightest tinge of racism...

...The truth got lost in the (political) shuffle...

...At a meeting in Washington just after the scandal, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors permitted themselves the self-serving observation that if the Post's editors had done their job right, the story would never have been published...

...Conclusion: Much of what gets printed and/ or broadcast is going to be false...

...The suppression of this story for twenty-some odd years is a tactical move...

...Consider what's been going on recently: The afternoon of the assassination attempt, I turned on ABC to hear Frank Reynolds giving an emotional obituary for James Brady, only to discover later that Brady was alive...

...But the major problem here is not energy, concentration, or even (for the most part) good will...

...The two columnists who managed to draw attention to the "truth" issue were Mary McGrory and Meg Greenfield (is it a coincidence that both are women...

...And how can those stories be checked if the publications themselves do the nominating...

...The economics of the news business requires that if you think your competition is "going" with a certain story, you "go" with it also, to avoid being "scooped...

...the picture of Maoism as a great success is disinformation...

...This is a fairly grim picture, and it cannot be brightened by the brave words of editors and ombudsmen who constantly tell us that the Post (or whatever) is a "great newspaper...

...It's interesting that Woodward should refer to Watergate, for there's a whole chapter of All the President's Men that tells of the time when Woodward and Bernstein wrongly accused a Nixon administration official of making certain statements to a grand jury...

...The only difference in the Cooke affair is that when the paper "stood by the story" it did not know that it was false...

...That's the way life is, and the reporters should be rather more modest about their own abilities to figure out what is correct simply by the way is sounds or looks or smells...

...Indeed, he had got one wrong just the week before, when he found a way to blame his favorite scapegoat-Secretary of State Haig-for an AW ACS decision that Haig had actually opposed...

...The actual figure is 950...

...The way the news business is run these days, there are no great newspapers in the United States...

...William Safire got at this question in his usual cunning way when he admitted that he himself had got stories wrong in the past...

...Janet Cooke, the author of the fraud, identify the real source of the story...

...Some black writers immediately concluded that the "real" tragedy of the affair was that it revived hostility to blacks in the profession, gave encouragement to racists, and threatened equal opportunity programs in the newspapers...

...Woodward said so when interviewed by the Post's ombudsman...

...Day forgotten the saga of the State Department, which was ordered to change its Foreign Service Examination until the results conformed to the pre-established racial quotas (ethnic balance, I mean) so dear to the Justice Department...

...Has he checked anything she wrote...

...and that means that our story considerably overstated the case when it quoted sources to the effect that the CIA previously considered terrorism a minor phenomenon.'' To return to Janet Cooke: One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is the Post's decision to stand by it when it came under attack from Washington, D.C...

...This is terribly hard work, and if done meticulously might deprive the editors of long, leisurely lunches and banker's hours: the sort of life-style that has been adopted by some (only some) types at major newspapers...

...Now, the Washington Post does not do that sort of thing: It has a choice of really talented and highly trained people every year, and can afford the luxury of meeting its quotas (I mean, improving its ethnic balance) with very high-quality minority representatives...

...On the sort of problems I work on, for example (foreign policy, intelligence questions, strategic issues), I generally get directly conflicting information from excellent sources...

...They went on to explain that this meant the journalist should have been forced to share her source(s) with her editor...

...Remember the way so much of the Western press hailed Maoism...

...Disinformation: Before the debate over disinformation gets out of hand, one should observe that the term is almost always misused in the press...

...Tony Day, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times (and a good editorial page it is, too) said that editors ought to "turn this point of view aside before it hurts feelings and gets us in trouble...

...A lot has been made of the operational failure: No editor insisted that Ms...

...officials...

...And I could satisfy the most exigent editor on the matter of sources, even giving names and telephone numbers of people who would confirm what they had said...

...If anything, the fact of her being black-in this case, at least -would suggest she was rather more talented than the usual new journalist...

...In a way this was like the story of the idol with clay feet, for it brought home to the press what the public had long realized: Journalists had been corrupted along with everyone else, and were no more reliable than anyone else...

...These days there's a little box that says, "in Monday's Blurb we said that according to the CIA 95 persons were killed by terrorism in 1975...

...rather the problem is one of knowledge and capacity...

...And hope for change is not bolstered by Ben Bradlee calling Janet Cooke a "helluva writer...

...When the White House slammed the Post for the story, and Woodward and Bernstein had in fact confirmed with a lawyer that they had got the story wrong, Bradlee issued a ringing endorsement of Woodward and Bernstein, and stood by the story...

...And this means that editors have to check the story, and not just the sources...

...Moral: Since television feels it must do "live" coverage of confusing events, the TV reporters and editors ought to take the time to explain to viewers that much of what is broadcast will undoubtedly turn out to be wrong later on...

...I quite agree that the Cooke story has little if anything to do with racism (lies are color blind), although one must point out that Bradlee said his confidence in the story came in part from the fact that Cooke is black, and hence ought to have better understanding of, and contacts in, the black community than a white journalist...

...According to the BBC, an article appeared in Peking, signed by a leading Chinese authority, saying that during the "great leap forward" Mao's agricultural policies (late 1950s, early 1960s) led to the death by starvation of between ten and twenty million Chinese...

...So the issue is accuracy, not sources...

...Not to put too fine an edge on it, according to their own account, Woodward and Bernstein wrote a lie, and their editor, knowing it to have been false, endorsed it...

...Indeed, there are very few that can check the stories coming out of the Washington bureaucracy in a normal 24-hour period...

...There is one big point, however, that has to be made: Our information about their world is very poor indeed, and on this there are three examples at hand: The first is the nuclear plant tragedy in Russia in the late fifties, that only emerged in the last couple of years...

...The newspapers, bad as they are, are better...

...But you may be sure that Safire had an excellent source (if not more than one) for his story, and that any editor limiting himself to checking the source would have been satisfied...

...There is a Bureau (or perhaps it's a "Directorate") of Disinformation in the Russian KGB, and its role is to purvey a systematically distorted picture of reality of both Soviet and Western realms...

...I offer an award to Marvin Kalb and Edwin Newman for refusing to endorse the rumors (like Brady's death), and for reminding viewers that although many people were going to draw conclusions from the lack of confirmed information, they should not do it...

...Events of this sort convince the public that the press is unreliable, and the public is right...

...But in each case the reflex was the same: Given the choice between a reporter's version of the truth and the government's version, the paper opted for the reporter...

...One would hope that a paper would have the courage to say something like, "the Blurb wrongly said . . . the truth is...

...Space does not permit examples this month, but I'll get back to it-in detail-next time...

...Or has Mr...

...Similar remarks were made by Anthony Lewis and Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times, with the latter quoted as saying that if a journalist didn't feel like identifying his sources to an editor at the Times, said journalist could find another newspaper to write for...

...with the latter stressing the decline of professional standards (she as much as said that much of what appears between quotation marks in the daily press was not said word for word, but rather represents a "composite" or a "sense of the speaker...

...Of course, the psychological effects on the Post's self-proclaimed stars were shattering: Bob Woodward had been warned about the "Jimmy" story, but didn't check it out, and it seems that even the great Ben Bradlee had had his chances earlier, but stuck with the story when it was challenged by the Washington police force and the mayor...

...As you can well imagine, there was considerable gossip around Washington that Ms...

...In a city like Washington there is never a lack of sources for whatever you wish to establish...

...That means that newspapers have to correct themselves if, as I assume, they will not restrain themselves from publishing and/or broadcasting stories that haven't been checked out completely...

...Marginal note: But shouldn't we insist that articles nominated for Pulitzer Prizes be checked out...

...Of course, this sort of confusion is one of the reasons I rarely watch TV, except for children's programs and sports events...

...Let's stop to take stock: The journalists are going to get some stories wrong, the editors are going to be unable to check them out, even if they are scrupulous and very hardworking, and the nature of the news game precludes editors' taking the proper time to check out the stories on a day-by-day basis...

...Worse still, all news operations, whether papers or TV or radio, run on deadline, and have to "beat the competition...

...How would he know...

...There are very few living people capable of checking out the majority of foreign news stories coming in to a major newspaper every day...

...Yet in many cases the story would be wrong, and could be demonstrated to be wrong by adequate footwork and brainwork...

...And they ought to do it systematically, not in the mealy-mouthed way currently practiced...

...Cooke had advanced at the Post not because of her journalistic ability, but because of her beauty and charm...

...So that when the Russians embark upon a disinformation campaign, their goal is to paint themselves as peace-loving, driven to their military programs by (reasonable) fear'of the aggressive West...

...When a president is shot, the confusion will be so great that lots of people will misspeak, lots of rumors will circulate, and the truth will be very hard to come by...

...That is, she was never made to give the actual name of "Jimmy" and/or "Jimmy's" pusher and/or mother to an editor at the Post...

...I share with the Post a low esteem for many of these officials, but there is no question that the Post's response was politically conditioned...

...So the insinuation that Cooke was favored because she was black, is nonsense...

...At seems to me that these remarks miss the point, which is the old problem of "what is the truth...

...My impression from the hundreds of letters to the editors in Washington and New York is that the public knows all this, even if there is some fuzziness about the details...

...IT IS NOT SIMPLY A MATTER OF SENDING OUT THE ODD LIE...

...And when it does turn out to be wrong, the broadcasters and journalists should not insinuate and imply that the government lied, or distorted, or misled...

...No one understands the significance unless they keep clips and go back to see what the context was...

...And if the board just reads the stories without looking into the facts...

...The third is a truly sensational story that I heard on BBC in mid-April (and have yet to see in the American press...

...And conversely, to show us as irrationally militaristic and imperialistic...

...Got it...

...According to Woodward, "we went into our Watergate mode," which means that the newspaper stonewalled, blindly endorsed their journalist, and hit the government...

...Indeed, during those hours immediately after the shooting in Washington, we saw an arrogant and rude bunch of journalists lambasting administration spokesmen for failing to confirm rumors or to provide detailed information, even though every journalism school student and every law student has been told repeatedly that in such a situation it is virtually impossible to get accurate information...