Presswatch/Anything Goes

...Will crossed it...

...There is a line that separates reporters and columnists from politicians, and it's not a fine one...

...Yet the press was relentless and Congress joined in by holding hearings...

...But if it turns out to be a major scandal, then the public will once again rely on the press to keep it informed-r-even if it has to publish purloined papers to do so-" The point, though, is not that the press should drop its investigations into Debategate...

...What would be the reaction of Accuracy in Media or Human Events if it turned up that, say, Joseph Kraft had dropped by a Carter debate practice and tossed out a question...

...Unless you subscribe to the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, there's no reason to rush to Will's defense...

...it is a legitimate issue...

...So it goes, as the Washington press feasts on the issue of how a debate briefing book and other documents got from the clutches of Carter and his minions to the Reagan presidential campaign team in 1980...

...But if any of them condemned the press treatment of Billygate, they never did so in my hearing...

...Marcus Welby...

...More recently, as Vemon Guidry pointed out in the Washington Journalism Review, CBS has taken the tack that Reagan was responsible for the recession, but the Federal Reserve had acted to prompt the recovery...

...And on top of that, he had also seen a copy of a Reagan briefing book on the desk of Hamilton Jordan earlier in the day...

...In truth, the food stamp program had been trimmed from $11.4 billion in 1981 to $11.3 billion in 1982...

...Soon they come to the conclusion that the journalistic profession is dominated by silliness and the reporting can't be trusted to get anything right...

...The press, at least since Watergate, would do the same to any President or major politician, conservative or liberal...

...The point is that it shouldn't publish stories that only belabor the issue without illuminating or advancing it...

...In Debategate, the disclosure that the briefing book had changed hands didn't stir the press initially...

...But that just doesn't happen to be the source of their rapt attention to Debategate...

...But-Strauss was scarcely asked a question about the new Democratic organization...

...To his credit, Strauss refused to take the bait, saying that he didn't have the foggiest idea about moles in the Carter White House...

...Who benefited politically...

...Richard Harwood, the deputy managing editor of the Washington Post, confessed that as a young reporter in Nashville he had written a politician's speech, then reported on it, then written a favorable editorial about it...

...Or there is the recent clumsiness of reporters in working toward a single name for the case of the Carter papers...

...Likewise, attempts to defend columnist George Will for his dalliance with Reagan during a debate practice session are undermined by the suspicion- actually, it's a certainty in my mind- that conservatives would be outraged if a liberal columnist had done the same thing for a Democratic presidential candidate...

...that is simply the way that daily journalism works these days...

...The prevailing rule is that being a reporter means you never have to say you're sorry-even when wrong...

...In the media seizure of this issue, and in the tenacity of their pursuit, we perceive what genuinely interests this capital city of the West," wrote columnist Patrick Buchanan...

...The Will episode is merely a symptom of a much larger problem within the Washington political/journalistic community," Harwood wrote...

...It is not beneficial to the press...

...There may even have been some punishable wrongdoing involved...

...The second type is plain, old sensationalism, the exploitation of a less-than-earthshaking story by the press because the yarn is a good one...

...Nonetheless, questions about moles persisted, and afterward the reporter who had insisted on making Debategate the focus of the press conference was rewarded a few bouquets of congratulations from her colleagues...

...Conservatives upset at Debategate coverage might have a stronger position if they had been complainants when Billygate was the issue...

...President Carter is quoted as saying there was more than one mole in the White House," the reporter asked...

...Jimmy Breslin, one of America's least credible columnists, wrote that Will's words "are an insult to the news business...

...No matter who is in the White House, the press attacks at the scent of presidential blood...

...My favorite was the Charles Osgood spot on the "CBS Evening News" to the effect that the "budget cutting wind" was "blowing strong enough...

...But reporters glommed onto the story when Reagan aides tripped over their own accounts of how the briefing papers came to them, contradicting each other or even themselves at times...

...Even so, it wasn't as if Billy were acting as a secret agent for the Libyans...

...to tear the roof off" some programs, "food stamps, for example...

...Do you agree with him...

...The crucial distinction here is between two types of critical stories about Reagan and his presidency...

...They boil down to: we've got to do this because there might be some real wrongdoing to ferret out...

...Once this happened, pandemonium in the press was inevitable...

...Well, I can think of lots of insults to the news business, but Will's peccadillo isn't one of them...

...For an insult to the news business, that little exercise will do just fine...

...Who do you think made Billygate a major flap in 1980, one that drained political energy from President Carter...

...In Billygate, the attack came several years after Billy's Libyan tie became known...

...It might, after all, amount to nothing...

...In judging whether I'm right, please remember Billygate, the flap that bedeviled Carter in the midst of his re-election campaign...

...But press overreaction to a shadowy story of potential lawbreak-ing or misconduct by presidential aides shouldn't surprise anyone...

...Given half a chance, the press always overreacts...

...Well, maybe, but I'm not going to hold my breath...

...I put Debategate in this category...

...As one trivial Gate follows another, all sound and fury signifying nothing, people begin to look at journalists in a funny way...

...Debategate may not be "anything more than a summertime diversion," wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post...

...Ben Wattenberg, the conservative Democratic journalist, expects that the Debategate debauch may prompt a public backlash against the press...

...Partly, but not completely...

...It wasn't Dr...

...Selected to be a co-chairman-and major-domo in charge of attracting reporters-was Robert S. Strauss, the gregarious Washington fixture and former aide to President Carter...

...This is business as usual-and not only in the case of a story about Reagan...

...The press charged when there was a hint of influence-peddling by Billy at the White House...

...If that is the case, then no one in the Administration need worry...

...It is, but that doesn't excuse Will...

...It all turns out to be fun and games for reporters hot on the spoor of yet another 'Gate.' But the right questions for journalists to ask should concern whether the Gating process is either accurate or beneficial...

...It's nothing to brag about, though the usual stream of lame, self-righteous excuses for the overkill have been offered up...

...Soon there will be a demand for Reporter-gate...

...For instance, there is the practice of attaching ''-gate" to every mini-controversy that comes along (a practice in which I have repeatedly indulged...

...It is, after all, an interesting issue...

...his connection with them and the money they had passed his way was well known and widely reported...

...They would pillory Kraft...

...Where conservatives go wrong in assessing Debategate is in concluding that ideological animus was the cause of the press riot...

...Just ask the Carters...

...PRESSWATCH ANYTHING GOES Uemocrats called a press conference in mid-July to announce the formation of a new National Caucus that would promote a single, coherent alternative to President Reagan's policies...

...Exaggeration and prolonged, largely unwarranted coverage are the hallmarks of this kind of journalism...

...It was, in fact, just like Debate-gate, except the presidential victim was not a conservative Republican President but a moderate Democratic one...

...True, most reporters, being liberals, would love to see Reagan stripped bare...

...He's hardly the first...

...It was catapulted to the status of major scandal, though the only wrongdoing involved was Billy Carter's failure to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of Libya...

...All of which warrants considerable coverage, though hardly the breathless, high-crimes-and-misdemeanors treatment it has received...

...The most conservative presidential nominee in decades, Reagan...

...The attacks are worse than the crime...

...What delights and captivates this city, as nothing else, is the delicious prospect of catching a major conservative with his pants down...

...It sure wasn't the Republican National Committee...

...Scads of these stories appeared in 1981 after the ballyhooed spending Cuts cleared Congress, with both the examples of suffering attributed to Reagan's -coldheartedness and drastic overestimates of the size of the cuts repeated endlessly...

...Some called it Briefingate, some Debategate, some, like Cohen, moaned about the lack of agreement on a single name...

...Instead, a television reporter peppered him with Debategate queries...

...Sometimes that | assault seems to be delayed, making it appear that the press is regurgitating old evidence for the sole purpose of discrediting a President...

...Silliness...

...Who do you think stoked up the AIDS hysteria...

...One is the pure ideological broadside, the type of story in which normal journalistic restraints are put aside in order to hold up some Reagan policy to public shame...

...In Washington, reporters and columnists have often joined forces with politicians, he noted...

...Since Watergate a tendency has grown up to take a minor story- sometimes true and sometimes not- grab it by the scruff of the neck, to shake it again and again, and to squeeze until a steady stream of contradictory statements can be made to sound like big time corruption, thereby dominating television day after day," he wrote in a July column...

...You just don't drift to that conclusion without some ideological compass pointing you in that direction...

...Wrong as Will was, he hardly merits the kind of criticism that has been dropped on him...

...Admittedly, what passes for journalistic ethics is largely hightoned posturing that masks an anything goes mentality, but there is one rule that has some flesh to it: you don't participate in campaigns you're writing about...