Presswatch/Stand By Your Man
Barnes, Fred
L e t ' s get rid of the silly stuff first. Jody Powell, the press secretary to President Jimmy Carter, thinks that ideological bias among reporters has only the most minimal influence on their...
...More than anything, 2Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie (reviewed in these pages last month by Richard Brookhiser...
...Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...This is both a logical impossibility and a complete inversion of the accepted standards of journalism...
...democracy," Neal writes...
...Cotnpared to which, Will's transgression is a trifle, if even that...
...But there is one powerful institution in our society that still lives by that rather arrogant and amoral precept, lives by it and prospers...
...Sounds bad, huh...
...Its hallmark is tortured logic, and some of that lingers with Powell years after the collapse of the Carter Administration...
...Since he left the White House, Powell writes that he found that "this opinion is shared by a large number of the more respected journalists in Washington...
...Willkie is not a political reality...
...Far from it...
...And like Agnew, he slips into the sort of political paranoia that is peculiar to embattled presidencies...
...So liberal reporters liked Kennedy, but how does that explain the soft-hitting treatment of Reagan...
...Powell couldn't find it when he was White House press secretary and he can't now...
...Does the press police its own malefactors...
...There is a faint echo of another famed press critic in all of this--Spiro Agnew--though you can't expect Powell to claim such sullied parentage...
...Having the support of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post was roughly the equivalent of CBS, NBC, and ABC getting together on a candidate in the age of television...
...But "because of their reluctance to criticize another member of the fourth estate, these opinions are not known by millions of Americans who read Anderson's columns in hundreds of newspapers...
...Does the press evade accountability...
...The same is true for CBS News, Time magazine, and so on down the list...
...It is, according to ABC, the responsibility of the government to prove that an event did not occur...
...The burden of proof, once the story is aired, shifts to the injured party...
...If true, the outburst of overcompensation for liberal bias was a historic first...
...everyone is out to get us' syndrome in the White House is a generally familiar problem...
...One of the nice touches in Powell's book is that he names names...
...He thinks that a massive campaign of disinformation by Reagan agents and the leaking of critical national security information by Reagan's sympathizers inside the Carter Administration affected the 1980 election dramatically, particularly because the press neglected to cover either...
...If the press feels there is reason to doubt the integrity of a public official, they will make sure that warning is conveyed to their readers and viewers...
...In the more than four years since that night, not one word has ever been mentioned on ABC News about the alleged bugging of Andy Y o u n g . . . Indeed, there was apparently no real inclination to check up on their story with a view toward correcting it if it could not be substantiated...
...Is sensationalism rampant...
...But why in the hell don't we make him one...
...Indeed, as Neal tells it, there was practically no Willkie campaign at all aside from his support by publisher Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune), the Cowles brothers (Look, the Des Moines Register, the Minneapolis Tribune) and the Saturday Evening Post...
...I n his harpooning of Washington reporters--columnist Joseph Kraft, TV correspondents Sam Donaldson and Lesley Stahl, and on and on-Powell naturally needles columnist George Will over his too-close ties to the Reagan campaign four years ago...
...Well, guess again...
...it was Willkie's massive and highly favorable exposure in the public prints that made him a national political force...
...As an egregious example, Powell cites the report on ABC's "World News Tonight" in August 1979 that "U.S...
...Columnist Jack Anderson, who reported in 1980 that Carter had a plan for a preelection invasion of lran, is "dangerously unreliable," he says...
...Russell Davenport, the managing editor of Fortune, was Willkie's most fervent advocate...
...intelligence agencies bugged the residence of UN Ambassador Andrew Young" and this alerted officials to Young's planned meeting with the PLO (a meeting which led to his ouster...
...He thinks the press gave Senator Teddy Kennedy a free ride in the 1980 presidential campaign, even on the touchy matter of Chappaquiddick...
...On April 6 [1940], he wrote [columnist] Raymond Clapper: 'The one man in America with the ability and the intellectual and oratorical power to rally these progressive Republican forces is Wendell Willkie...
...It is not that editors do not edit or that all reporters are without scruples," h~writes...
...Is the First Amendment invoked recklessly and reflexively by jqurnalists as a cover for their poor reporting...
...The 'circle the wagons...
...So the story was wrong, Powell says, and had been denied vehemently by Attorney General Benjamin Civileti...
...Isn't there a similar obligation with regard to someone with as much power and influence on public policy as Anderson...
...Most notable is the campaign ~of Wendell Willkie for the Republican nomination in 19"40, now brilliantly chronicled in a new Willkie biography by Steve Neal, 2 a highly regarded political reporter for the Chicago Tribune...
...That is not proper...
...Life published 11 pages of Willkie puffery in its May 13 i s s u e . . . In an era when national magazines shaped public opinion, Willkie became an instant celebrity,.a star...
...Powell, now a Washington-based ~William Morrow, $15.95...
...The only judge of the performance of the Washington Post is the Washington Post--or at least the only judge in a position to do much about it...
...Not so you'd notice, he says...
...But one of the things I believe most strongly about it is that it usually is not adeq u a t e . . . The fear that mistakes, incompetence, or malice will be discovered and exposed and those responsible will suffer the consequences simply does not exist in journalism to the extent that it should...
...Check...
...Even as savvy and likable a press secretary as Powell couldn't change that...
...In his pubIications, Luce "abandoned any pretense of objective coverage of the Republican contest and portrayed 'Davenport's man' as the defender of U.S...
...Jody Powell, the press secretary to President Jimmy Carter, thinks that ideological bias among reporters has only the most minimal influence on their coverage...
...Rather the opposite...
...Still, Powell recognizes another reason why Reagan got more kindly coverage than Carter in 1980...
...Frank Reynolds was reported to have said, in explanation of why the story was never retracted, 'I've never been persuaded that the report we gave was in error, therefore there is no need to correct the record.' That, my friends, is one of the more remarkable statements ever uttered by a responsible journalist...
...That investigation may be the longest in journalistic history...
...ABC closed its second evening news story on the bogus bugging by stating enigmatically that its investigation was continuing," Powell says...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 25...
...Reporters worried about accusations of unfairness to right-wing candidates and thus "overcompensated for their ideological preferences...
...Yes, yes, and yes...
...You will, however, go on to point out that Mr...
...Where's the accountability...
...Will's involvement with the Reagan crowd, the topic of so much breastbeating by puffed-up reporters last year, becomes all the more trivial and harmless in light of fresh evidence of engag~ journalism in past presidential campaigns...
...In the unkindest cut of all, Powell likens the press to its mortal enemy, the White House...
...Yes, he says...
...It also happens to be the institution that does most of the accusing of everybody and everything else: the fourth estate...
...Under those circumstances I would not have written about the stolen briefing books either," he writes...
...Has the press taken a never-sayyou're-sorry jag that is both dangerous and arrogant...
...He fusses too long over mundane matters, such as whether Hamilton Jordan was treated unfairly by the press in the Amarettoand-cream episode, but he does tackle some of the weightier questions head on...
...He declares that press bias resulted in far better campaign coverage for both Kennedy and Reagan than for Carter...
...And while reporters treated Carter's statements as those of a conniving politician, they took what Kennedy said "at face value...
...The process is roughly equivalent to saying, 'Well, I think the President and his chief of staff are decent fellows on the whole...
...Some now argue that this opinion was justified, but few maintain that it did not exist...
...The story had been developed by an inexperienced reporter who misinterpreted what officials meant when they confirmed learning of Young's planned meeting from "intelligence sources...
...Or maybe it's just what you expected from the White House memoirs of a loyal Carter aide...
...Using his Fortune letterhead and journalistic contacts, Davenport solicited the support of influential editors and political writers...
...But any careful observer can quickly detect large differences in the amount of editorial gcrutiny among news organizations and the fatal weakness is that almost all the checks and constraints are located within the organization...
...Yet ABC went with it...
...In fact, Powell seems to think--he doesn't say so explicitly in his reflections on his White House years, The Other Side o f the Story'--that the press snatched a Carter defeat of Reagan from the jaws of victory and a second term for Jimmy...
...Many reporters "personally did not like Carter," he says...
...Like Agnew, he finds the soft, vulnerable spots that reporters try to mask or ignore...
...The 'circle the typewriters...
...Both have a "tendency to become overly defensive when under attack," he says...
...And when Carter himself denied it-and no other news agency picked up the story--ABC continued to broad-cast the story...
...But he says that Will, once accepted by the Reaganites as a partisan, had to play by their rules...
...the First Amendment is at stake' phenomenon in the press is at least as common, almost as serious in its consequences, and much less well recognized or understood...
...The trouble was, these sources didn't include an American bug on Young's apartment...
...columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald and a commentator on ABC-TV, insists that what he calls the "never explain" mode of behavior has engulfed the news business...
...Kennedy "had among the Washington press corps one of the most loyal and effective claques in existence," Powell asserts...
...let's forget about this investigative reporting business and trust them to make sure the executive branch does its duty.' We leave the question of right and wrong in the press, unlike other powerful institutions in our society, to the in24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 dividual consciences of reporters and editors...
...I am a great believer in individual conscience...
...Simple...
...For public officials accused of a mistake or worse, refusing to apologize or explain is usually a recipe for disaster, particularly if the accusation is false," he writes...
...As defensive and wrongheaded as Powell sometimes is in his new book, more frequently than not he emerges as a trenchant and largely fearless critic of the Washington press corps...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
