Presswatch/Premises, Premises

...What might not have been anticipated was the difference in the coverage of the press conferences held by each delegation, the Soviets in Washington, the Americans in Moscow...

...A month later, the dubious favor of their presence was reciprocated when an NCC delegation trekked through the Soviet Union...

...A delegation of 266 American church leaders, the largest such group ever to visit the Soviet Union, today ended a two-week tour of 14 cities with praise for the status of religion in the Soviet Union and condemnation of the United States role in the arms race," it said...

...There are significant constitutional issues here.' " [] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 25...

...The visit came at a time when the Soviet government has curtailed contacts with the United States...

...What Spear rinds to be manipulative is the simple effort, followed not only by all politicians but by nearly every member of the human race, to put one's best face forward...

...Jackson got 17 percent of the vote and 9 percent of the delegates, the Times noted...

...There is never, ever, any cost-benefit analysis in the budget cut stories, the amount of the cut being weighed, say, against the overall benefit that less government spending might bring to society...

...Not to put too subtle a point on it, but the difference was not in the style of the newspaper pieces...

...Miss Summersby could not be reached for comment...

...and Soviet churches in pursuit of peace...

...If it did, President Reagan wouldn't have been forced to back off from his plan to bar the disclosure for all time of any classified information learned by minions in his administration...

...Day after day this past June, reporters peppered the White House with questions about a possible summit, questions premised on the notion that Reagan's opposition to a summit was wrong...

...The tour pointed up a growing role assigned to the controlled churches in representing the Soviet Union to the outside world...

...Well, for one thing, they have their aides shower press kits on newspapers and TV stations in the hinterlands, press kits that are most likely filed in the trash can rather than perused reverentially...

...Now the whole manipulation myth has been packaged in a book by Joseph C. Spear,' who happens to be one of the country's best investigative reporters--but not a great analyst of how Presidents fare with the press...

...in the Times piece, it was skeptical...

...The most obvious example, of course, is the treatment of President Reagan's cuts in social spending...

...Yet a front-page piece in the New York Times at the end of the primary season concluded that Jackson had been "penalized" because of this system...

...And heaven forbid, the concept of welfare dependency never intrudes...

...Leaders of the group, sponsored by the National Council of Churches, also voiced irritation that the harmony of their visit had been marred when two demonstrators, demanding religious freedom, held up banners during a Baptist church service...

...Sure, Presidents would like to manipulate the press...

...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...

...make a brilliant Defense Secretary...

...As anyone who can tie his shoes would have expected, both groups came to the same, tired conclusion: The United States is responsible for an awful arms race...

...This practice is "the most ambitious public relations machine ever assembled for a President...

...That amounts to injustice, especially if your premise was that proportional representation should reign...

...If manipulation did work, Reagan wouldn't be President at all, Carter would be...

...The need for change was manifest," said Newsweek...

...For example: "The possible role of Miss Summersby in the general's late-night invasion decision is not known...

...Woolsey jotted down a mock story on how D-Day might be covered by today's reporters, and it was published in June on the op-ed page of the Washington Post...

...The premise of the Times Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...

...What mattered was the premise, and it was that the Soviet troupe was legit, wholly independent of the Soviet government and earnest in its desire for peace and tranquillity...

...Their stories reflected acceptance of the premise that one-man, one-vote should prevail in delegate selection...

...Future historians of the presidentialpress relationships will surely regard the decade of the 1970s as epochal," he writes...

...Reliable sources in Eisenhower headquarters have revealed that in the middle of the night he disregarded pessimistic weather predictions and overrode the objections of several subordinates in ordering the June 6 attack, which included an assault by Army Rangers on a German gun position atop a 100-foot sheer cliff, an operation described by a staff aide as 'a crazy gamble that was bound to get somebody badly h u r t . ' " The Woolsey satire was full of nice touches...

...Gen...

...The visit of the Americans drew thousands of words of coverage in the Soviet press, which quoted the visitors as supporting world peace and praising Soviet freedom of religion...

...And so on...

...Forget that Dean Rusk, who was Kennedy's Secretary of State, says a summit meeting might have been disastrous at the time of the Cuban missile crisis...

...The visit of the group, which included leaders of Baptist, Lutheran and Armenian Apostolic Churches as well as the rabbi of Moscow's Choral Synagogue, was arranged by the National Council of Churches as part of a long-range exchange of visits between U.S...

...story, all but flatly stated, was that the Soviet churchmen (not to mention their American visitors) were something more than unfettered priests infused with yearnings for peace...

...During this period the chief executives virtually mastered the media...

...Jimmy Carter...

...most liberals aren't about to accept Soviet church officials at face value...

...And when Reagan said at his June press conference that he was willing to convene one, the press responded enthusiastically...

...Name Address City State Zip Telephone ment, first-term Republican Congressman Buford Grundge, prominent critic of American involvement in the arms race, which led to the current hostilities, and of the unpopular aid program to a British government involved in such controversial human rights practices as massive wartime relocation of children, has called for a major investigation of Army procurement...

...But the fact is, manipulation doesn't work...

...Lyndon B. Johnson quits after a single elected term, Richard M. Nixon is driven to resigning, Gerald R. Ford suffers rejection in his bid for a full White House term, Jimmy Carter is humiliatingly exiled to Plainsmstill, the notion persists among reporters that manipulation is rampant...

...Like most Washington reporters, Spear can't see the forest for the trees...

...One could call the first liberal and the second conservative, but I wouldn't...

...by Fred Barnes Never mind the session that John F Kennedy had with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 (a new Berlin crisis ensued...

...unctuous aides whisper to them that it's easy...

...Richard Nixon did this...

...American casualties, many as a consequence of drownings in landing craft in the storm-tossed Normandy surf--about which the general had been warned--are thought to be among the highest for any single day of military operations since the Civil War...

...And some delegates--congressmen, governors, state chairmen--don't have to be elected at all...

...The account in the Washington Post of what the Soviets said at the end of their visit was written in conventional, matter-of-fact fashion that seemed innocuous enough...

...One of them was R. James Woolsey, an undersecretary of the Navy in the Carter Administration, a stalwart of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, and a man who would Presidents and the Press, MIT Press, $25.00...

...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...

...The satirical piece, under the headline "General With Roving Eye Loses 10,000 Troops in France," was both enormously witty and extraordinarily telling...

...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...

...Another ubiquitous premise in the minds of journalists is that summit meetings between American Presidents and Soviet leaders are always good...

...Or: "In New York, in another development, ACLU President Garrison O. Pugh charged today that there was massive deception involved in planning for the Normandy operation...

...Military duplicity and secrecy led the American people to believe that this invasion would probably occur at Pas de Calais, not Normandy,' said Pugh...

...The thought that an adversarial press might have made D-Day a far hairier--and maybe abortive--operation than it was occurred to more folks than just me...

...With delegates elected at the district level, he suffered the "disadvantage" of having too many delegates in one district, not enough in another, the Times said...

...The group visited 15 cities throughout the country and, on Saturday, joined in a consultation here on peacemaking with U.S...

...The spokesman for a delegation of 19 Soviet religious leaders winding up a two-week tour of this country said yesterday that world peace could be achieved if the United States would respond to the initiatives of the Soviet Union," it said...

...But there are cases, many, many of them, in which a liberal premise lurks behind supposedly objective coverage...

...And then Spear's book might make sense...

...Or: "In another major Washington developTHE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...

...For another, they conduct regional press conferences at which yahoo local reporters, not superknowledgeable Washington types, get to ask questions...

...yowls from the press caused the retreat...

...If so, they must have done it after they were routed from the Oval Office...

...The premise is that for every penny in lost government stipend, the welfare recipient is that much worse off...

...It doesn't in presidential primaries and caucuses, and it isn't supposed to...

...Jesse Jackson also got a break from many reporters who wrote about his challenge tQ the Democratic presidential delegation selection rules...

...it was in the premise behind the stories...

...To the naked eye, there wasn't much to the Post piece...

...In the Post story, the premise was naive...

...Dwight D. Eisenhower, rumored to be romantically involved with his 'driver,' Kay Summersby, ordered an invasion of Normandy in the early morning hours yesterday," it began...

...How do Presidents do this...

...Russian church figures often speak out on themes, such as the deploying of American missiles in Western Europe, that echo their Government's foreign policy positions...

...church leaders...

...Story after story cites the reduction in welfare benefits that some poor devil is suffering, and leaves it at that...

...Nor does it in presidential elections (remember the electoral college...

...No matter how flagrant the assault and battery on the President by the press, the idea lingers in the journalistic mind that somehow, some way, through a process that is both mysterious and sinister, the guy in the White House is manipulating his 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 coverage...

...Gerald Ford...

...Believe me, premises matter...

...Now, turn to the New York Times for its story on the American church leaders' session with reporters in Moscow last June, and you find something that is, well, different...