Presswatch/Nosing Around

...Yes," she said, speaking hypothetically...

...The press corps began to question the "credibility" of presidential press spokesman Larry Speakes because he had not informed them of the skin cancer as soon as the tests had disclosed it...

...racy that martyrdom was necessary to stop him...

...First, it shows the President in a more heroic light than that in which he normally appears in Mr...

...Instead, what we got was "Nosegate...

...Individual investors can be more long-term oriented since favorable tax treatment requires at least a six-month holding period...

...When this negative news hits the market place institutional selling occurs and the price of stock drops...

...Their philosophy and motivation are better revealed by what they do than by what they say...

...They are not bound together by opinions at all...

...Then, having won the election, why did the President not rush into hospital for a life-saving operation...

...Now there are reasons for this nosiness...

...All journalists would then be libertarians-a very boring state of affairs...

...One needed to pinch oneself to recall that these angry exchanges concerned a delay of one weekend in reporting the fact of a harmless skin cancer...

...These stipulate that any such program dealing with Northern Ireland terrorism must be shown to the Northern Ireland governor of the BBC, in this case Lady Faulkner...

...He risked his life to keep Walter Mondale out of the White House...

...Reagan had an operation to remove a pimple, or "pampoule," from it on a Tuesday, and the fact was announced to the media on Thursday...

...What Mrs...

...A television interview, however harshly conducted, inevitably treats its subject as someone whose contribution to public debate is worthy of attention...

...Thatcher did not know-but what the Sunday Times did know-was that the BBC was planning to do a documentary that included such an interview with Martin MacGuinness, formerly the IRA's "chief of staff (to use the inflated jargon) and now a Sinn Fein member of the Northern Ireland Assembly...

...Nosegate," then, describes a phenomenon of journalism which deserves attention...

...These journalistic attitudes amounted to professional arrogance of almost medical proportions...

...One was reminded of the remark that the entire history of the world might have been different if Cleopatra's nose had been half an inch longer...

...We must learn what the terrorists stand for...

...Of this suggestion two remarks may be made...

...Hitch-ens, citing the medical correspondent of the London Observer, suggested that the President's cancer had been discovered in 1984 but that the news of it had been suppressed in the interest of winning the election...

...But what of the question of substance raised by Thatcher: Should television broadcast interviews with terrorists...

...Hitchens's columns...

...Secondly, the governors were appalled at the program when they saw it...

...Reagan is quite right to feel that some of the press attention to Mr...

...Instead they canceled it...

...Speakes replied he had not "lied" (even though he had not been forthright) and that his credibility was in excellent shape...

...Sorry, I just couldn't resist...

...During the intervening years, Ireland has moved quite far in a liberal direction...

...And the reason is that most institutional money managers are short-term result-oriented because much of the money they manage doesn't pay taxes (Pension Plans) and because they are competing against other institutions for assets to manage...

...The nose issue should by rights have been brought to a halt then and there...

...They are its final editorial court of appeal...

...The reasons are hardly mysterious...

...But the objection presented with especial passion was that banning an interview with a terrorist was the start of a slippery slope leading to general political censorship, dictatorship, dark night, and old chaos...

...It is refuted by the example of the Irish Republic...

...It therefore became the bounden duty of newspersons to watch hawk-like for any signs of the illness recurring...

...They discovered that the program had been made in contravention of the BBC's own internal guidelines on programs concerning terrorism...

...At a Monday press conference, the President gave a very full account of the medical facts, skin cancer and all...

...In reply to this, the journalists argued that "we need to know our enemy...

...He never passes up a chance to get on the box...

...The National Union of Journalists, which itself tries to censor any opinions on racial and sexual matters of which it disapproves under the guise of upholding "professional standards" (it never somehow reproves bad spelling, bad punctuation, or rolling up dead drunk to cover the town council), then got into the act...

...Now, as a result of minor surgery, the President's nose is marginally smaller...

...Since much was later made of MacGuinness's status as a "democratically elected politician," it should be made clear that Sinn Fein is simply the Public Relations Department of the terror machine...

...This was not done, it was said, for the incredibly feeble reason that Lady Faulkner was due to retire soon...

...These respectable arguments struck the White House press corps as sinister harbingers of censorship and deceit...

...We now know that they did so for two reasons unrelated to Brittan's letter...

...Instead he dawdled around governing the country for eight months...

...After all, journalists are generally subject to that form of censorship called editing...

...What better than to have the President himself, apparently in good health, reveal the news and then go on to emphasize its true triviality by lamenting that he would no longer be able to get a good suntan...

...And a major political row began...

...After all, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has pointed out, some people like killing, hurting, and frightening others...

...The Irish government introduced a formal government ban on interviews with the IRA on the Irish National Network, RTE, in 1972...

...The argument that it should not is based on the theory that such interviews confer legitimacy and respectability upon the terrorist...

...But the procedures laid down for editing programs on Ulster terrorism had been previously ignored...

...No additional censorship has been imposed...

...Besides, it is naive in the extreme to imagine that such an interview would tell us what terrorists "believe...

...It can either know everything or it can tell everything, but it cannot do both...

...The adage Buy on Bad News-Sell on Good News is another way of stating this philosophy...

...At once they wanted to know if the growth removed had been "cancerous" since the main anxiety after the colonic operation was that the cancer might have spread to other parts of the body...

...But a President, though on display, is entitled to the minimum privacy of not having his bladder function described to the world...

...To be fair to all concerned, I cannot really imagine that the President regarded Mondale as such a threat to America and democJohn O'Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the New York Post and a columnist for the Times of London...

...The Sunday Times duly splashed the story: Thatcher condemns BBC interview utterly...

...Gradually the terrorist ceases to seem like a criminal and becomes a sort of politician...

...As we now know, the nose pimple was a minor skin cancer, medically unrelated to the colon cancer and probably the result of too much sun bathing...

...The governors were simply correcting that omission- which we might classify as omission by stealth...

...And they may have felt that the announcement of the skin cancer should reflect its medical unimportance...

...They are not likely to stand up and say so on the evening news, but their actions can be judged to point to that conclusion...

...So if the press, intent on safeguarding the nation from serious medical deception, is to be allowed full access to all the details of the President's medical condition, then it must accept the corresponding restraint that doctors accept-namely, confidentiality (a.k.a...

...The British home secretary, Leon Brittan, actually has the legal authority to instruct the BBC to cancel a particular program...

...To the Washington press corps, this was history...

...Like most arguments which see a dire threat to the First Amendment, this is hysterical exaggeration...

...Alarmist hysteria of this kind was the staple of speeches at a special showing of the BBC documentary under NUJ auspices...

...The President himself was not told the results of the tests until that weekend...

...But why even that delay...

...This is justified by the argument that, if lesser standards are applied, we might end up with a Woodrow Wilson White House in which Nancy's finger is on the nuclear trigger while a sick President repines upstairs...

...The Buy Low-Sell High philosophy means that you buy good quality stocks when they are out of favor...

...Our Investment Philosophy "Buy Low-Sell High" The Lemley Letter suggests long-term investments in keeping with the Buy Low-Sell High philosophy...

...Thatcher called for the media to adopt a voluntary code of conduct that would deprive terrorists of the "oxygen of publicity...

...A week later, she was asked by a London Sunday Times reporter at a Washington press conference if, in view of this, she would condemn the BBC if it were to screen an interview with an IRA terrorist...

...This is poppycock...

...As with "Nosegate," the lesson is clear...

...While the philosophy may seem simplistic -it works...

...By discussing his political aims, "motivation," and philosophy, it blurs the vital distinction between murder and legitimate political struggle, between crime and opinion...

...Has the Republic sunk into the dark abyss of fascism...

...self-censorship...

...In this particular case, the BBC journalists were on especially weak grounds in crying censorship...

...NUJ broadcast journalists called a one-day strike to protest government censorship-oblivious to the fact that a journalists' strike is itself a form of censorship...

...After a period of time those who run the company usually solve the problem, earnings start to improve, the institutions become more aggressive buyers, and the price of the stock goes up...

...President Reagan's operation for cancer had ended with the doctor's assurance that he had a better than 50 percent chance of surviving for a normal life span...

...In short, the Hitchens theory of an earlier cover-up fails to grip...

...But the right not to be murdered takes precedence over it...

...They had-I feel a phrase coming on-a cover-up mind-set...

...We must distinguish between the right to know and the right to nose...

...They are simply people who write for journals...

...She would "condemn it utterly...

...Storms, flouts, jeers, and recriminations ensued...

...Nor were the BBC governors, as some implied, acting ultra vires...

...To return to the nose, Mr...

...What has happened since then...

...An "Iron Curtain" was brought down on the nose-but only for one weekend...

...Journalists should have no such thing as a collective opinion...

...Worse, he had concealed the fact at his Friday press conference...

...The right to know is important...

...Finally, the BBC is accountable to the public through the governors...

...Instead, Brittan wrote to the BBC governors denouncing the idea of the BBC granting such respectability to a terrorist...

...Not in the least...

...It depicted MacGuinness as a moody but quiet young man, given to dandling children in his lap in the best Yassir Arafat tradition, while glibly defending the IRA's right to kill people...

...In trying to deny the governors any editorial control, even in extremis, the BBC journalists were asserting their right to receive large sums of public money and then to spend it exactly as they wished with no questions asked...

...It would be sugared propaganda...

...But this formal power has never been used...

...A his sheep-like orthodoxy is disturbing...

...No concealment of anything was attempted...

...So the White House press corps was waiting anxiously for two things: signs that the President was still suffering from cancer and evidence of a "cover-up...

...Nor was it used on this occasion...

...That would surely be an improvement on some doctor bounding out, declaring "the President has cancer of the nose," and then going on to explain at length that this was a medical term which meant he had had a harmless cancer removed...

...This method of investing should work in any market for patient investors, who have a desire to trade in the stock market for capital gains...

...And according to the canons of post-Watergate journalism, the very fact that the press is interested in any subject is plain proof that the government must be trying to conceal it...

...Promulgating the general principle that all journalists have a professional duty to oppose any limitation on free speech, they puiied the plugs on radio and television sets...

...The press drew the conclusion that this meant he had an almost 50 percent chance of not surviving...

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...No one has the slightest doubt what the IRA (or the PLO, or the Sandinistas, or the Red Brigades) believes in...

...If the President really were disabled by illness, there would be no way of concealing the fact in the present day...

...Indeed, charges of a cover-up had already been leveled in the Other Spectator by Christopher Hitchens, Washington correspondent of both the Spectator and the Nation...

...If journalists were forced by their professional standards to believe in completely unfettered freedom, there could be no Communist, fascist, conservative, or moderate liberal journalists...

...At the July conference of the American Bar Association in London, Mrs...

...A modern President is, quite simply, much more regularly on public display than were his predecessors of sixty years ago...

...His advisers, including Mrs...

...Reagan's entrails went beyond legitimate curiosity...

...But it shows how some people in the press were thinking...

...And if we did not know, a reporter's precis would be a more efficient way of telling us than a televised interview of terrorist and baby...

...Certainly the terrorist thinks so...

...Reagan, did not want him to learn the news from possibly misleading or exaggerated reports on television...

...Nonetheless, the governor's decision to ban the program was greeted with loud cries of "censorship," "bowing to government pressure," and so on...

...This was known on Friday but not announced to the press...

...At this point everybody-possibly including Brittan himself-expected the BBC governors to issue a ringing declaration of the BBC's independence and announce that the interview would go ahead...

...It is the journalistic conviction that the same standards of intrusiveness and suspicion of government which determine reporting of the State Department or the Environmental Protection Agency also apply to revealing the truth about somebody's nose...

...Sinn Fein members advocate murder and terrorism, but they graciously agree to leave their guns in the cloakroom...

...Almost certainly the real reason was that the bureaucrats in charge thought that she would object to the program and thus decided to avoid any such obstacle...

...All companies, no matter how smart the people in charge, eventually have problems with earnings or sales-either because of incorrect internal business decisions or because of external market forces...

...Asking questions was "censorship...