Presswatch/Bad News Bearers

...the result might be much less neurotic journalism...

...His remarkable achievement in this space was to write a column that never shrank from justified, documented, and occasionally savage criticism of his peers, but never exhibited a note of peevish nagging...

...The discovery of the forty-seven SS graves at Bitburg gave the President a choice of evils...

...The big story on such occasions is not the violations themselves, but the embarrassment reports of them will naturally cause Secretary Shultz and President Reagan...

...Reality is the name he gives to his mistakes...

...has surfaced...

...No, my regret is that, like his other readers, I shall miss the incomparable Fred...

...It was possible to discover from them exactly how this blunder was conceived and allowed to flourish...

...The customary liberal response to this question is (a) to deny it, or (b) as a fall-back position, to admit that, yes, journalists are by and large liberal but that they wouldn't dream of letting this interfere with their work...

...There is a certain irony in being attacked by liberals for using them...

...Many of those who now call for simple moral statements recognizing the distinction between good and evil were two years ago wearily dismissing just such a statement as simplistic rhetoric...

...James Reston's formula: He shows no "sensitivity to the memories and sufferings of the last half-century...

...He embraces the accusation proudly because liberalism, you see, is neither more nor less than journalistic professionalism...

...Irvine's check through the files, however, could not find this great multiplicity of stories, or indeed any...

...This is not meant to suggest that every German soldier was guilty of Nazism-that notion was scotched by the Nuremberg trials-merely that the comparison was inapt and offensive...

...It is not so much that the liberal media are uninterested in Soviet violations of arms control pacts as that they are positively hostile to such reports...

...The controversy it has given rise to here prevents its providing the reconciliation it was intended to achieve...

...When Senator Helms complains about liberal bias, "he is complaining about its vitality, its energy, its determination to confront the nation with the worst news of all- bad news...

...The networks in particular were not disposed to devote much time to it, plainly feeling that a Cambodian or Vietnamese bloodbath might make the Vietnam war seem justified...

...Plainly, the reason was that by then it was being regarded by many Germans, including the Kohl government, as a test of U.S...

...To the charge of predictability I plead guilty but provoked-and cite in evidence an article by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post...

...Did it seek out, for instance, the bad news about Geraldine Ferraro's finances and odd family connections skeptically, aggressively, and energetically...

...But is the press really determined to make us face all kinds of bad news...

...And the blunder was presented as a blunder, not as a crime...

...For the true mark of prejudice is not being fiercely opposed to other views-it is not realizing that there are other views...

...And it will not achieve its purposes...

...And this approach continues...

...And when the indispensable Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media inquired why it had been ignored, he was told by the news editor Larry Stern that it was because they had run many such stories...

...Those seventeen major violations might be thought by you and me to justify the critic's disdain...

...With only three paragraphs gone, the seemingly eternal debate on "Are the media liberal...

...His criticism of the evil empire that did not fall in 1945 but threatens us and its own subjects still, used to strike these worldly people as unsophisticated, naive, and dangerous...

...And the liberal media's version of these events became "Why are we persecuting Mrs...

...President Reagan's decision to lay a wreath at Bitburg military cemetery during his May visit to Germany has stirred up a vast, unnecessary controversy...

...In Mr...

...debate...

...He could either go ahead with the ceremony-and offend veteran and Jewish organizations and a great many other people-or cancel it-and offend the West Germans...

...Ho hum...

...Reagan certainly laid himself open to such attacks by one or two offensive and ridiculous arguments-notably, that German soldiers were every bit as much victims of Nazism as were the Jewish prisoners in Dachau and Auschwitz...

...But Mr...

...Subsequently, when the U.S...

...But to lay oneself open to attack does not justify any and every attack...

...Reconciliation, forgetting the past, looking to the future-these are the staple catch-phrases of liberalism...

...Jesse Jackson, the friend of Louis Farrakhan, can denounce Mr...

...But this argument hinges on a confusion between two different meanings of the word "remember...

...But neither his words nor his actions will bear the monstrous interpretation that he was anxious to sweep the Holocaust under some vast historical carpet...

...The President may also have thought he was using liberal arguments when he defended the wreath-laying...

...When we turn to international affairs, the "bad news" stories in particular have received scant liberal attention...

...Ferraro laid out for inspection a distinctly partial and inadequate account of her family finances...

...Such solicitude is rare...

...He was, in my view, mistaken...

...But the Times evidently felt that his disdain discredited the report of the violations...

...economy started its dramatic revival in 1983 and prosperity became a perfectly legitimate news story, the media showed a remarkable lack of interest in the fact...

...Lewis's charge of insensitivity to evil...

...citizenship on Konrad Adenauer, the greatest statesman in German history and a great friend of the U.S...

...An employee of the ASC claimed that Ms...

...Reagan has amply made clear that he does not think that the Holocaust should be forgotten...

...The world-view that Senator Jesse Helms denounces as liberal, claims Mr...

...It is a bad, indeed absurd, test...

...Now, Mr...

...Hardly...

...They concentrate on those brands of bad news that are good for liberalism...

...Cohen, "is one most journalists would call professional...

...Were there still large numbers of political prisoners, concentration camps, slave labor, and anti-Jewish discrimination...

...Also, there were fears that if he should be installed in "Press-watch," it might upset the entire balance of power in the region...

...First the Cambodian genocide, though indignantly denounced today, was ignored by much of the liberal media when it was actually taking place...

...Cohen is being quite sincere in not seeing this plain fact...

...Nothing was artificially manufactured...

...Political movements which try to deny it have been given very short shrift by the German electorate...

...But they should not be allowed too much weight...

...For Mr...

...See, for instance, the recent headline in the Sunday New York Times business section: "A Steady C.P.I.-For Now...

...Becker subsequently denied making the remark, but no report of Pin Yathay's story appeared in the Post...

...Becker, while putting on her coat, had remarked that she had heard enough of this "junk...

...One is reminded of Boulay de la Meurthe's comment on Napoleon's execution of the Due d'Enghien: "Worse than a crime-it's a blunder...

...A second topic where bad news has not exactly been aggressively sought is arms control...

...Several columns hinted nastily that Mr...

...What could be fairer than that...

...So when he expresses liberal opinion he is simply telling it like it is...

...It was only later that the poverty caused by the Reagan welfare "cuts" became the media's abiding passion...

...Reagan should have canceled it and compensated with some such gesture as posthumously conferring U.S...

...friendship...

...Cohen grandly disdains such subterfuges...

...Take, for instance, Mr...

...But when the Rev...

...Ferraro...

...For what it means is that not only do liberals retain the power in such establishment outposts as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the three networks, but they have grabbed the prestige of being the underdog too...

...On this occasion, the White House can have no complaint about the news reports...

...A Wall Street Journal reporter who persisted in questioning her at the press conference was booed by other journalists for his unseemly curiosity...

...The liberal feminist influence in the media ensured that the story was at first ignored, then pursued reluctantly and timidly when the non-liberal media turned up embarrassing details, and finally dropped altogether when Mrs...

...It is nice to know that I and others addicted to the special brand of Barnesian upbeat political journalism will normally be able to find him on another page...

...And in Mr...

...Few major media representatives were present...

...A particularly graphic example springs to mind...

...Opinions will legitimately differ...

...By 1978 there was probably a very favorable ratio of houses to population...

...I think the reader can see well enough in what direction such comments are pointing...

...Unwelcome good news was typically presented thus: "Unemployment fell again this month-but in fact there was still little relief from the grim picture of continued joblessness...

...The analysis and comments in editorials and columns were another matter...

...It was said to be an obstacle to good relations with the Soviet Union, with which we had to "deal...

...That was, I take it, the President's meaning when he decided not to visit a death camp...

...Having said that, I must add that I take a slightly gloomier view than he about the spread of the belief in media circles that conservatives now dominate even there...

...But it is at least arguable that West Germans need not be constantly reminded by others that they are the nation that was guilty of a great historical crime...

...In the past it is President Reagan's exaggerated sensitivity to evil which has disturbed liberal commentators...

...They know that...

...Anthony Lewis's view: "He sees nothing unique in the evil of the Holocaust" and cannot distinguish between "reconciliation with Germany and reconciliation with the Nazi experience...

...It can mean not forgetting-and Mr...

...Perhaps someone should recommend that these guilt-ridden innocents try a few sessions with a really skilled dominatrix...

...Reagan for complicity with Nazism and raise not a peep of skepticism from liberal commentators, something is indeed happening-and it's not the drawing of clear distinctions between good and evil...

...By this token, conservatives are presumably credulous, timid, and likely to believe that the press should concentrate on rich people in minks driving around in Cadillacs-hang on for a moment, surely it wasn't the liberal media which determined that the big story at the 1981 inauguration was rich people in Cadillacs...

...It is a mentality that entails skepticism, aggressiveness in news gathering and, I suppose, holding the wacky belief that, say, poverty is usually a better story than prosperity...

...This example of liberal desire to feel guilt for sins they haven't committed followed quickly on their earlier and equally needless guilt trip over "Why have we been so biased in favor of Ronald Reagan...

...Frankly, I am rather sorry-and not for the obvious reason that the prinJohn O'Sullivan, formerly editor of Policy Review and editor at the London Daily Telegraph, is the editorial page editor of the New York Post...

...But it can also mean the more vigorous process of being reminded...

...But Mr...

...Louis Post-Dispatch returned from Cambodia to report a housing boom there-and in a macabre way, he may have been right...

...Like most of his colleagues, Mr...

...Not content with being the giant, liberals also want to play Jack the Giant Killer, his mother, his girl Sal, and the pantomime horse- Carl Rowan being particularly effective in this latter role...

...cipal effect of a column of media criticism is to alienate potential employers and colleagues...

...Lewis accuses the President of wishing to suppress the past, even to the point of confusing the German people and the Nazi experience...

...A soldier who dies fighting is a victim of his government's policies in a metaphorical sense...

...In recent days, however, it is not Cambodia but an earlier genocide which has dominated the news...

...Alas, the liberal media do not report all kinds of bad news with fine impartiality...

...At the time of writing, Mr...

...That was a distinctly prescient passion, incidentally, because the stories lamenting the poverty first appeared shortly before the "cuts" had gone into effect...

...But the death camp victims were victims in the plainest possible sense of the word-and they were victims, moreover, of the very government which the soldiers were fighting to defend...

...The sigh of relief could almost be heard from the printed page...

...And one who was, Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post, left halfway through the conference...

...So the phone rang and I accepted the portfolio...

...Why, then, did he not cancel the wreath-laying ceremony at Bitburg once he heard of the SS graves...

...Cohen takes such matters in his complacent stride...

...Capitol Ideas," "Editorials," "Book Reviews," and even "The Continuing Crisis" were nervous that tank formations might suddenly mass on their frontiers...

...Reston's and Mr...

...In such circumstances, even RET himself might sink to the level of a fifth-class power...

...In January the New York Times devoted a front-page story to the news that an official report cataloguing seventeen Soviet violations was the work of someone who "made no secret of his disdain for arms control accords...

...Reagan has stuck to the wrong choice and, still worse, defended it with crass and foolish arguments...

...It did not bear thinking about...

...In January 1978, the American Security Council held a press conference in Washington, D.C., at which a Cambodian refugee, Pin Yathay, described how his wife, three children, and other close relatives had perished in the Khmer Rouge massacres...

...But sometimes other topics should be emphasized in our dealings with them...

...If this were true, it would paradoxically be good news...

...People who employed such arguments-displaying, as they do, an insensitivity to the memories and sufferings of the past half-century-might properly pause before launching this particular attack...

...These things were wrong, of course...

...In the same year Richard Dudman of the St...

...The accounts were perfectly fair...

...Reagan's errors and follies on this occasion told us something deeply significant about his character...

...But these events occurred before the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia made it respectable to believe in Pol Pot's massacres...

...Cohen's article marks a new stage in the "Are the media liberal...

...Cohen thinks that other people have opinions, but he simply reports the facts...