Behind the Front Page
Broder, David S.
David Broder of the Washington Post is the dean of American political reporters, but readers who pick up this book out of an interest in politics will be disappointed. Though most of its anecdotes...
...The strength of Broder's book is that he has no desire to offer the last word on the subject of the news media's failings...
...Should the press have held off reporting Muskie's reaction until the accuracy of the Union Leader's story could be established...
...It is deservedly forgotten now, but Broder notes that for several weeks in the summer of 1980, it was the subject of an average of three stories a day in the now-defunct Washington Star...
...In fact, on numerous occasions before his presidential race, Jackson had vigorously and publicly denounced abortion on demand—arguing that it would lead to the killing of people on the basis of "blindness, crippledness, old age," endorsing the Hyde Amendment, praising a restrictive ordinance in Akron for "defending human life in its most defenseless state...
...He dutifully notes that he overlooked or underestimated such important stories as the 1967 "Dump Johnson" movement, the rise of feminism, the politicization of the religious right, and the tax revolt...
...It has some definite assets...
...The first is to induce some humility in his colleagues...
...There is no point in agonizing over what can't be changed...
...What the incident shows, for journalistic purposes, is the risk of misleading the reader when the reporter's information is incomplete...
...These cases hardly exhaust the list of topics most press organs have ignored or covered in inexcusably slanted ways...
...Sometimes the problem is not coverage but lack of it...
...What is needed is a diversity of biases...
...its members deserve, and gave them an accurate understanding of the pressures of time and space under which we work, we could acknowledge the inherent limitations in our work," Broder writes...
...The Times example also dramatizes the crucial point: The enemy of a well-informed citizenry is not slanted news coverage, but uniformly slanted news coverage...
...It is written by a talented reporter who has covered a lot of historic events...
...The Washington Times has its share of flaws, but it has made itself valuable by frequently covering stories that otherwise wouldn't be covered...
...Instead of promising All the News That's Fit to Print, I would like to see us say—over and over, until the point has been made—that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard in the past 24 hours—distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read about it in an hour...
...Despite reading four and sometimes five newspapers and watching a morning news program every day, I didn't see or hear a single report that treated the proposal as one that might have some merit...
...Every reporter apparently assumed that it could only be the worthless work of right-wing cranks and religious fanatics...
...The lack of diversity in the newsroom produces a stale uniformity in coverage...
...What conservatives see as a liberal tilt, he insists, is actually just a "skeptical posture...
...The reason, no doubt, is that most of them favor a policy allowing abortion on demand—as documented by S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman in The Media Elite...
...It turned out that the letter was one of the Nixon White House's "dirty tricks...
...It is well timed, coming in the wake of the Miami Herald's exposure of Gary Hart's relationship with Donna Rice...
...ut not all the errors he examines LP are his own...
...In news reports on the resulting controversy, particularly on network newscasts, the proposal was invariably referred to as the "squeal rule' loaded term if there ever was one...
...Unwittingly, I did my part in the work of the Nixon operatives in helping destroy the BEHIND THE FRONT PAGE: A CANDID LOOK AT HOW THE NEWS IS MADE David S. Broder/Simon and Schuster/$18.95 Stephen Chapman THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 43 credibility of the Muskie candidacy," Broder says...
...Broder says, "We were all too eager to have the big story pan out, and we brushed aside anything that did not help move the story along to what we thought should be its conclusion...
...Two stories that come to mind suggest that the press is selective about what it doubts...
...Muskie was angry at a story in William Loeb's Manchester Union-Leader claiming, on the basis of a letter purportedly from a Florida man, that Muskie had used a disparaging term for French-Americans...
...But skeptical of what...
...All this was easy todocument, as I discovered, but no one else in the major news media ever bothered...
...There are other factors at work, too...
...But even if the op-ed tilt were as pronounced as he claims, it's absurd to pretend that one page of explicitly conservative views can match the weight of the covertly liberal ones that permeate the entire news section...
...In pointing out mistakes, Broder doesn't spare himself...
...The author has several purposes in mind...
...Behind the Front Page consists of Broder's recollections about assorted news stories, combined with extensive consideration of how he and other reporters did their job in each instance...
...If we treated our audience with the respect Stephen Chapman is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune...
...In the end, it was all smoke and no fire: Billy did nothing warranting prosecution, and the President had no discernible connection to anything his brother did with the Libyans...
...As Broder himself admits, daily reporting is inevitably incomplete, and understanding the full context of any political event is a job that can be handled only by historians...
...Still, he says, the prediction "waspreposterous, and I deserved to get burned...
...One of the Star reporters on the story said his editor "got pleasure from sticking it to Carter...
...Yet much more modest shifts in the opposite direction by other politicians—Ronald Reagan and George Bush, for example—have been noted in press accounts...
...Reporters are highly skeptical of the right-to-life movement, but not of its opponents...
...Jackson said he hadn't, and to my knowledge no news organ ever reported that he was lying (except the Chicago Tribune, where I did...
...specially when there are other failings that are not inevitable...
...That it is windy, unpersuasive, and obtuse in many places, and ultimately unsatisfying as a whole, doesn't make it any less valuable a glimpse into how the press sees itself...
...But it's hard to see what he or anyone else could have done differently...
...The most revealing is "Billygate," the mini-scandal involving Jimmy Carter's brother and the government of Libya...
...In Wisconsin's 1976 presidential primary, he was so reckless as to project victories for Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford based on interviews with a grand total of eighty-five voters in a single city...
...He leads off the book with one that "nags at me as do few other stories I have ever written' Edmund Muskie's famous crying-inthe-snow scene on the eve of the 1972 New Hampshire primary...
...For those readers who aspire to do that, Behind the Front Page is a good introduction to the daily dilemmas of the people who cover the news...
...But barring unreasonable delays in reporting public events, reporters have no way to guarantee that the events will be interpreted in their proper context...
...Broder argues that "the most influential voices in journalism today—as in the past—are staunchly conservative," noting the dominance of the right among opinion columnists...
...Of course not...
...Why did the press go wild...
...Broder declares primly that "impartiality is one of the most important values in a reporter's life," but if he truly doubts that this sort of bias colors news coverage, he should look at the Post's local competition...
...The blame lies less with conscious distortions than with a broad worldviewliberal, secular, cynical—that is almost universal among reporters...
...He says his ultimate purpose is to encourage ordinary people to read their papers critically and skeptically, and to let reporters and editors know when their work doesn't measure up...
...It is a sober and resolutely fair-minded examination of how the press does its job...
...Another factor is the capital press corps' chronic inability to distinguish what is truly important from what is of interest only to people in Washington—an unavoidable occupational hazard, no doubt, but one whose damage could be contained by editors and reporters mindful of the danger...
...In most instances, reporters don't deliberately omit evidence that contradicts their own opinions—they simply aren't aware it exists...
...One is the melodramatic bent of most journalists, who have an insatiable taste for stories with plainly marked heroes, villains, and moral lessons...
...Washington boasts few of those...
...If that wasn't bad enough, he and the Post, eager to report the winners in the earliest possible edition, declared Morris Udall the victor in Wisconsin on the basis of incomplete and misleading election returns, producing a "Dewey defeats Truman" fiasco in 150,000 copies of the newspaper...
...In a 1984 debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, Reubin Askew asked Jesse Jackson if he had reversed his position on abortion...
...Some of his other examples are less illuminating...
...Prodded by its rival, the Washington Post devoted 117 stories to the subject in less than three months, forty-six of them on the front page...
...Luckily for Broder both won, though more narrowly than expected...
...One is the Reagan Administration's 1982 proposal to require federally funded family planning clinics to get parental permission before dispensing contraceptives to minors...
...Though most of its anecdotes grow out of campaigns, Behind the Front Page is an exercise in press criticism, written largely for journalists and other news junkies...
...Having a staff of editors and reporters who tend to be politically conservative ensures a distinct perspective on the world's events...
...In its own defects, it inadvertently suggests which of the press's failings are the most intractable...
...The New York Times ran a long analysis which, though it conceded the "debate has been percolating," quoted no one who favored the proposal, omitting even the Administration's stated reasons...
...Broder goes out of his way to debunk the idea that news coverage is colored by any consistent ideological bias...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
