Presswatch/Evil Running Wild
Eastland, Terry
EVIL RUNNING WILD O n the first day it could be reported as "news"—Friday, April 21—the New York Times ran an apparently local story on the front of its Metropolitan News section. "Youths Rape...
...Thus a Nan Chase, identified merely as "a reporter in North Carolina" (where...
...Does it not reflect moral judgments...
...An older tradition is neglected, meanwhile, one which teaches that there is good and evil, and that the individual —whatever his background—is a moral agent who can be held responsible for his choices, even if he is angry, or unduly influenced by television...
...Well, the Wall Street Journal says...
...Following that event, by the way, Charles Kuralt correctly commented on CBS Radio.that here indeed was an evil act...
...Class, race, poverty, anger, boredom, television, advertising, the media, peer pressure, even the poor victim herself—you name it, it was tried, with varying degrees of plausibility...
...411111i7 We're HelPing Pe o "a LearnTo Live Without Us...
...In fact, his antileak policy has evolved into just the opposite...
...But working as strict empiricists, journalists can never adequately explain events because truth cannot ultimately be captured in empirical terms...
...So when you give to CARE, please give generously...
...Kitty Hawk...
...It is not metaphysics or theology...
...Greensboro...
...Those were among the conclusions of a New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted April 13-16—an excellent example of the welcome trend toward more detailed polling...
...Now here's a standard method of the experienced leaker: appearing on e Of America's Most Successful Companies Makes The Least Money...
...The problem of journalism is thus also the problem of late twentieth-century elite culture...
...And speaking of law, what about its pedagogical force...
...The architecture of this fascinating story, written for the May 2 edition by Ann Devroy and David Hoffman, is worth a detailed study...
...A 28-year-old white woman, on her usual nighttime jog in Central Park, had been raped, severely beaten, and left unconscious in a pool of her own blood Wednesday night, around 10 p.m...
...However the Court rules, she adds, "abortions in America will not stop and probably will not even be slowed...
...he esteemed editor of this journal 1 has reminded me of one of the original purposes of this column—that I should practice some leakology (the science of leaks...
...There was a period early on, after his election in November, when Bush seemed to be saying, "No leaks, period...
...She was the victim of a rampage by a large group of black and Hispanic teenaged youths—five of whom had by now been arrested...
...The problem is not journalism's alone...
...Knight-Ridder's Owen Ullman collected a bucketful of anonymous anti-Reagan quotes from top Bush aides...
...Still, it strains credulity to think that Bush's concerted effort to distinguish himself from Reagan, at least stylistically, didn't provide encouragement to his aides to dump (anonymously) on the former President...
...A s I write, in mid-May, the Supreme Court has yet to rule in Webster, the Missouri abortion case...
...First paragraph: "White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu lectured senior aides last Saturday morning about airing in public their 'grousing' over the lack of a coherent strategy in presenting President Bush's message, senior administration officials said yesterday...
...Gray didn't define what might be authorized and what might not...
...What gives...
...That first story was fine by modern journalistic standards: the conventional questions of who, what, when, and where had been answered, so far as could be known...
...Lately, however, the pollsters have been asking more detailed questions...
...The following italics are mine...
...That's from a front-page story on April 26, the day the Supreme Court heard arguments in Webster...
...After a while, a few columnists—notably George Will and Edwin Yoder, Jr.—dismissed this search for "root causes" and urged readers to understand the event in terms of evil...
...This is an amazing fluid...
...Nope...
...And this by Terry Eastland lead paragraph of the story under it: "The battle over abortion, the single most divisive social issue of the last quarter-century, is about to become 50 battles...
...Alas, I haven't been able to get a single White House faucet to work properly...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989...
...But that hasn't stopped some in the press from writing about the case as if the Court had already used it to overturn Roe v. Wade...
...As C. S. Lewis remarked in The Screwtape Letters, the Devil records his greatest success when he persuades us he does not exist...
...So enough of metaphysics and evil and pedagogy...
...Let me report that the faucets of the Bush Administration are indeed open, with stuff trickling regularly into the buckets of some reporters...
...I drink Leakaid too...
...Thank God they've been outlawed...
...And, finally, Steve Studdert, an aide involved in scheduling the President's trips and public activities: "What Saturday staff meeting...
...Presumably, we can doctor the causes of evil as we might repair an engine that has blown a gasket...
...Here is Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater: "If there were such a meeting, and I am neither confirming nor denying there was, you know I would not discuss it...
...Asheville...
...The search for an explanation took the media up and down the usual highways and byways...
...Another is more sophisticated polling...
...The not-sosubtle implication is that it is fruitless to outlaw them and that the Supreme Court should not create a legal environment in which that might be done...
...FORTUNE Magazine has named CARE the best run, best managed charity in America...
...Now what was interesting about the Sununu lecture is that it was leaked to the Post...
...Recall Jonestown...
...95% of every dollar CARE receives goes to help impoverished people...
...Another professor assured the press that the jogger may have represented "a level of socioeconomic attainment that the media has [sic] convinced everybody is necessary to be an acceptable person...
...We aren't surprised...
...They were fundamental aspects of human behavior on this continent for a long time—and still are in other places around the world...
...Note the relentless cast of mind here that requires an empirical explanation of evil...
...Back to the faucets of government I go...
...Occasionally there comes an event or person that shatters the premises of modern paganism...
...Among other major leaks this spring, there was the one that stained former President Reagan...
...But the older tradition is not merely neglected...
...In the wake of the Tower defeat, when the Washington press was puzzling over the status of the Bush presidency, the Post ran a front-page story on the subject, observing that it interviewed more than two dozen Bush aides for the story—most of whom wished to remain anonymous...
...In this way aides ingratiate themselves with Washington reporters, who in turn provide them with necessary cover...
...There was no "Sununu refused to comment," or "Sununu could not be reached for comment...
...I've been wondering whether Sununu, upon reading the story, called in senior aides and then lectured them about leaking the staff meeting...
...It's the daily drink of the news business...
...Journalism—at least the reportorial, newsroom kind—is an empirical exercise...
...Who says...
...Of course, I won'treveal who that was...
...Fourth graf: "Last week's trip [a four-day swing by Bush through the midwest and west] exacerbated concerns among some aides that the White House staff operation is not functioning well . . ." • Fifth graf: "[The trip hadn't gone well and the White House lacked an overall communications strategy], sources said...
...This is one of several noticeable trends in the 1989 coverage of the abortion issue...
...Third graf: " 'Sununu said he thought the last week went fine and there were no problems except for people grousing to the press,' one source said...
...What luck...
...No other charity gives more to charity...
...Youths Rape Jogger on Central Park Road," said the headline, standing atop a three-column story placed at the fold...
...Cannibalism has been a "fundamental aspect of human behavior" too, but does that make it right...
...The empiricists hope for heaven not in heaven (because there is no such place) but on earth, which is all there is...
...Are these publications taking sides...
...Finally, there is in recent media "analyses" a recurring theme to the effect that women will get abortions even if they are made illegal...
...That is why it will tend to "explain" an event the way it "explained" the CenThrry Eastland political commentator for National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered" is author of Ethics, Politics, and the Independent Counsel, published this summer by the National Legal Center for the Public Interest...
...After Richard Nixon, among others, asked Bush to put a halt to it, the President expressed his outrage and asked that his aides quit jabbering...
...Remember Hitler...
...And it turns out that Americans are deeply ambivalent about abortion, that their thoughts on the subject are complicated and at times contradictory, and that there is no national consensus on what abortion policy should be...
...Sixth graf: "According to the sources, Sununu called the Saturday morning session essentially to review the past week's efforts and conduct what one official called a 'reflective self-evaluation' by the staff...
...Or bear in mind what happened earlier this year in Matamoros, Mexico, where a gang, seeking "demonic protection" from the police, randomly abducted and murdered a 21-year-old University of Texas student who had crossed the border on spring break to quaff a beer or two...
...Expect such questions to be joined if the Court returns much of abortion policymaking to the states...
...But one official said the session was preceded by charges and countercharges over who was talking too much to reporters . . ." • Seventh graf: "Another source described Sununu as 'fairly defensive' . . ." Not until the eighth, ninth, and tenth paragraphs of a fourteen-paragraph story is anyone quoted on the record...
...The aides can communicate their message through the newspapers, which in this case was that Bush and Sununu need a better public affairs program and that, by the by, Sununu isn't doing such a hot job...
...A President can create conditions that promote leaks...
...And that's what has happened...
...Partisans on both sides—more often on the pro-choice side—have cited the results of these simple-minded polls in order to claim public support for their views...
...One of those later confided to me that he had been in the story...
...The vocabulary with which elites work is too narrow, the categories too small...
...Next is David Demarest (the communications director): "You know I won't comment on meetings that do or do not occur...
...They're reflecting reality: for the first time both sides in the abortion battle believe that if not this year then sometime soon the jurisprudence of Roe v. Wade will be changed, enabling the states to formulate abortion policy much more substantially than they can now...
...Here, on display, is the sadly provincial mind of modern man...
...The Washington Post, in which Will's column appears, carried letters from Beltway empiricists chiding him for a view that ignores "the causes of [the youths'] evilness" and prevents "us from removing them...
...As for Sununu, the one leaked on (so to speak), the two Post reporters apparently made no effort to contact him, though clearly they should have...
...Arguably, the placement was wrong, but soon enough the story made the front pages and the networks, as journalism tried to address the remaining "w" question`why...
...often it is treated contemptuously, as though those who held to it were stumblebums who must be escorted from polite company...
...What is lacking in this kind of analysis is moral perspective...
...In December, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray revised that to "No unauthorized leaks...
...And other media organs—such as Newsweek (May 1)—had the same perspective...
...And for all his early talk against leaks, President Bush hasn't cut them off...
...What happened in Central Park is a story at many levels, not least of which concerns a problem of journalism...
...The story contained none of the telltale signs...
...Consider this headline: "Activists on Abortion/Take Their Crusades/To the 50 Statehouses...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 writes in the Sunday Outlook section of a recent Washington Post that abortion "is a fundamental aspect of human behavior"—and therefore morally okay...
...M ore recently, Chief of Staff John Sununu scolded senior staffers for "airing in public"—leaking—their complaints about the lack of a coherent public affairs strategy in the Bush White House...
...But you don't have to be a great leakologist to figure out that the Gray amendment effectively permits an aide to leak whatever he himself authorizes and thinks he can get away with...
...The Gip-per, they said, was "ill-informed, lazy and detached," etc., etc) Ullman wasn't the only reporter to hear or print such stuff...
...In the past, polls on abortion have tended to ask one or two simple questions that by their very nature could not reach the complexities of the issue...
...Thus did the Central Park episode explode as a national news story...
...the empiricism they live and breathe too easily devolves into simple determinism, with its denial of free will and moral responsibility...
...Thus a Harvard psychologist appeared on one of the Sunday talk shows to declare that the assault proceeded from the kids' "anger...
...Who can know...
...Second graf: ". . . 7ivo sources said some White House officials were prepared to offer extensive suggestions on how Bush's efforts to communicate his programs and policies could be improved but chose not to do so...
...Trouble is, it can happen above the border, too...
...Who can doubt that one or more of this trio provided material for paragraphs one through seven...
...tral Park assault...
...You know we will...
...But perhaps more notable is the agenda: we must explain evil to find out how to do away with it...
...As the attempt to account for the rape in Central Park showed, the media never lack for experts and authorities who can provide the necessary psycho- and sociobabble...
...ple 1-800-242-GIVE Photo, Htng Norton THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 33 the record toward the end of the story to take the official line—in this instance, neither to confirm nor to deny that the meeting had occurred—while spilling the beans higher up in the story as an anonymous source...
...Call it Leakaide, since it comes from aides, or Leakaid, since it aids journalism...
...Or what about slavery and segregation...
...Understand, I'm not talking about national security leaks but the day-to-day drops of administration gossip fortified with occasional fact...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
