Presswatch / Two for One
Eastland, Terry
PRESSWATCH TWO FOR ONE by Terry Eastland n May /0, four days after the announcement of the budget summit that could lead to "some new taxes," I opened my Washington Post and was drawn...
...Downie said he "was concerned about [possible bias] and checked into it," but concluded there was none...
...Still, in retrospect, this wasn't much of a story...
...Afterwards, Downie sent his staff a memo drawing the line against their participating in rallies...
...He thinks the problem is cultural, in the sense that his reporters don't know anyone in the pro-life movement...
...Otherwise, they would have horned in...
...Bush from controversy...
...Most if not all of his reporters recognize the newspaper's mistake...
...And now for Anna Perez, who keeps tight lips indeed...
...Downie did not try to justify the Post's treatment of the Rally for Life...
...She got the story...
...So the Post had enough "others on the plane" to identify Sununu in its next-day story...
...After all, a year ago some of Downie's reporters joined in an abortion rights rally that drew 125,000 (Park police estimate) and front-page Post coverage...
...nix options are not the right economic answer" to the deficit, he told the Post...
...I refer, of course, to the Washington Post, which ran a 16-inch story accompanied by two photographs in its Metro section...
...I can't fault the Post or the Washing- ' ton Times, the only news organizations of the eight represented on the plane to report the senior official's 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 remarks, for their stories...
...Is there a bias at the newspaper that influences abortion coverage...
...I wish Downie luck...
...To the contrary, he admitted that "we made a terrible mistake...
...Small minds ask small questions...
...The Post has given new meaning to the term "insider journalism...
...The discussion was largely about...
...And then, grist for my mill, the fourth paragraph leaped off the page and eventually into this column: A senior White House official, traveling on the plane from Costa Rica to Washington early yesterday with First Lady Barbara Bush and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, told reporters that the "no preconditions" description of the [sutnmit] negotiations meant that Democrats could propose tax increases but that the White House would veto them...
...The problem for the Post, of course, is that this plane wasn't Sununu's but the First Lady's...
...Some 200,000 showed up on the Mall, according to Park police, 600,000 if you accept the organizers' claims...
...And I emphasize the no...
...I figured the day's events would establish the source's identity...
...It's not as though Sununu decided, hey, I want to orchestrate a story that puts out the line against tax increases...
...Unlike these others, moreover, the Past's story was content-thin...
...Sununu didn't...
...In an obvious effort to repair the damage, the Post ran a front-page story on the rally on Monday, April 30...
...When the judgment is made that a given rally is a major story, the responsibility can shift to the national staff...
...For the future, Downie has advised his reporters that as professionals they must make the effort to understand all groups...
...Which others...
...As for the substance of what Sununu did say, there wasn't much here either...
...What John Sununu was trying to say," began the Veep...
...Contributed...
...One of the sources was probably the Post's own Donnie Radcliffe, who covers the First Lady and thus traveled with Mrs...
...A little less opacity, please...
...Not a, but the...
...They don't have friends or relatives or neighbors involved...
...Remarkably, the first five paragraphs (out of seventeen) were devoted to the question of whether the attendance was 200,000 or three times that...
...After all, the New York Times, whose reporters come from the same cultural milieu as the Post's, was able to produce a story on the Rally for Life that was fair and comprehensive...
...PRESSWATCH TWO FOR ONE by Terry Eastland n May /0, four days after the announcement of the budget summit that could lead to "some new taxes," I opened my Washington Post and was drawn immediately to a front-page, above-the-fold story by Ann Devroy and John E. Yang...
...Sure enough, on the evening news that night no longer were we talking sources but Sununu...
...F or starters, who identified Sununu 1-/ as the Main Link...
...And, further, he is quoted as saying, in response to a query about whether there was any way the White House would agree to a tax increase: "You've got a one-track mind on a trivial question...
...Coveringmarches, which typically occur on weekends when the newspaper is short-staffed, is the responsibility of the Metro staff, he said...
...Okay, I've been in your shoes, Anna...
...Bush to Costa Rica for the inauguration of that country's new president...
...Habit, I'd say—the bad habit of excessive reliance on unnamed sources...
...Others on the plane with him" did the deed, the Post told its readers the next day, May 11, in a story relegated to page A24...
...So she asked that the senior official not be described as traveling with the First Lady...
...But I'm prepared to believe that the "others" included reporters, which is to say they doubled as unnamed sources...
...I read on: "We're allowing [Democrats] to bring their good arguments for taxes to the table," the senior official said...
...Which leads me to ask some questions...
...The New York Times, by contrast, began its fifty-five column inches of coverage (allocated to three stories and accompanied by three photographs) on the front page, as the lead...
...And it was Sununu who was talking...
...that is, it used unnamed sources to identify a previously unnamed source...
...I think enough has been said about that plane trip...
...And it would seem that professionalism is within their grasp...
...Devroy and Yang helped me out in the next paragraph, calling the person in question "the main White House link to conservatives...
...Whatever one makes of Sununu's remarks about taxes, I think he was acting on his own, undirected by George Bush...
...Why didn't it...
...It preferred them over Vice President Dan Quayle, who unwittingly became a source—on the record, no less—when he fell for a reporter's question framed in terms of "what John Sununu had said...
...Sure sounds like Sununu, I thought, but how could that be if the source was traveling with the First Lady and Sununu...
...My qualified guess was right...
...Perhaps Ailes was...
...Ouch...
...Devroy and Yang were not aboard the flight, but were instead the beneficiaries of Radcliffe as eyewitness...
...For once you demystify the Sununu comments by putting them on the record (what is on background carries a presumption of intrigue) and parsing them, Sununu was saying no more than that George Bush retains the ability to say, once again, "no new taxes...
...They were not persuasive last time, and they are likely not to be persuasive again...
...Indeed, at the bottom of the original story, below an eight-point line, in italics, the Post noted: "Staff writer Donnie Radcliffe contributed to this report...
...When I asked Perez a few questions about this ground rule matter, she said: "Whatever the ground rule was, for whoever it was who was talking, was for the press in attendance...
...Another source was Frank Murray of the Washington Times...
...And the officials, besides Sununu and the First Lady, included their assistants, Ed Rogers and Anna Perez...
...Perez's job, of course, is to separate Mrs...
...Why the Post's strange "others on the plane" sourcing of something now on the record, out in the open...
...They do not wish to repeat it...
...Nonetheless, Time's Dan Goodgame saw in these in-flight remarks evidence of some master plan, another instance of the intentional "good-cop, bad-cop routine" in which Bush plays the former, Sununu the latter...
...White House 'Dies to Calm GOP Fears on Tax Stand," the headline read...
...There were eight reporters on board (not to mention several camera crew and photographers...
...As for why the Post described its unnamed source in the May 10 story as someone "traveling" with Sununu when that someone turned out to be Sununu, I chalk that up to genuine puzzlement within the Post as to what to do...
...And that's why Sununu was on background in the first place...
...That should have happened in this case, he said...
...What was the ground rule...
...Even more bizarre, I know the manifest for this particular Costa Rican flight...
...when he was national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger often spoke on background while in flight somewhere or other, and would be identified as "a senior official traveling on Henry Kissinger's plane...
...Yet who else could it be...
...He let the word "Sununu" part his lips as he framed a question about the import of the "senior official's" remarks for White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater during the daily briefing on May 10...
...Perez is Barbara Bush's press secretary, and was press officer for the trip...
...My sources—I've got them, too, you know —tell me that Sununu's "summit" comments in fact came at the end of a give-and-take with reporters on a variety of subjects, including the swearing-in of the new Costa Rican president, the fighting in El Salvador, and the First Lady's work during the trip...
...Neither did the more veteran members of the national staff...
...But you had to work hard to find coverage of the event in the only local paper to be published on Sundays in Washington...
...A more sensible option might have been: a senior White House official traveling with First Lady Barbara Bush, period...
...I doubt any of the officials were among the Post's "others," especially not Perez, for a reason to be revealed...
...Other out-of-town organs such as the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer ran major front-page stories...
...But if they want to come to the table and say they put [tax increases] there, it is their prerogative to put them on the table, and it's our prerogative to say no...
...This main link to conservatives, I'm also informed, "sharply chastised reporters and officials who have speculated about a possible tax increase...
...The official said that public statements by Republican [congressional] leaders . . . that the White House is considering a range of tax increases are not true...
...I asked Leonard Downie, the Post's managing editor, about his paper's virtual noncoverage of the rally...
...And so it has.• • • O n April 28, an anti-abortion Rally for Life took place in Washington...
...Retroactive ground rules usually don't fly with reporters, and they didn't in this case...
...In case any reporter doubted that the unnamed source was Sununu, here was someone who'd been on the plane actually naming him...
...Terry Eastland is resident scholar at the National Legal Center for the Public Interest...
...They came at a time of intense Washington interest in a fresh, developing story about the budget summit...
...diplomatic matters, which often are dealt with on background...
...Those commissioned to study these things, as I am, will note that there was something Kissingerian in the phrasing...
...Not only last year's abortion rights rally but also this year's Earth Day extravaganza (six days before the Rally for Life) received what can only be described as mega-coverage from the Post...
...The younger, less seasoned Metro staffers didn't understand the story's importance, he said...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 31...
...The paper did not say...
...And there was Roger Ailes, of campaign fame...
...The Post's failure has put it conspicuously on the spot...
...I'm told by a reporter on the plane that the matter wasn't "a topic he really wanted to talk to...
...By contrast, they know people in the abortion rightsand environmental movements...
...Another mistake of this magnitude will determine whether the newspaper is hopelessly out of touch with some major currents in American life...
...However true that might be in other circumstances, it's hard to believe it happened aboard the White House jet...
...A big crowd, by any count...
...Who was this senior official...
...A half hour or so after Sununu had finished talking with reporters, she returned to the rear of the plane (from the front, where the officials sit) to amend the ground rules...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
