Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism
Northway, Martin
Book Review/Martin Northway Investigating the Investigators • • More than fifty years ago Walter Lippmann wrote what should be an enduring caveat for his fellow journalists when he observed in...
...Ai overzealous and overextended press i: liable to leave the rest of us in a predica ment like that of the prisoners in Plato', Cave in The Republic: democrats shack led by a lack of sound information which to base our decisions, gazing help lessly at the dancing shadows cast by th, real world...
...on an assumption that proves, on examination, to be false...
...He does suggest, however, that the press's at best modest success in handling the narrower duty of fair and accurate "objective" re porting means that newsmen shoulc "give up the pretense of being establish ers of truth...
...that of these ten, six Panthers were killed by police who were either wounded or in imminent danger...
...The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act...
...The experience of Watergate should rather have demonstrated the remarkable power of our institutions to uncover wrongdoing and to punish it, but our newsmen failed to recognize this strength...
...In "The Panthers and the Press," a remarkable effort in genuinely investigative reporting (originally published in the New Yorker), Epstein shows the damage frequently wrought by such "blind spots...
...Under present conditions he warns in his introductory essay, "i [the press] cannot serve as a credible in vestigator of the 'hidden facts' or the elu sive truths which determine them...
...The press performs a vital function in a democracy, of course, but, as Lippmann warned us, it cannot subsume and should not presume to act for the other institutions of society...
...It was these efforts that were crucial—in fact, much of the celebrated "investigative reporting" was really just the publication of material leaked from government investigations...
...Throughout the investigations, the press remained blithely unconcerned about the motives and intentions of those in government who leaked the news...
...In the current volume, "The Televised War" underscores one of the author's central points in News from Nowhere: the extent to which television is tied to its requirement to produce "dramatic" and "thematic" treatments of the news in order to entertain its audiences, and how this necessarily makes television news inaccurate and unreliable...
...Today the press is riding a wave of popularity, cresting on the prestige of its Watergate "revelations...
...The government's investigation of itself has become a missing link in the story of the Watergate scandal, and the actual role that journalists played remains ill understood...
...Bernard Roshco updated Lippmann's observation by suggesting in his recent book Newsmaking that "the press may serve the public better by insisting that watchdog institutions do their job properly than by trying to do the job itself...
...As with Watergate, the press's attitude toward sources became a stumbling-block for the "truth...
...After analyzing each reported Panther killing, he found that only ten of the 28 killings involved police at all...
...This collection of essays by Edward Jay Epstein continues in the tradition of journalism criticism, offering insights into the limitations of the press and into the dangers of its current pretensions...
...In an earlier book, News from Nowhere: Television and the News (Random House, 1973), Epstein showed that network news is heavily dependent on the print mediumfor its "leads" for stories to cover—less than a fifth of its "leads" come in any sense from its own resources, and only about two percent from its very visible and highly-touted "correspondents...
...Epstein does not provide any formula for the media's shortcomings...
...Epstein's conclusion seems almost an understatement: "The idea that the police have declared a sort of open season on the Black Panthers is based...
...What is significant is not only that a gross lie was widely reported, but that it was never checked by the press and even came to be treated as a fact...
...originally published in Commentary), Epstein maintains that, by magnifying its own accomplishments, the pressgave short shrift to the efforts of our government institutions...
...In "Did the Press Uncover Watergate...
...Although television is a different type of medium and may be more influential than newspapers and newsmagazines, its procedures are derived from the news-gathering habits of the print trade...
...The attribution of quotations and important "facts" to unnamed sources is only one way in which the press presumes to act as our surrogate seeker-of-truth...
...The experience of Watergate also shows how ill-equipped the press is to disclose the "whole truth" about public affairs...
...Epstein says this "blind spot" toward sources, which often makes the press an unwitting pawn, is "endemic to journalists" and "proceeds from an unwillingness to see the complexity of bureaucratic in-fighting and of politics within the government itself...
...They must therefore assume some responsibility for weakening confidence in those institutions...
...A new breed of "investigative reporter" promises to get "behind the facts" not just to hidden information but to the substantive issues, and thereby to the "truth...
...The press did focus attention on the unfolding events, but it is foolish to assume that the ultimate outcome of the investigations was pivotally dependent on the press...
...In the introThe Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 35 duction to Between Fact and Fiction, Epstein hypothesizes that the journalists best able to dispute the assertion were unwilling to do so for fear of alienating their sources within the Panthers...
...The author undertook the monumental task of tracking down the facts behind the widely-reported 1969 assertion that police had killed 28 members of the Black Panther Party in less than two years, a charge that became a rallying-point for critics of police "repression...
...36 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 19...
...Although, as we came to learn, there was a cover-up at high levels of government, there was also a persistent effort in Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism by Edward Jay Epstein Vintage Books $3.95, paper many government agencies to uncover the facts...
...Under this banner, the press promises to serve as the flagship of our institutions, the guardian of our democracy...
...and that only two Panthers, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, were killed as the result of planned police raids...
...So long as journalists maintain their usual professional blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institutions of government, they will no doubt continue to speak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath...
...Book Review/Martin Northway Investigating the Investigators • • More than fifty years ago Walter Lippmann wrote what should be an enduring caveat for his fellow journalists when he observed in Public Opinion that "news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
