PRESS: Line of Maximm Consequence
Powers, Thomas
LINE OF MAXIMUM CONSEQUENCE PRESS I know it's hard to believe but in late September some reporter summoned the bald effrontery to ask Rosalynn Carter of Plains, Georgia, if she had begun to doubt...
...Reporters were hardly responsible for Eagleton's departure-that was McGovern's choice, and McGovern's alone-but they were certainly midwives to the result...
...He referred to Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr...
...There is no question that George Romney was knocked overboard by the "brainwashing" furor eight years ago, and that a lot of journalists think Carter may be teetering right now...
...McCarthy's campaign has been conducted all but in secret, not because McCarthy isn't serious, but because no one else thinks he is...
...Their reasoning went like this: a city default would probably bankrupt the state, thereby undermining confidence in municipal bonds elsewhere and triggering further defaults, major banking failures, a stock market crash, a major depression and worldwide economic collapse...
...Does this seem like a contradiction to you...
...This was in the lead paragraph, not buried at the bottom of the story...
...This tendency to extrapolate a mighty oak from every acorn raises questions about the common sense, perspective and steadiness of reporters...
...Pretty scary," said a senator...
...She said no...
...Do you know anyone who thinks this is even remotely possible...
...I didn't run around breaking down people's doors to see if they were fornicating...
...The columnists who weighed in, a kind of second wave, all asked in one way or another if this were the fatal error, the terminal blunder, the undoing of Carter's campaign for which they seemed to have been waiting...
...One reason for this is that reporters are addicted to idle chatter about things which are not so likely as they are intriguing, like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman...
...It's nothing personal, just that somebody is bound to go down in an election and no journal-list wants to be absent at the kill...
...He admitted that "I've looked on a lot of women with lust...
...It was nothing personal, just- the nature of the profession...
...Insulting," said William Safire...
...They are as easily sidetracked as the rest of us by gossip, the odd fact, what really happened, people with a lot of money, the fall of great men, sad stories, quarrels, reports of strange lights in the sky, violence, the end of the Cadillac convertible, the possibility of life on Mars, the weather, which horse runs fastest, children with incurable diseases, how to cook scallopine al limone, the odds that smoking will kill you, the location of Atlantis, the number of Whooping Cranes, beautiful women and the price of coffee, but their most basic and abiding interest is in what's going to happen...
...The same thing happened when Carter said he didn't think ethnic neighborhoods ought to be systematically broken up (who does think so...
...The principle is that reporters, confronted by an event, will follow that part of it which constitutes the Line of Maximum Consequence...
...When Hugh Carey was elected Governor of New York, for example, there was a good deal of talk in the press about his presidential prospects...
...His comments run a thousand words or more...
...could not imagine that the country would care after the election, when it had not cared during it...
...It took discovery of the White House taping system, the firing of Archibald Cox, and the sheer longevity of the crisis finally to convince the press that events were, in fact, leading toward their logical conclusion...
...he said he tried to live by his own convictions in these matters but did not think God had appointed him to judge his countrymen...
...Carter tried to explain to Playboy's interviewer why he would not use the Oval Office to launch a crusade against vice...
...This stunningly obvious remark reminds me of Calvin Coolidge's classic observation that when "more and more people are out of work, unemployment results...
...We'd like to ask you a blunt question," said the interviewer...
...When a new scent of some great possibility arrives the press will set off in a new direction...
...There is nothing like an election to bring out a strain of bubbleheaded hysteria in journalists but the confusion, willful misunderstanding and gross overreaction to Carter's Playboy interview set something of a record...
...and when he said he would have fired Clarence Kelley for accepting favors from his subordinates, although he was not sure he would do so retroactively if he were elected president...
...Bad enough the city could not pay its bills, but what is to be gained by inflating a local disaster into an international catastrophe...
...It doesn't to me but even if we assume it is it hardly seems a contradiction of sufficient magnitude to decide an election...
...There seems so little room for misinterpretation...
...Another is that journalism requires complex subjects to be squeezed into small spaces in simple, declarative sentences...
...and noted only incredulity when the word impeachment was first uttered...
...Further slippage of the kind he has so far experienced would drop him behind the President by November 2, when the voters will make their selection...
...But once in a while the Line of Maximum Consequence turns out to be the pattern of events in fact...
...In a characteristic response to changes in the political weather R.W...
...This is a completely standard procedure on the part of the press but there is something half crazy all the same about probing microscopically for fatal errors .in slips of the tongue, pratfalls on ski slopes, minor contradictions, red flag phrases and the like...
...They have got to get in the paper, granted, but why do they insist on seeing every ripple as the first sign of a tidal wave...
...I'll try to express my views...
...The guy who's loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud...
...The difficulty did not lie in imagining the President's involvement in the break-in or the cover-up- who else?-but in imagining that it could be proved against him...
...It's not a matter of condemnation, it's not a matter of persecution...
...But the interviewer would not be reassured...
...Another example was press speculation a year ago that New York City might default, a depressingly real possibility even now, but the press quickly extrapolated the bad to the horrific...
...Journalists knew too much about presidential power and congressional timidity to imagine that the weaker party could expel the stronger...
...I've committed adultery in my heart many times...
...Shocked," said the Dallas pastor...
...With five weeks to go until election day, the former Georgia governor clung to his national edge, but the momentum was clearly against him...
...Looked at from the perspective of a week, even so hard-working, knowledgeable and accomplished a reporter as Apple often sounds a bit like Chicken Little...
...Nixon survived a similar episode in 1952 following the revelation that he had a "secret slush fund," but twenty years later he ran out of luck...
...In most stories pursuit of the Line of Maximum Consequence amounts to little more than a nervous tic...
...This was inevitable, given human nature, Carter said...
...It was wasted breath...
...They did not see how incriminating evidence could be pried out of the Oval Office...
...A few people complimented Carter on his honesty but most found his plain speaking plain crazy...
...Nothing to be gained," said another...
...This is something that's ridiculous...
...In the meantime Carter, at least, will learn again that there are never as many people waiting to catch you in the brutal competition of politics, as are waiting to watch you fall...
...Christ says, Don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife...
...I think we've pursued this conversation long enough-if you have another question . . . Look...
...Nevertheless a recent story in the Times (September 16) suggests that Eugene McCarthy's presence on the ballot in half a dozen important states "could affect the outcome of a close election...
...Why does every story about the San Andreas fault mention the possibility that California could slide into the ocean...
...thomas powers CUPS JOINT...
...In the second volume of his autobiography, The Infernal Grove, Malcolm Muggeridge suggests that the very profession is characterized by a sort of inborn rapacity...
...Reporters have pursued it because it was there...
...Why did every story about Khe Sanh back in 1967 mention Dien Bien Phu...
...It was what the story was about...
...But a five-letter vulgarism has none of the explosive potential of Watergate...
...We can almost see his face twist as he is asked the same question for the third time...
...Admittedly a reporter would hate to miscall a calamity of1 that magnitude, but dwelling on it is crazy...
...Journalists responded by phoning everyone from Mrs...
...His argument was conventional enough...
...The idea that his fitful effort might decide the election is preposterous, but the reporter simply could not resist writing about it all the same...
...When it was learned four years ago that Thomas Eagle-ton had once received electro-shock therapy for mental problems the Line of Maximum Consequence seemed obvious: George McGovern might be forced to drop him from the ticket...
...The answer, of course, is generally prosaic...
...But he was the Governor of a major state, and he was going to be the quasi-official host of the Democratic Convention, and there could be a deadlock among the 13 original contenders, and, well . . . y6u know how the argument went...
...Carter's irritation is obvious...
...After watching the controversy in the press for a week, it is poignant but instructive to read the interview as a whole...
...LINE OF MAXIMUM CONSEQUENCE PRESS I know it's hard to believe but in late September some reporter summoned the bald effrontery to ask Rosalynn Carter of Plains, Georgia, if she had begun to doubt her husband's sexual fidelity after reading his remark in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had "committed adultery in my heart many times...
...Watergate's Line of Maximum Consequence was obvious from the first day-Nixon's departure-but it took a long time for most journalists, including Woodward and Bernstein, to see it...
...It is not the only principle in the mysterious question of what makes a story, but it is one of them, and it explains a lot which is otherwise baffling, not only why journalists are obsessive in the pursuit of some possibilities, but why they are frequently blind to others...
...Anybody can come and look at my record...
...Why did reporters covering a New York City garbage strike in the '60s all pursue the possibility it might cause an epidemic...
...It was crazy but harmless...
...Journalists follow authority as sharks do a liner," he says, "hoping to feed off the waste it discharges, with perhaps someone occasionally falling overboard to make a meal, and once in a while the whole ship going down and providing a positive feast...
...The reaction all focused on the admission and on the word "screw," which some paper printed, and others referred to as a five-letter vulgarism for sexual intercourse, making it sound somehow salacious...
...One tried to live by certain moral precepts, and one expected to fall...
...Did he have any...
...But the main reason has to do with a fundamental principle of journalism, here revealed for the first time...
...Apple of the Times recently wrote (on September 27) that poll results indicated Carter "lost" the first debate...
...He described the fundamentals of evangelical Christianity...
...In the long interim they had to operate on blind instinct alone, following the Line of Maximum Consequence in progressive steps, from the original burglars to CREEP, and thence to Haldeman and Ehrlichman...
...In 1968 political reporters endlessly discussed the possibility that George Wallace's third party campaign might throw the election into the House of Representatives, which it did not come close to doing...
...Wouldn't we expect a puritanical tone to be set in the White House if you were elected...
...Why does the press pursue such minor episodes with wolf-pack hunger...
...When the latter were gone, only Nixon remained...
...The interviewer was still unconvinced and Carter tried yet again...
...Either nothing happens, or nothing much, or nothing out of the ordinary, but the repetition of failed possibilities seems to have no dampening effect on a journalist's appetite for what might happen...
...I've been a governor for four years...
...Journalists called up everybody in their address books to ask what they thought and so many people said McGovern had no choice that in the end McGovern decided he had no choice, and Eagleton was dropped...
...His first instinct, confronted by an event, is to search for the biggest thing which might follow-the Line of Maximum Consequence -and to dog it until the possibility has been exhausted...
...Carter to the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, and the reactions for the most part were just what you'd expect from people who hadn't read the interview and wouldn't get a chance until the controversy was long past...
...Working journalists, no less than- stockbrokers, are interested in the future...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 22
