The Truth, the Lie and the Press

...Nevertheless, there remains, I would suggest, a significant difference between the role of the press and the role of these other contributing factors...

...It did not seem to matter that the Crusader against Communism was a relatively very late discoverer of the "Red menace" on the American scene, and that in his brief stormy political career he (1) had accepted Communist votes, (2) had been duped (in the Malmedy affair) by a Communist agent, (3) had no real interest in the subject of Communism and (4) never managed to catch any...

...If this is a reference to the Pravdas of the Soviet world, then there is no argument...

...Indeed, a journalist is defined in America as "an unemployed reporter...

...It would be folly to rejoice in the end of McCarthyite witch-hunting only to begin hunting for other witches in the bar of Washington's National Press Club or behind typewriters in editorial offices from New York to Los Angeles...

...McCarthyism was the product of a unique historical situation which is never likely to arise again in the same shape or form...

...Of course, no reporter should indulge in excessive political partisanship...

...It was, in part, "the product of the cold war" (as Joseph Alsop has argued), of the bewildering international tensions of the duel with Soviet Russian power...

...they have elevated the influence of fools to that of wise men...

...By a McCarthy-style presentation of the German story," Joe Alsop was shrewd enough to perceive, "the President could be made to look much 'softer towards Communism' than 99 per cent of the wretched victims...

...The Germans have a fine and formidable word for it—Zeitung-swissenschaft, the "science of the press"—and they make a vague, misty attempt at pursuing it at their universities...

...but the natural American genius in such things is often to neglect problems of theory, meaning, analysis, for a course of practical instruction...

...The reply to this charge was indignant: ''The best of the American newspapers, feeling from the beginning that McCarthy was peddling a pack of lies, accompanied the publication of them with lengthy reportage—not to mention denunciations on the leader-pages—seeking to lay bare the truth...

...The press only added to the distortion and rarely helped to bring it into focus...

...Frequently he looms larger, with his pencil and little notebook in hand scribbling the fragments of a story, than the real and famed power-holder on the other side of the desk...

...McCarthy was, indeed, "the first American ever to be discussed and described as being himself a menace to the comity of nations and the strength of alliances . . . the first American ever to be actively hated and feared by foreigners in large numbers...

...but if it is to the dozen or so serious and thoughtful European papers which can be compared to the New York Times, then Rovere is grievously mistaken...

...Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" and who shall report on the reporters ? Consider the problem of the newspapers and their relationship to the American phenomenon of Mc-Carthyism...

...How had it acquitted itself in the test case of McCarthyism...

...There was a powerful Republican party, eager to enjoy national power for the first time in a generation and, given the predominantly one-party nature of newspaper ownership, not beyond a conventional bit of opportunistic demagogy...

...News is news, I suppose, and as an American I cannot honestly protest the bad publicity...

...A thousand reporters in Washington, D.C., armed with notebooks and cameras, sent this story around the world and it commanded front-page headlines everywhere...

...In January 1954, a Gallup poll indicated that some 29 per cent of the American people had an unfavorable view of McCarthy's activities and another 21 per cent had no view at all...

...It is hopelessly naive to suppose that the McCarthy story could have been buried or even played-down...

...It was Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed: "Were it left to me whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter...

...The accusations were dramatic and important news...

...I mention this only because I played a small part in one such maneuver, although I became fully aware of this only after reading The Reporter's Trade...

...If there is such a thing as "a power elite," the gentlemen of the press, both in Europe and in America, have been moving pretty close to its center...

...Why not on the Foreign Service—for what did the diplomats, including the senior representative, John Foster Dulles, do except appease and retreat...

...How powerful are bankers and brokers when a city or financial editor has the confidence of millions of readers who are also investors and shareholders...

...It was news and it had to be published...

...This might almost serve as an ideal case-study in the problem of the "press, publicity and public affairs...

...terminology...

...Caught between the hardening of the fronts on both left and right, the "vital center" of American democratic liberalism mumbled, fumbled or kept deafeningly silent...

...It is high time, I would most urgently suggest, that journalists who put questions to all the world (and properly so) put a few questions to themselves...

...The facts never caught up with the reported non-facts...

...There was the war in Korea and its distressing effect on millions of Americans who were at once dutifully militant, guiltily prosperous and politically confused...

...The sociologists seem to be everywhere but we have not yet, alas, a Sociology of the Press...

...And clearly enough the Senator, after a victory over the Army generals, would not be loath to take on the President...

...Americans have innumerable schools of journalism, and all at a rather respectable academic level...

...The public is served better...

...But, as Rovere points out, "It was also, of course, news that a United States Senator was lying and defrauding the people and their government...

...Nor did it ever become entirely clear to the excited anti-McCarthyite opposition that, if McCarthyism was to be effectively combatted, it could hardly be done in the company of a "united front" (known, in the phrase of the day, as the "anti-anti-Communists") which refused to face up to the totalitarians on the left...

...Rovere finds him a man of formidable proportions, a "hero of evil," In these circumstances, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy s "Fight for America" (the title of the manifesto he published) went from victory to victory against an opposition which was both disorganized and disoriented...

...It continues to convey but also, more and more, to control...

...Certainly in those countries where this is the practice, the press serves the public less well than ours does...

...But it tried to explain that it had seen no alternative: "It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore charges by Senator McCarthy just because they are usually proved false...

...There was a new and inexperienced President, not very strong in political courage and foresight, representing a self-satisfied citizenry quite unprepared for libertarian militance and uneasily disposed, after the ideological stress of a "generation on trial," to the sacrifice of available scapegoats...

...had the McCarthy campaign been reported on inside pages with non committal headlines, little more would have been heard of it all...

...Contributions to historical and economic science have not infrequently been made by reflective protagonists on the scene of business and politics...

...Most strange, I think, this professional deformation which blinds them to possibly the most interesting and important story of them all...

...American liberty was lost...

...a few writers and editors assemble their books of adventure and anecdote...

...This would seem to be a fairly grave structural defect in the set-up of a free press, and one can only wonder why the acute critic who can perceive this is reluctant to recognize the possibility of some modest relevant reforms...

...They claim that "by Eisenhower's own directives, indeed, about half of the West German press and radio was at first handed over to the Communist party...

...But even if a reporter meets both these tests, he must still be engage, if only because he himself is a most necessary part of the political process...

...It is they, and not party organizers and platform orators, who exercise an influence on popular moods and electoral voting trends...

...Nor do we have from the "insiders," the professionals themselves, that critical, frank and thoughtful documentation of their lives and times which would help illuminate these questions of press, publicity and public affairs...

...It is they, and not government printing offices, who announce public policies to the nation...

...There was a serious Communist menace, and there had at one time even been a dangerous penetration (whether by agents or fellow travelers) into government and private organizations...

...Yet he believes that the Times was "essentially right"—"for I suspect there is no surer way to a corrupt and worthless press than to authorize reporters to tell the readers which 'facts' are really 'facts' and which are not...

...Why not on the Senate—for 95 other powerful Senators allowed one man to manipulate their procedures and violate their traditions...

...But 50 per cent went on record as having a generally "favorable opinion" of the Senator and felt he was serving the country in a useful way...

...I did so and mailed the background story to them in Washington...

...we see too much of them to be able to see what they are doing...

...It has been deeply involved in many of the terrible and unnecessary tragedies of our time: in recent America, in the pre-Hitler Germany of the Weimar Republic, in the corrupt and disoriented France of the 1930s, in the confused and ill-informed Britain of the Munich period...

...The demagogue is only the undetected liar, "yet all the elaborate reporting mechanisms of the press seemed unable to detect and to communicate the basic fact of McCarthy's lies...

...But if the foreign press could, with some justice, be blamed for misleading public opinion, how much more so could America's own press which was, after all, the source of almost all the foreign dispatches...

...Douglass Cater, whose recent book, The Fourth Branch of Government, is a most thoughtful American critique of contemporary journalism, has summed up the failure of the press vis-a-vis McCarthy in these words: "The extent of the communications failure McCarthyism presented can be measured by the fact that few of the reporters who regularly covered McCarthy believed him...

...Information Agency librarians and retired letter-head fellow travelers...

...Adams was then asked, point blank, whether the Administration now meant to fight McCarthy all-out"—in which case there would be no reason to publish the German story...

...but, in the long run, the maintenance of independent critical faculties at the very source of news-reporting is a decisive factor in supporting truth-telling and civility in public life...

...press ever wants to be known as anything but a humble laborer in the vineyard...

...Why pick on the press...

...or perhaps "What's new and true...

...Rather it was the inherent vulnerabilities—the frozen patterns of the press—which McCarthy discovered and played upon with unerring skill...

...At the risk of appearing rather pedantic I would submit that this is a subject about which we know precious little...

...We wanted," write the Alsops, "to close off the Administration's avenues of retreat from a head-on fight" with McCarthy...

...What happened after that was very melodramatic and almost incredible...

...In the recent exchange in Britain between Arthur Webb, an English journalist who had served in Washington, and Alfred Friendly, the highly respected managing editor of the Washington Post and Times Herald, the issues were put with the burning clarity of angry polemicists...

...If McCarthyism was a cause without character, anti-McCarthyism was a passion without principle...

...There is a substantial exaggeration here, and I told them so at the time, but I agreed that there was also an important truth there...

...They went on to ask me, as a reporter engage in Berlin, to "gather the facts" (which were damaging enough...

...Government, has gone so far (and in this he has had the assent of a Walter Lippmann) as to speak of reporters as "the Fourth Branch of Government...

...the ignorant to the level of the learned...

...That a Press Lord has genuine power is, of course, not a new thing...

...I do not mean to exaggerate and I would not want to venture a prediction about the future of the "fourth estate" as a "reportocracy" or "journalarchy," but the power of the press has grown, in our open, free, democratized and internationalized society, to a historical force of major proportions...

...The question and its answer are, to be sure, as complicated as the subtlest inquiries into cause and effect in history, but the very posing of it amounts to a radical challenge to the democratic ideology...

...The New York Times once looked back upon its own coverage of a McCarthy investigation and acknowledged that it had done its readers something of a disservice, though perhaps an unavoidable one...

...He was extremely skillful at press conferences and sometimes he even ingeniously called one to announce another...

...But there was nothing wrong with the institution as such of the Presidency, or the Republican party, or the State Department, or the Senate which a little more character and courage could not have corrected...

...How true and serious an explanation is it to attribute to the irresponsible sensationalism of newspapers the rise and fall (there was no time for a decline) of this amazing Crusader against Communism who, as his recent biographer Richard Rovere says, was "like Hitler, a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob, an exploiter of popular fears . . . [who] denounced and accused and blamed and insulted and villified and demeaned...

...Rovere is right in remarking that to many people this was rather like saying that if a restaurant serves poisoned food, it is up to the diner to refuse it...

...Straight' news, the absolute commandment of most mass media journalists, had become a straitjacket to crush the initiative and the independence of the reporter...

...The American press was simply not set up so that it could feature a 'McCarthy Lies' story alongside a 'McCarthy Says' story...

...but also "What's true...

...And so he was, and I would like to believe that there were occasional twinges of shame and embarrassment on the part of those doom-obsessed observers who were prompted by the melodramatic appearance of things to write off so hastily, so faithlessly, the oldest constitutional republic in the West...

...It is almost as if Americans were strangely afraid to face up openly to the dimensions of mind and to be intellectuality involved in the art of journalism...

...After a long silence, Adams swore that the White House now meant to fight McCarthy without giving or asking a quarter...

...There was a scattered, atomized "liberal left" movement which had not thought its way much beyond the halcyon New Deal '30s when Franklin D. Roosevelt had recognized the Soviet Union and Communists were accepted as extreme democrats or more radical progressives...

...But this presupposes that the reporter will not always be asking "What's new...

...In its new self-awareness and in its re-examination of fundamentals, the press may come to know something of its own real philosophy, sociology, and ethics...

...How effective is the authority of ministers and governors when public opinion can only really be swayed by the men who control the headlines and the news...

...A roving reporter from Germany decides to publish a rash and ill-considered remark of a French general and there is, as a direct consequence, a governmental crisis in Paris and a minor civil war in Algiers...

...Is it truly the function of the press to be the mere mindless mirror of the times...

...Our Zeitungswissenschaftler, our "scientist of the papers," has very little on the shelf: A few newspapers and magazines record their fortunes, more or less piously...

...But, by and large, we are reading our newspapers in the dark...

...They knew that in Germany in 1945-46, General Eisenhower "had tolerated or been victimized by many known Communists in our military government...

...But—in large part because McCarthy was a true innovator, because he lied with an unprecedented boldness, because he invented new kinds of lies—even those newspapers that were willing to expose him found that they lacked the technical resources...

...What the reporter in our time seems to need is an Emancipation Proclamation which would guarantee him the right of interpretive comment in the due process of fact-gathering...

...It had printed so many headlines and stories and interviews, and it admitted that little or no truth turned out to be in any of these...

...Regrettable only was the note of hysterical fatalism about so many of the dispatches in the world press: McCarthyism was triumphant...

...It is they, far more than any foreign minister, who set the context for the foreign relations which are to be conducted with friends and enemies...

...For them the free press is not quite (in the sardonic words of William Faulkner) "that dedicated paladin through whose inflexible rectitude truth shall prevail and justice and mercy be done...

...I have often discussed this matter with American editors and they often seemed to me almost neurotically reluctant to admit as legitimate reportage those elements of judicious analysis and considered personal opinion which they privately, in their travels and interviewing, relentlessly pursue...

...There were all those status-conflicts and resentments of a dynamic uprooted postwar society which the sociologists told us had given rise to a "new American right...

...We cannot make out the real story for the headlines, or the pattern of things because of the make-up...

...This accounts for the incongruity of the American philosophy of the reporter as a "straight newsman" and the credo as enunciated by the Alsop brothers: "Above all, reporting offers the sense of being engage in the political process of one's own time...

...A sound philosophy of news must insist, at the very least, on the equality of all facts, on no fact being "more equal" than others...

...Surely any objective inquiry into the causes of McCarthyism would divide and apportion blame and criticism among many persons and institutions: No valid historical explanation can be monolithic...

...the details were dull and simply there to be recorded...

...We have known, in history, oligarchy and theocracy, plutocracy and rule of the Third Estate...

...Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity [Eric Sevareid has written], beginning with the wire-agency bulletins and reports—the warp and woof of what the papers print and the broadcasters voice—our flat, one dimensional handling of news, have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given...

...No member of the U.S...

...Not a few contemporary Jeffersonians are less confident, more hesitant...

...The charge was harsh: The whole of McCarthyism had been created by the American newspapers...

...So McCarthyism came to pass, as mysterious and unique as anything that happens once and suddenly in history, and as understandable when, after the event, all things are considered...

...I should like to quote one final bit of American testimony, for it indicates, I believe, a real breakthrough in the critical self-awareness of the press, and here as elsewhere Americans seem to be the pioneers both in the disease and the diagnosis...

...I do not know whether this is either necessary or inevitable, encouraging or alarming...

...every reporter knew the truth, but few wrote it, because few newspapers were interested in the facts...

...If he was to be called a liar, someone had to call him a liar...

...In 1953, when the Senator was at the very height of his career, I found myself arguing about "witch-hunting" and "book-burning," "loyalty hearings" and "security charges" in every urban center I visited from Paris and Belgrade to New Delhi and Tokyo...

...Was it the headlines which made and unmade the man...

...An American observer, studying the reporter's growing influence over the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of the U.S...

...Nor is this a mere matter of occasional scoops and sensations...

...Commentators like Walter Lippmann, who indulge in regular flights of scholarly theory and analysis, refer to themselves simply as "newspapermen," and columnists like the Alsops prefer to present themselves as mere "reporters...

...But this power has now become democratized and shared by every once-lowly representative in the corridors of world-affairs...

...There are also, here and there, a number of press councils which from time to time conduct a hasty investigation into a scandal or a misdemeanor...

...Thus, it becomes necessary and proper for an engage reporter (read journalist, i.e., crusader) to be involved even in a kind of noble blackmail in the cause of truth and justice...

...More often than Melvin J. Lasky, former New Leader managing editor and ex-editor of Der Monat, is now co-editor of Encounter...

...What the editor needs is a Magna Carta of his own which would allow him, nay, oblige him, to place the interests of the obvious truth no lower than loyalty to the gathered facts...

...Why should the "media of mass communication," alone of all the formidable institutions which shape and control modern society, go on in its exercise of public authority without the legitimacy of properly stated claims...

...And—last, but as Rovere insists, very far from being the least—there was tail-gunner Joe himself, "the most gifted demagogue ever bred on these shores...

...If there are any larger lessons to be learned from such a case-study in the relationship between the press and the phenomenon of McCarthyism, it is that the increasingly powerful "Fourth Estate" must continue this agonizing reappraisal of its recent record...

...But though they feared him, it was not intimidation that caused the press to serve as the instrument for McCarthy's rise...

...And yet the truth laid bare here and there did not prevail...

...It did not appear to be ludicrous at the time that, if Stalinism was indeed a world danger, the McCarthyites were vengefully and myopically preoccupied with pink Army dentists, leftish U.S...

...The remedy lies with the reader...

...the press feeds on sensations, and the wilder the accusations became, the bigger the lies, the larger the headlines...

...and there is the beginning of valuable work being done by the International Press Institute at Zurich...

...Was its behavior during those "four sordid shameful years" (as the Alsops have called them) a passing aberration, a temporary failing, a lapse from high calling, or was it some organic deficiency in its very structure which must lead it to spiritual surrender and intellectual betrayal again and again...

...Alsop requested an interview with Sherman Adams, then the Presidential chief-of-staff...

...It is only fair to concede that in McCarthy the American press came up against an unprecedented master in the art of publicity and ballyhoo...

...not, it is they who serve as the watchdogs of democratic institutions—rather than the traditional government committees who offer too little too late...

...For many Washington correspondents the McCarthy era was "a deeply unsettling experience...

...there was no shred of hope for the half-bewitched, half-terrorized nation...

...no bolder seditionist ever moved among us—nor any politician with a surer, swifter access to the dark places of the American mind...

...The German facts were laid before Adams...

...Of course, all reporters must also be sternly loyal to the facts, whether the facts help or harm friend or foe...

...Can the same, however, be said for the institution of the press...

...Who among the journalists in those awful and confusing years reported that there was little terror and even less bewitching, that the demagogue who was having a temporary field day would be "ultimately" or "sooner or later" crushed by the traditional strength of American democratic institutions...

...Some of the peculiarly American difficulties arise from the curious U.S...

...The proverbial "power of the press" is obviously a force in the contemporary world for both great good and grievous harm...

...Like Cocteau's mirror it might well learn to reflect a little more before passing on its images...

...The reporter who is not engage is in fact likely to be a very bad and unsuccessful reporter...

...Not merely how they got their story, and when and where—but also why: This is what we want to know...

...Most came to hate and fear him as a cynical liar who was willing to wreak untold havoc to satisfy his own power drive...

...There was the traditional American (the words are Dickens') "distrustfulness, mean suspicions and unworthy doubts," aggravated by the aftermath of the Alger Hiss revelations (for if this clean-cut Harvard hero was guilty, what could not conceivably be believed about anyone...

...But first let me add a word of caution...

...As one correspondent has recorded, "He knew the newspapermen and how and when they worked and what they needed and when their headlines were and what made a 'lead,' what made an 'overnight,' what made a 'sidebar.' He knew how to 'top' or blanket a story unfavorable to him...

...Indeed, the American press has been accused, at home and abroad, of being the "sole responsible agency for the phenomenal rise of McCarthy...

...We read what the papers say, but we do not study them...

...The freelancing journalist, cut off from the responsibilities of portfolio, is considered free to become some kind of loose pamphleteer, clearly an alien and undesirable character...

...How was it possible that this formidable bloc of popular opinion was never reached, never swayed...

...THE TRUTH, THE LIE AND THE PRESS News today is a major historical force By Melvin J. Lasky Ours has been called the Era of the Journalist, and one does not have to look very far to be impressed and even overwhelmed by the evidence...

...In the short run, it may be that the temperaments and prejudices of the various correspondents color (and discolor) some of the factual reporting on the parliamentary or labor front, or from some foreign capital...

...The press is called, in the ponderous jargon of our day, "the media of mass communication," but the enormous press corps, with its reporters, correspondents, columnists, resident and roving editors, experts and special representatives, is no longer a simple "medium...

...An American correspondent is given a "leak" about alleged Bundeswehr military bases in Spain and there follows an important crisis among NATO allies and a serious worsening of Anglo-German relations...

...It was "somewhat grimly suggested" that they would be better published in the Alsop column than in a new McCarthy broadside...

...the evil to the level of the good...

...A reporter, bearing no authority other than accreditation by a newspaper, wire-service or radio-television network, has become part of the privileged officialdom in every world capital...

...Why not on the President—who, after all, refused to challenge the Senator from Wisconsin until very late in the day...