Back in the Press BOX

...Reporting Schorr's departure, CBS' Walter Cronkite misrepresented what happened...

...Yet Clearing the Air is more than a "Final Assignment"—the prepublica-tion title...

...His critics have rightly faulted him for glossing over a number of nagging questions, particularly his failure to clear the air when a CBS colleague was falsely accused of leaking the unreleased Pike report...

...During the course of a 23-year career with CBS News, he distinguished himself as a foreign correspondent in such capitals as Moscow, Bucharest and Bonn, and he subsequently won three Emmy Awards for his Watergate coverage...

...The mix in the United States today is such, however, that more people depend on us than they do upon newspapers, yet we are just not a big enough vessel to handle that...

...The humdrum reality of life is subtly changed into a more exciting television version of reality...

...It ought to be made perfectly clear," said Cronkite, "that there is no way that television can replace the newspapers and the newsmagazines as an important source of information...

...Joseph Conrad David Halberstam once aptly described Daniel Schorr as "an old-fashioned print journalist—too serious, too subtle, too talented, too aggressive for television...

...scrutinized people, they were scrutinizing us, and not always appreciatively...

...It is a good supplemental source for a lot of people, a primary source for some...

...Without Watergate, the Pike report may never have fallen into Schorr's hands...

...unfortunately, he only muddied the water, according to the author...

...He issued a statement "accepting the 'reality' of being unable 'to work as a reporter while personally involved in a controversy over reporters' rights,' as though I had simply put aside my normal duties to deal with a First Amendment issue...

...But he was taken off the air last year after arranging the publication of the suppressed final report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, then steadfastly defending the First Amendment by refusing to name his source even when threatened with jail for contempt of Congress...

...TV, however, so "obviously incompatible with invisibility," produced a "new reality" for broadcasters: "while we...

...it was reserved for Eric Sevareid...

...It became increasingly difficult for a television journalist to disengage himself from his story...

...Schorr has now written a book to "illuminate some of the central conflicts involving government, the news media and society...

...But it should not be a primary source for any...

...Chancellor elaborated: "We are very good at transmitting experience, and we're very bad at transmitting facts...

...Reviewed by Peter Lincoln Assistant Editor, "New Times" "1 don't like work—nobody does—but 1 like what is in work—the chance to find yourself...

...He has returned not on our screens but in the pages of this book—and his medium is the message...

...As the influence of the media grew, so did leaks: "In an era where perception seemed to overshadow reality, where image was the decisive political force, it was almost inevitable that the walls of discretion and restraint would be cracked by the manifold temptations to create and alter public impressions...

...But he doesn't stop there...

...Although "no licences have ever been lost over an issue of national security, and the FCC has taken the firm position that it has no authority over the content of broadcasting—let alone what a subsidiary book company publishes," the network "perceived itself as being threatened" by disclosure of the report and acted on this mistaken notion by relieving Schorr of his duties...

...Here then is a former culprit recanting and blaming the messenger for its bad news, for "dulling the sense of the objective and tangible and making the perceived more important than the fact," and for certifying "a new semblance of the truth, a kind of allegory of events...

...The Pike affair, interrupting Schorr's career, further confronted him with "being turned from a newsman into a news story, from practitioner of the press into defender of the press—and sometimes target of the press...

...Quite apart from his own circumstance, he offers a penetrating analysis of the problems of TV news...

...Perhaps it is in the nature of an escapist medium to trivialize its conflicts, personalize its disputes and construct its own consoling realities," Schorr observes...

...Next morning the director received orders from New York not to use the black backdrop again...

...Its time restraints and demands for pacing oblige it to make the rambling speaker seem pithy, the disjointed debate terse and cogent...

...Fueling the controversy was CBS' reluctance to make the full document available because, Schorr maintains, it "overestimated the risk to television of acting in defiance of government...

...For the author, it is a means of getting a lot off his chest and of returning to a normal life—to "the press box, not the arena...

...Nevertheless, as Schorr notes, television news "selects the interesting over the boring, the simple over the complex, the concrete over the abstract...

...This, Schorr believes, can be partly attributed to the legacy of Watergate...

...The result was oracular: "It had the dramatic effect of making me seem to appear from nowhere...

...The word 'reporting,' " he writes in his Foreword, "was always closely associated in my mind with the word 'reality.' " The reporter's function "was to discover the 'real story' or to extract from it the mists of vagueness and pretense," while remaining the "untouched observer...

...Your own reality—for yourself, not for others?what no man can ever know...

...For as he discovered in writing Clearing the Air, his words have "one touch of reality that television could not import...

...In a series of related, anecdote-filled, crisply-written essays, he holds forth provocatively on dilemmas like the rival claims of national security and the public's "right to know," the ethics of checkbook journalism, and the influence of government officials and network operatives on broadcast newsmen...

...The author acknowledges he contributed to the misunderstanding by cooperating with CBS in covering up his "forced resignation," which took place in September 1976, after months of negotiations...

...Schorr has been absent from our livingrooms for many months...

...But as he explains himself and ponders the nature of television journalism, we enjoy a rare and persuasive look at the realities of the news business...

...If Schorr's book is self-therapy, it works to our benefit as well...

...they stay there, not melting with the twist of a dial...

...As comic relief, the author highlights the "uphill battle" television news wages against its "show-business surroundings...

...Newspapers, meanwhile, are very good at transmitting facts and very bad at transmitting experience...

...Schorr requested a correction, and the next night Cronkite obliged...

...He recounts that "as part of the constant experimentation with lighting, camera angles and backgrounds," he was once positioned before a black backdrop to tape an analysis...

...Interestingly, its demerits were also readily acknowledged in interviews I have conducted with Cronkite and NBC's John Chancellor...