Missing the News
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Missing the News A Crisis for the American Press By John Hohenberg Columbia. 316 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman John Hohenberg is a veteran journalist, teacher of journalism,...
...The New York Times and the Washington Post are the best, bravest and brightest of American newspapers...
...The same court has refused to review the confidentiality issue at the heart of the recent case involving New York Times reporter Myron Farber...
...Most others are in the entertainment business, not the First Amendment business...
...It would be disaster if the revision of the criminal code, still on the Congressional agenda, in the end includes anything like the British Official Secrets Act, and an even larger calamity if the Supreme Court drifted toward stricter English notions of newspaper liability to libel actions...
...The Farber case is a good place to start...
...The New Jersey courts mishandled the controversy by issuing a sweeping subpoena and denying any hearing to Farber and his employers...
...They claimed the right for their reporters to protect sources and judge for themselves the materiality to criminal prosecutions of data in their possession...
...Press sins are venial...
...As a branch of the entertainment industry, the press is unlikely to evoke substantial general sympathy in its times of trial...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman John Hohenberg is a veteran journalist, teacher of journalism, award recipient, and award administrator...
...I doubt that an average reader of the Post or Times, uncursed by graduate economic training, will have learned much about the sources of inflation, the adequacy of Carter's Phase II, and, least of all, the existence of alternatives...
...Hohenberg quotes former Times editorial page editor John Oakes approvingly to the effect that "As the press has assumed the responsibility in recent years of inquiring into the hidden recesses of government...
...The same columnists, ranging in ideology from slightly left to far right of center, pop up everywhere...
...Nor does he deny numerous flagrant invasions of personal privacy and the sensationalizing of crime and scandal...
...I wish I could stop here...
...Even when the papers set their minds and resources to an important story, they usually botch it...
...No doubt some judges are corrupt and others incompetent-weaknesses, incidentally, that also afflict journalists...
...At the moment the judiciary are in the vanguard of the attack...
...A New York judge ruled at the end of last year that the state's shield statute does not apply to the writers of books because they are not journalists...
...Let me briefly share the results of introspection...
...the reaction on the part of governing authority has been to attempt to place new and unaccustomed restrictions upon it...
...The author puts some of the blame on editors and publishers who resist outside evaluation and refuse to support independent review bodies like the National News Council established by the Twentieth Century Fund...
...Judges are closing their courts to pretrial hearings, gagging opposing attorneys and using other means, notably threats of contempt citations, to curtail the flow of information...
...He makes a solid argument here for the proposition that the freedom of the press is under unusually severe assault...
...Farber is a brave man...
...The stars themselves busily blur their strongest virtues...
...The irony of the matter, of course, is the implausibility of winning a competition with television -the unchallenged winner of any and all contests in triviality...
...Our press may be a poor thing, but it is much bolder at revelation and less respectful of public officials than its British equivalent...
...Dare I say that the lure of the balance sheet is an enemy of the First Amendment far more ferocious than Chief Justice Burger in his least restrained moments...
...With a few exceptions, newspapers solidly supported Farber...
...If they are fortunate and their local paper courageously takes the strip, they will enjoy some sharp social commentary in Doones-bury...
...Freedom of the press is vital to the preservation of other liberties...
...Author of 10 books about the press, he is a far from uncritical admirer of American newspapers...
...More dangerous is the almost universal skepticism about the press and its claims and merits...
...For their own well-being, newspeople ought to think carefully and fairly about the resolution of disputes where the freedom to print conflicts, or appears to conflict, with individual reputation, personal privacy and the opportunity to get a fair trial...
...Possibly the clue to newspaper survival is in the qualities now in disrepute: serious analysis, independent editorial judgment, and readiness to annoy the advertisers...
...Two years ago Business Week's cover story on the Times charged that it was poorly managed and, far worse, had allowed itself to forget that it was a large enterprise whose financial interests coincided with those of other major corporations...
...Hohenberg records the sour joke around the Times that the paper's next supplement will be called "News...
...I agree...
...In the Stanford University Daily case, the Supreme Court upheld the application of search warrants to newspaper offices...
...Their editorials sometimes are canned and almost always read like conventional endorsements of popular wisdom...
...Nevertheless, the media claims were almost breath-takingly arrogant...
...Supreme Court majorities come and go...
...An increasing percentage of the Post and the Times is devoted to features popularized by Clay Felker during his years of stewardship of New York magazine...
...Honesty compels me to add that the press has brought many of its troubles upon its own head and evoked from civil libertarians like myself an alarming tepid-ness of affect when confronted by calls to arms such as the one at hand...
...Rumor has it that the admonition stimulated the publisher to replace his cousin John Oakes with Max Frankel as editor of the editorial page, and to fatten daily issues with Living, Home, Weekend, Sports, and Science minimagazines...
...Journalists are not lawyers...
...Watergate and the Pentagon Papers brought honor to the Post and Times, respectively...
...Its inaction left standing the New Jersey interpretation of the primacy of Sixth Amendment rights to a fair trial over First Amendment guarantees of press liberty...
...Yet for better or worse ours is a polity in which judges evaluate competing and clashing claims...
...Judges (as well as defense counsel) may differ about the importance to the jury of a given piece of information...
...I rather think that Oakes and Hohenberg exaggerate newspaper militancy...
...How frequently have their brethren as fearlessly interpreted their role...
...In any event, the public seems bored or even resentful at appeals to conscience and the duties of citizenship on the occasions when such appeals actually are made...
...Many readers turn first to the sports pages or the comics...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 3
