How the Press Works
HERMAN, GEORGE
How the Press Works_ Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House and the Truth By James Deakin Morrow. 378 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by George Herman CBS News correspondent Books by...
...Conceivably Deakin's reluctance stems from the fact that not all reporters are adversaries, but then we are not all critics either...
...Deakin has much to say about recent history, recent Presidents, recent journalism...
...that the Founding Fathers intended government to be uncomfortable, hence the First Amendment on freedom of the press...
...If it tends toward any of the categories listed, it is a mildly quirky version of "In defense of journalism...
...Let Deakin have his small pleasures, including his fondness for little known words, such as "monom-achies," "fardel," and "apodictic...
...2) Why the press is biased, or anti-American...
...Yet when the government concocts and feeds lies to reporters it must view the press as something other than simply a critic...
...The substance of the problem is frequently undercovered and instead a running score of victors and vanquished is offered...
...All this, of course, is merely the piquant sauce accompanying the thought-nourishing entree...
...Alas, poor CBS News...
...I have read many volumes on the subject and fought my way through a lot of charts and tables of the Washington press corps' characteristics...
...the journalists reacted with the fury of a creationist reading a book...
...It is mostly Lear: 'So we'll...
...The courts have deliberately institutionalized this relationship between prosecution and defense attorneys because it is believed to uncover the truth to the fullest extent possible...
...or (3) Sociological studies of reporters, including charts, tables and graphs on their age, education, wealth, and point of view, Jim Deakin, a colleague on the Washington scene who is an inner-directed man, has largely managed to avoid the stereotypes...
...Responding to the findings that increasingly the media are hiring graduates of superior schools, he writes:"Of course an Ivy League education is not a guarantee of individual ability...
...A comment may end cryptically, "fructus esse...
...A chapter summarizing some of the pedants is enlivened by pure Deakin...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...When they do their job well—which is not always the case by any means—the news media draw attention to the mistakes, shortcomings, abuses, and corruptions of those in power...
...This brings us to the serious matter of reality...
...Toward the end, I will concede, even Deakin nods over long lists of who did what...
...Deakin argues that reporters are not adversaries of government but the critics...
...What is more, many reporters look upon their role as an adversarial one...
...President Nixon, it should be recalled, had an "enemies list" drawn up, notacritics list...
...He has written a classic, although personal, account of the news business as practiced in the capital...
...Ultimately, I think, Straight Stuff is a little bit of each...
...2) My life chasing stories...
...who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out.'" The Lear quote illustrates an occasionally distracting stylistic tic: Deakin delights in his own literacy...
...And they do this impartially, regardless of which party and which individuals are in office...
...Small wonder, given these circumstances, that there have been many studies of our bents and twists...
...I am not sure why Deakin, like the vast majority of our confreres, seems so uneasy about acknowledging the essentially adversary relationship between reporters and newsmakers...
...The final eight lines summon up in one prolonged breath Rousseau, Voltaire, Spiro Agnew, Nixon, and Aeschylus...
...Frequently the aim of an ambitious young broadcast reporter interviewing a high government official is to reduce the guest-victim to powder before the eyes and ears of the audience, and thus make a name for himself or herself...
...Books by outsiders about the Fourth Estate similarly tend to fall into one of three categories: (1) How the press misrepresented, or missed, the truth...
...The media focus lovingly on the momentary, the transitory and the gossipy...
...He demonstrates how news leaks are in fact mostly generated by the government, observing that this is its means of holding a dialogue with itself through the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...hear poor rogues talk of court news...
...At the same time: "American journalism, with a few prominent exceptions, is incorrigibly superficial...
...Ours is not a profession bound by formal rules...
...But above all, he gives you the feel, the smell, the taste of what we Washington reporters do...
...or (3) In defense of journalism...
...I don't want to launch a semantic debate on Deakin's choice of "critics" over "adversaries" to describe the journalistic fraternity...
...Moreover, the fascination with language leads to flashes of verbal lightning, instantly illuminating the landscape Deakin wants us to see...
...Nor is such behavior confined to the representatives of politically extreme journals...
...Already I know of colleagues who have told aspiring young reporters: "First read Deakin's book...
...the great thing about Abraham Lincoln was that he put Harvard into perspective...
...Here he is on Lyndon Johnson changing press secretaries: "The reporters considered the situation...
...Those from Right-wing publications can be seen almost daily setting out to expose the folly, wrong-thinking, or reputed viciousness of an administration failing to adhere to Rightist orthodoxy...
...Beyond that, the methods we use, the pieces we turn out, are pretty much determined by our respective talents and our employers...
...Then you'll understand this business...
...When it is open and above board, it can actually be a courteous ritual...
...the news media so relish a fight that they often fail to make it clear what the fight is about...
...Once his thesis is clearly established, the author supports it by recounting some of the experiences he has had covering our Presidents from Eisenhower to the present for the St...
...They knew Johnson and [Bill] Moyers were very close, almost a tyrant and son relationship," On Richard Nixon's press secretary: "An endless supply of Ron Zieglers is available in Washington...
...On a rumor that reporters would have to conform to a dress code in the White House...
...One almost suspects he couldn't quite decide whether he was writing a general book or a textbook...
...and what is done to us...
...The book has a sweep that carries one past its idiosyncrasies...
...And they have an irresistible impulse to treat everything as a fight...
...A final example: "The DAR is a haven of the Red Scare and the Blue Rinse...
...And that is true...
...These reveal that in different ways and degrees, and sometimes for different reasons, the White House has lied to or misled reporters...
...They were not born yesterday but this morning...
...It is a craft of individuals with certain commonly held skills and loosely shared perceptions of what "makes news...
...No matter...
...Even so great a friend of the reporter as John F. Kennedy felt that journalists who were not 100 per cent for him were, by his definition, against him...
...Those from the Left do the same...
...Young print j ournalists often envision themselves as a Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, bringing down the mighty to their own greater glory and enlarged paycheck...
...To wit: "The press is the permanent, resident critic of government...
...generation after generation of young men stamped monotonously from the Great American Machine, with eager dentition and Orphan Annie eyes that reflect no light...
...they were not critics, they were adversaries...
...We are told that "The relationship between the President and the press is the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of relationships: an endless dispute"—a reference that will be evocative only to someone who remembers Bleak House, or perhaps to lawyers...
...Straight Stuff is the first book that has the feel of us right...
...He further presents, quite effectively, the reporters' contention that the American people have a right to know what alternatives are weighed in particular situations: Since they are going to pay the bill, in lives or money, public debate rather than secret decisions and fails accomplis are required in a democracy...
...Reviewed by George Herman CBS News correspondent Books by reporters about reporting usually fall into one of three categories: (1) What really happened...
Vol. 67 • March 1984 • No. 5
