The Wayward Academics

...Elliot Richardson, former Secretary of Everything, is quoted as saying that when he wanted to avoid coverage, he would respond to an inquiry by using too many words and "smother the question with saliva...

...Very often for the policymaker, no news is good news...

...The greatest weakness of Linsky's book is, in fact, its failure to address cause rather than effect...

...Not one, however, was willing to cite a resulting change in policy...

...In the school busing controversy the press is faulted for having "emphasized normalcy" in desegregated schools over "disruption and racial incidents...

...Positive stories validate action and accelerate existing momentum behind a course of action...

...author, "Clearing the Air" Americans are increasingly preoccupied with "the media," to which they have transferred some of the epithets once reserved for government—too intrusive, too insensitive, too influential...

...If you think the press is biased, you should see the kind of anti-press bias that sometimes lurks under the ivy...

...Grateful for this belated insight, I beg leave to apply his colorful phrase to these two books, which reveal more about wayward academics than about the wayward press...

...Nearly 50 per cent of senior officials spend "over five hours a week thinking about or dealing with press matters...

...For the reporter it is j ust the reverse ...'' Linsky is fond of numbers...

...Linsky does not seem to realize that the government-press relationship is a dynamic one, involving not simply action and reaction, but complex interaction...

...I plead guilty to having myself added such background information, and to believing that doing so is a prime j ournalistic duty...

...Judgments of how controversial stories were covered reveal the viewpoint of The Media Elite...

...A Ror-schach-type test of apperception based on interpreting ambiguous pictures leads to the conclusion that journalists are "power-oriented.' Suggestions are irri-tatingly presented in the form of questions: "Are journalists more susceptible to such [macho] tendencies than people in other professions...

...that "in order to make policy well, officials increasingly have to take into consideration the press and public relations aspects of their programs and decisions...

...The six news episodes taken up in Impact are the orchestration of the public relations campaign to reorganize the U.S...

...To what extent is the press willfully manipulating policy and to what extent are policymakers manipulating the press...

...Attorney advising the Vice President that he was under investigation...

...There is indeed rich material here for a study of bias—among researchers...

...Less tendentious but equally superficial is Martin Linsky's Impact, a book based on examinations of sue major news events, laboriously quantified questionnaires, and interviews with current and past Federal officials—some famous and still self-justifying...

...Theymakepolicymakerspause, although there is no clear consensus about what happens when they do...

...Ifso, it would help explain the disparity between many journalists' self-image as champions of the people and the public's tendency to see journalists as rude, callous and disrespectful...

...It erupted when the Wall Street Journal "obtained" a copy of a letter from the U.S...

...Robert Lichter of George Washington University, working with Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Linda Lichter, was supported by the Earhart, Guggenheim, Olin and Scaife foundations in an attempt to dissect the "new elite" represented by news personalities...

...What we "learn" from his book is that Federal officials divide into "activists" and "reactivists" in their dealings with the press, and "the activist strategy produces better coverage...

...Does adverse reaction to a sensational disclosure mean a harmful story or a harmful decision...

...Journalists are placed not only under the microscope but on the couch...

...that "leakers" have a tendency "to be more confident [than professed nonleakers] about the relationship between press and government...

...In this atmosphere the press has become a trendy subject for academic scrutiny, attracting the largess of foundations endowed by millionaire business people...

...Officials who enjoy dealing with the press seem to last longer (they comprise 80 per cent of those with at least 20 years of service)—but if there is acausal connection, it is not established...

...But—perhaps betraying my own anti-antipress bias—I'm getting ahead of myself...

...Impact: How the Press Affects Federal Policymaking By Martin Linsky Norton...

...One must smile when former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, leaker extraordinary, expresses his "extremely bad feelings" about leaks...

...Martin Linsky of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School got a lot of money from the Charles H. Revson Foundation, and some more from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for a three-year study of how the press affects Federal policy...

...Accordingly, Lichter and his associates stack up the journalists they interviewed against a control group from the business world...

...Thus, it is a "jarring" example of anti-incumbency for a television correspondent to note that President Reagan, in an emotional tribute to a soldier killed in Grenada, failed to mention he was cut down by "friendly fire...

...260 pp...

...They would like to strip powerbrokers of their influence and empower black leaders, consumer groups, intellectuals and...

...This produces, amid similar revelations, the un-astounding finding that reporters are more likely than businessmen to favor a "humane society" and less likely to choose national defense as a top priority...

...It peeps out in phrases like Lin-sky's about the media controlling "the view of reality that is presented to the American people," and Lichter's about "America's new powerbrokers" and "society's mythmaker...

...More than 56 per cent of these officials believe the press had an important effect on Federal policy...

...Reviewed by Daniel Schorr Senior News Analyst, National Public Radio...

...Nowhere in this shallow work are we given any sense of the newsgathering process—of journalists competing with each other under editors and other supervisors, responding to perceived popular preferences in the ceaseless quest for ratings and circulation...

...All the funds and effort have gone into producing two works of pretentious banality that quantify everything and illuminate little...

...Observations often presuppose acceptance of the book's premises...

...Or that White House spokesman Larry Speakes, in stressing increased funding for Federal food programs, failed to mention the President had tried to cut these programs...

...With the exception of the essentially unrelated and successfully planned Post Office propaganda effort, government officials lost the news management initiative in each case because of leaks...

...Here is a random sampling: • "Sometimes the press plays a significant role in determining what becomes amajorissue...onceitis there, the press is part of the story...

...Over 96 per cent of the senior Federal policymakers we surveyed said that the press had an impact on Federal policy, and over half of them considered the impact substantial...

...Scientific inquiry requires scientific procedures...

...We are told in suffocating detail how government hates to be caught by surprise and how much energy is consumed in responding, but the lessons drawn range from the obvious to the inane...

...Consider the Agnew episode...

...the media...

...Predominantly negative toward nuclear power" is the indictment against journalists who seemed to concern themselves too much with matters of safety...

...The subsequent tumultuous events are exhaustively documented under the rubric of press impact, yet there is no discussion of who may have had an interest in disclosing the investigation and why...

...The Media Elite, as its title suggests, seeks to identify a generation of journalists better educated and better paid than their predecessors, ambivalent about their own success, yet relentlessly pursuing their own narcissistic ways and their conflict with established authority...

...Impact," yes, but whose...

...Yet a "Postscript on Chernobyl" acknowledges that on matters nuclear the media may have been "more correct in their assessments than the experts...

...In coverage of the "oil shocks" the media's sin was giving excessive attention to the petroleum industry's soaring profits...

...Post Office, the lead-up to the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, President Carter's cancellation of plans to develop a neutron weapon, the relocation of 700 families threatened by a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls' Love Canal, the dispute over President Reagan's plan to give tax exemption to racially segregated schools, and the controversy over the Reagan Administration plan to reduce Social Security disability benefits...

...Negative stories are arresting...

...And again when former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezin-ski, whoonpage 132 defines his leaks as "deliberate acts designed to promote the policy we were trying to implement," returns on page 201 to say, "Someone at my level never leaks...

...Instead, there are conclusions such as the following: "Today'sleadingjoumalistsarepoliti-cally liberal and alienated from traditional norms and institutions...