Power and the Press

...Similarly, based on his years at City Hall, he has some surprisingly kind words for the often scurrilous New York Post...

...Since he does not spell out these limits or suggest a source for them apart from his personal sense of morality, one is never clear in this book about ethics what ethical ground Goldstein is standing on...

...His book is rich in anecdotes and personal remembrance...

...Toadegreeun-imagined by most New Yorkers, the Post set the agenda for the other papers...

...Tebbel and Watts indicate that the credibility gap which opened up during the Johnson Administration and widened under Richard M. Nixon damaged both sides, despite the fact that the journalists were merely doing their job of reporting the news...

...The more reliable papers maintain a sharp line between their news and editorial pages...

...They take their social responsibility as conveyors of information very seriously...

...John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts are less prescriptive than Goldstein(though they do not try to hide their liberal biases...

...Interestingly, according to Tebbel and Watts, the Presidents who have endured the severest criticism are those considered among the greatest—Washington, Lincoln and the second Roosevelt...

...An unsettling proposition, but one that is unproved even by the evidence contained in this book...

...What was acceptable then (Grant did not even bother to lodge a protest) would be condemned as reprehensible today...

...He calls forthekindof professionalism that would identify journalism as a higher calling distinct from other jobs...

...He feels reporters should be "embarrassed" if they withhold news, and urges them to "maintain an arm's length distance from government," never performing undercover work for the police...

...In the perpetual st ruggle between journalists and the White House, it isn't that the press has become too strong...

...Always remember," John F. Kennedy said, "that their interests and ours ultimately conflict...

...There is widespread concern about the power of the press and a general perception that it is abusing its position...

...It was the only major newspaper in the city, Goldstein notes, that gave significant coverage to municipal news, frequently scooping its competitors, the Times and Ihc Daily News...

...At the same time, it has been drawing closer to the traditional professions in recent years: More and more reporters are receiving specialized training, and a growing number of newspapers have adopted ethical codes...

...There are descriptions of plagiarism, of invasions of privacy, of reporters breaking the news of a child's death to parents in order to catch a "reaction shot...

...For all of his remarkable popularity, Ronald Reagan has been unable, especially in his second term, to translate his standing in the polls into support for his programs...

...Journalism has changed a great deal in the last hundred years or so...

...As a result, he often sounds like a finger-wagging schoolmarm...

...Unfortunately, in his zeal to expose every j ournalistic sin from the most mortal to the least venial, Goldstein doesn't know when to stop...

...Journalism is not strictly a profession, he observes, because it lacks a method of licensing and a system of standards...

...Goldstein cites a journalism textbook that states: "many fundamental techniques of investigative reporting involve actions some would label dishonest, fraudulent, immoral, and perhaps even illegal...

...With his penchant for moralizing, Goldstein fails to see that the most interesting parts of his book are the sections where moralities clash...

...Sometimes the rupture is caused by the publication of a leak or a dispute over what constitutes national security, but the ineluctability of the process is striking...

...If Presidents have attempted to handle the press in a variety of ways—some charmed, some dominated, some hid behind closed office doors—by the start of the 20th century they had come to realize that journalists could be manipulated for political advantage...

...Government is now, consequently, in a position to exert the controls that the architects of the Bill of Rights, and particularly the First Amendment, expressly sought to prevent...

...Maybe the classic example is the priest who cannot disclose the confession of an unsuspected murderer...

...A pattern persists in media/White House relations, generally beginning with a honeymoon of mutual good will, followed by initial suspicions, and concluding in open dissatisfaction that can lead to all-out war...

...Their approach in The Press and the Presidency is historical, and has the virtue of reminding us that some things do not change...

...Indeed, American history, as traced through The Press and the Presidency, suggests an explanation for why the public views the media with such distaste and distrust at the present time...

...The only problem with the World's, article was that Grant never made the statements attributed to him...

...by the time he gets around to scolding reporters who abuse parking privileges, readers may feel they have crossed the path of a latter-day Carrie Nation...

...Predictably, FDR and JFK were also experts of the art as was, of all people, Calvin Coolidge...

...Each side has its concept of the public good, and the two concepts differ...

...It is that our recent Presidents have been too weak...

...But although both have a lot to tell us about the practice and function of the media in an age of suspicion and controversy, in the end neither, singly or in combination with the other, tells us enough...

...of the New York Herald that "he made his paper famous by making it infamous...

...Two new books—Tom Goldstein's The News at A ny Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News (Simon and Schuster, 301 pp., $18.95) and John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts' The Press and the Presidency: From George Washington to Ronald Reagan (Oxford, 583 pp., $24.95)—succeed in shedding some light on this puzzle...

...Every profession faces conflicts between its peer-approved standards of conduct and socially condoned behavior...

...What is more, the last 20 years hardly suggest a need for concern about an overpowerful Chief Executive—not with two Presidents having been driven from office and two others turned into national laughing stocks...

...When he says that the Times has been carrying on a long-standing love affair with Judge Irving R. Kaufman, opening up its pages to him at an almost promiscuous rate, you know that as a one-time legal reporter for the paper, Goldstein is someone who had reason to keep count...

...There is no straightforward resolution of this phenomenon...

...It mattered nothing to him who was harmed, so that he made money...

...And he noted sourly of James Gordon Bennett Sr...

...Janet Cooke, the young woman who won the Pulitzer Prize for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict that it later turned out she had invented, is here...

...Yet he also insists on the need for self-restraint in news gathering, repeatedly criticizing the more extreme techniques reporters use to get their stories—and some techniques that are not so extreme...

...The Presidency has evolved into an imperialistic institution which is now capable of manipulating and controlling the media, and through them the public, in ways beyond the vision of the FoundingFathers...

...He does not rule unchallenged, and the press is scarcely cowed...

...So is Christopher Jones, who wrote a piece for the Times Magazine on the remote regions of Cambodia without getting any closer than Spain...

...Their commitment should be to informing the public...

...Standards of accuracy have grown stricter, and partisanship has declined, or at least become less blatant...

...Writers & Writing POWER AND THE PRESS BY BARRY GEWEN In 1868, the New York World ran a story on Ulysses S. Grant featuring extensive comments from the new Presidentelect on various public figures, including some of the country's most renowned newspapermen...

...Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter were notable failures...

...Ironically, however, as this trend continues and journalism becomes increasingly conscious of itself as a separate vocation, with its own rules and allegiances, it will likely move farther away from commonly accepted norms...

...One prominent newspaperman is quoted as saying that "good" reporting requires a certain amount of dishonesty...

...Goldstein's aim in The News at Any Cost is to elucidate the misdeeds and failings of contemporary journalists...

...Goldstein, a former employee of both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, press secretary to Mayor Ed Koch from 1980-82, and currently a journalism instructor at Berkeley, brings a wealth of experience to his discussion of media ethics...

...Since it had not been able to speak to him personally, the paper interviewed a number of his friends and simply proceeded to fashion the reports of his views into direct quotations...

...About Horace Greeley, Grant said: "I like Greeley better than I have any reason to suppose he likes me...

...Yet, strangely, distrust of the media is probably higher now than at any time in this century...

...Theodore Roosevelt, astride his "bully pulpit," was "the first President to shape public opinion, and he did it with a master hand...

...For his part, Goldstein apparently wants to have it both ways...

...The editor of the New York Sun he considered "aman for whom I ought to have great contempt, but to whom I owe nothing but good will...

...It is surely of significance that the news agencies the public seems most to dislike and distrust are those with the highest professional standards, not the New York Post and National Enquirer, but CBS, ABC and NBC News, the Times and the Washington Post...

...As they work their way forward to The Great Communicator, a President whom they fit into a Nixonian mold because of the campaign of intimidation they say he is waging against the press, the two authors argue that the scales in the ongoing battle have tipped heavily toward the White House...