I SEE BY THE PAPERS

...But now we needed an interpretation, and the interpretation was that no farm revolt had taken place...

...We look for a lead—usually the most provocative, inflammatory, controversial thing the man says...

...This must have impressed the political reporters so much that they started applying the same technique to primaries...

...It is not reasonable to expect that this can be avoided...

...Up to now it had usually been considered that when a voter does not choose between two candidates there can hardly be a contest between them...

...Yet even if Dr...

...You have to tell what they "mean," not trusting the reader to make his own inferences...

...Much is expected of individual reporters and editors...

...President...

...But most papers getting UP service suppressed the item as advised to do...

...He asks people whom they would like to see win if Eisenhower were running against Kefauver, against Stevenson, against Symington, and so on...

...The prudent way to forecast is to forecast what everybody else is forecasting...

...It is not necessary to avoid it...

...Why did the UP kill the story...

...manager could have done it better...

...It is so much easier to gaze into the crystal ball than to go out and interview real, live voters...

...In 1948 a lot of newspapermen said they had learned their lesson, and some did a bit of soul-searching...

...They had, almost without exception, gone overboard on the proposition that Truman just could not win...

...It is not possible to abandon the 'lead' technique entirely...

...Newspapers generally, and the AP in particular, operate more and more these days on the assumption that facts have no sex appeal...

...Resolutions for fair and impartial political reporting may be something like the pledges the politicians sign every four years for a clean, honest, -no-lying, no-mud-slinging campaign...

...You have to pretty them up...

...We cannot §p»*J...

...The influence of the polls is plain...

...Another factor is the current madness for what is called interpretive reporting, to the exclusion of hard, prosy, undecorated narration of facts...

...The simpler explanation is that the press increasingly becomes a victim of its sloppy habits, of the public opinion polls, and of its predilection for prophecy instead of reporting, interpretation instead of facts...

...After half a dozen had been handled in this way, somebody in the Associated Press organization must have reminded himself that, after all, Eisenhower really was not running against Kefauver, or Stevenson, and that perhaps it was not quite accurate to speak of Eisenhower "outpolling" somebody who was not on the same ballot...

...Let us exercise caution in trying to keep the controversial phrase in context...

...Gallup were silenced, as I often think he should be, the political reporting fraternity probably would continue to be bewitched by the habit of prophecy...

...This was interesting, whatever its importance, and Smith put the item into his biweekly White House column...

...He laughed cheerfully and said he could not possibly remember...

...Has the press learned its lesson of 1948...

...Almost every primary, as reported in the press, thus added something to the legend of invincibility which the Republicans are so strenuously weaving around the President...

...The Curious 'Kill' Speaking of political reporting, a curious thing happened to Merriman Smith, the United Press reporter who is the senior member of the White House press corps and as such entitled to break up Presidential news conferences with, "Thank you, Mr...

...They are not expected, on the basis of each day's news, to give the reader the current total estimate of the relative merits of contending candidates or parties...

...It is so much more fun to balance the various elements of the political equation, and come forth with a copyrighted prognostication, than to do the tedious legwork which yields no spectacular forecast but only a factual report on what voters are saying, what party leaders are doing, and what social and economic influences are shaping the political process...

...Political reporting is still the prisoner of its own preconceptions...

...No G.O.P...

...I cannot recall that anybody before ever thought of matching up the unopposed candidate in one party's primary with the leading candidate in the other party's primary, and proclaiming the result as a "victory" for the unopposed candidate...

...Such assistance to Deity as the individual reporter may provide probably would not be decisive in any case...

...From that lead we trail off into as much additional comment as we have room for...

...One common characteristic of all three primaries was a rather light vote in the rural districts...

...The remark had been eliminated, he said, because it was "wholly out of context," and had merely been overheardA couple of weeks later, the President was asked at a news conference whether the remark had been made as reported...

...This doctrine sometimes seems to be at war with our news techniques...

...JBut Wiggins at least has led his staff M taking a pledge, which puts the Washington Post and Times-Herald well out in front...

...It always showed President Eisenhower "winning...

...Whether by chance or otherwise, the new conception had one invariable characteristic...

...The reason so many reporters were saying that he had been, this correspondent observed, was that they had announced beforehand that he would be dead if he lost...

...God has not abdicated, for the duration of the campaign, the prerogative of arriving at solemn final moral judgments on human beings...

...is to run "trial heats" between President Eisenhower and each of the potential Democratic candidates...

...In the dispatches from Nebraska, a slight qualification crept in...

...The trouble is that the prophecy business leads to a good deal of taking in each other's washing...

...We can achieve a better total balance than we have, sometimes, in the past...

...During political campaigns a conspicuous weakness of American reporting becomes especially noticeable- I am referring to our weaknesses in reporting public speeches...

...If the speaker hedges, let us say he hedged, at the expense of a sharp lead or a good headline...

...Strictly speaking in the lead paragraphs, the AP clung to its Eisenhower "angle-" The Nebraska vote, it said, had "established President Eisenhower firmly as a near two-to-one winner over Senator Kefauver...

...Gallup almost causes some of us to forget that the only way to decide an election is to go ahead and hold it...

...President Eisenhower's great personal popularity, coupled with his steady dominance in the public opinion polls, made it easy if not imperative for the newspapers to report each primary as a personal triumph for him...

...Some of us," he wrote, "will start the campaign with intellectual preferences...

...Political reporters talk to other political reporters instead of to voters...

...Instead of being content to identify and explain the political forces at work during a campaign, we have hypnotized ourselves with the futile exercise of trying to predict how it is going to come out...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...In some newspapers they are eliminated altogether, or rounded into meaninglessness...

...Smith has always been regarded as an unusually reliable reporter...

...This year, however, political reporters and especially the wire services developed the habit of lumping together the results of two party primaries as if they were the results of a single election...

...The President won, of course, in the same way that an unopposed candidate for governor of New York would defeat the leading candidate for governor of Iowa...

...I doubt that there was any far-flung plot on the part of newspapers and news agencies to rig the primary returns in Eisenhower's favor...

...When he won anyway, some of the more thoughtful reporters asked themselves how they could have got so far out of touch with public opinionMy own feeling was, and is, that too many of us had become preoccupied with something that is not really a journalistic function...

...And so we were told after each Presidential preference primary that Eisenhower had "won" 61 per cent of the total vote, or 65 per cent, or 70 per cent...

...Some of the stories from these states led off, in fact, with the "news" that no farm revolt was evident—which may be the first time that such a sweeping conclusion was drawn from the absence of voters from a primary in which there was no contest...

...and having announced it, they were trapped by their own predictions...

...Just reporting how many votes each candidate got and where he got them is considered insufferably dull, and so the statistics of an election are usually buried far down in the story...

...Prisoner of Preconceptions After the Minnesota primary was widely interpreted as a farmers' revolt, political reporters naturally watched for farmers' revolts in Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska...

...But that was down in the body of the story...

...Inter-Office Memo J. R- Wiggins, executive editor of the Washington Post and Times Herald, reminded his staff at the outset of the political season of the perils before them...

...Not long after President Eisenhower announced his decision to run again, a photographer at the White House overheard the President, walking down a corridor, say to one of -his companions: "I had to say yes because they told me they didn't have time to build up another candidate...

...It is a good policy to withhold it...

...The difference was that in the primaries they were dealing with a real and not a hypothetical situation—a situation, furthermore, in which two different sets of voters were casting their ballots in two separate party elections that happened to be held on the same day...

...The leading prophets collect around them galaxies of satellite prophets...

...It is better not to attempt it...

...Shortly after the column had been released for publication, the United Press sent out a kill...

...In a thoughtful memorandum he called upon reporters and editors to try always for fairness and impartiality, for restraint and common sense, and for a sense of responsibility in reporting the campaign...

...After National Democratic Chairman Paul Butler had publicly discussed the incident as an example of "the tremendous control this Administration has over communications in this country," UP General Manager Lyle C. Wilson explained...

...Each was unopposed on his own party's ballot, making each a sort of default winner...

...The Washington Daily News declined to observe the order, and printed the story anyway...

...do the speech in the English pjjlprjier—as a veritable abstract of S$ address, with the ideas in sub-Mpatially the same sequence...

...Others will develop preferences as the campaign proceeds...

...One wise Washington correspondent told me after the Minnesota primary that Adlai Stevenson had not, contrary to the then prevailing presumption, been killed off by his defeat in the state...

...In the old days, this would have been taken as an indication that only the regular political organizations were turning out for the primary, and that the bulk of unaffiliated voters had stayed home...

...Strictly speaking," the AP wrote, "President Eisenhower and Senator Kefauver were not running against each other...

...What we seek to avoid is the intrusion of these preferences into the professional tasks of news handling . . . "It is a good thing to avoid total judgments on men or events, or parties...

...A published account of a speech— political or otherwise—ought to try to disclose to the reader the total view of the speaker, insofar as he exhibits it, and not just a fragment...

...I doubt it...

...Gallup's favorite tricks ROBERT LASCH is an editorial writer for the St...

...One of Dr...