THE PRESS MANAGES THE NEWS

...A. J. Liebling has observed that fewer than fifty of approximately 1,760 American dailies have any reporters abroad and fewer than 100 subscribe to one of the syndicated foreign services maintained by The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and The Chicago Daily News...

...Slave World...

...Another observer has ventured the opinion that U.S...

...Reflecting the cold war stance of the U.S...

...It seems unlikely unless they speak up to the publishers...

...defense against missiles is almost an accomplished fact, although a careful analysis of technical developments would indicate that this achievement is still far in the future...

...At the same meeting at which President Kennedy called on the press in 1961 to raise its standards, the president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and other speakers, hailed the daily newspaper as an unexcelled institution of public service...

...As threatening as the Russian buildup in Cuba may have looked to the United States, it did not seem to much of the world any more a threat to peace than the long-time American military buildup around the perimeter of the Soviet Union...

...the Russian leader, to the Soviet Parliament...

...This leaves about 1,600 daily papers almost entirely dependent on the Associated Press and the United Press International for foreign news, and in many cases clients of one wire service do not subscribe to the other...

...But United Press International, in a dispatch from Moscow the same day, ignored the conciliatory aspect of the Soviet move and looked for a conflict theme...

...the case was taken unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court by the American Civil Liberties Union...

...military establishment that a nuclear war would not be too bad, 330 newspapers across the land in the fall of 1961 gave major headline treatment to a series of Associated Press articles by Dr...

...Shackford's stories are filled with allegations about the "hoaxes" and "falsehoods" of the Soviet Union...

...To evaluate properly the role of United States foreign policy in this changed world of 1963, Americans need a far wiser and more sophisticated press than the average daily newspaper now represents...

...Copy editors as well as reporters have usurped the function of the editorial page in their handling of news that touches on international relations...

...11 In a "score-card" type of coverage THE PROGRESSIVE of international events...

...Sylvester's revealing, if thoughtless, remark prompted loud protests in the press, questions at Presidential press conferences, and a Congressional investigation...

...It attempted to put the situation in perspective by reporting events suggesting the possibility of negotiation...

...Turner Catledge, managing editor of The New York Times, has said: "Our primary obligation is to our readers...

...Louis Post-Dispatch and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as notable examples) clearly asserted that their highest responsibility was to report the news and that such reporting was more important to a free people than possible interference with government policy...

...Because of the tendency to rely on the official information line, American readers were long denied a factual account of the corruption in, and the deterioration of, the Diem government...

...When newspapers present international news in a biased fashion, when they exaggerate the conflicts of the cold war, or when they withhold news or fail to dig it out because of government objections, they are usually motivated by the mistaken notion that somehow the press has a duty to promote government or "national" policy...

...His invective may even be turned against a friendly government if it is not following what he considers the proper cold war policy: earlier this year, in a news story, he accused then Canadian Prime Minister John Diefen-baker of "double talk...

...They accept as gospel information from sources deemed to be anti-Communist and give unwarranted weight to statements because they come from "official," though unidentifiable, U. S. government spokesmen...

...At last year's meeting of publishers, the AN PA head remarked that newspapers faced a challenge and had an opportunity greater than at any time before...

...Even the pressure for loyalty in a crisis need not have barred questions, for example, about the true offensive potential of the old Soviet Ilyushin-28 bombers in Cuba and the purported upset in the world nuclear power balance by missiles in Cuba which were still under Russian control...

...In 1960, when President Eisenhower's visit to Japan was cancelled because of intense opposition there, the meaning of the opposition was interpreted by the American press almost exclusively in terms of the cold war alignments of the Japanese people, anti-American or pro-American, anti-Communist or pro-Communist...

...Another defect in press coverage of international affairs stems from the tendency of reporters and editors seeking to lure readers by writing and stressing that type of news which represents force, conflict, or drama, in contrast to the kind which deals with conciliation...

...The enlistment of the press in the cold war is registered in three principal ways: % In national bias in headlines and stories...

...papers use less than a sixth of the 20,000 words filed by the Associated Press from overseas every day...

...Like other papers, The New York Times properly carried big headlines and stories indicating an approaching showdown over Berlin...

...Seven months later it was still producing editorial howls and headlines...

...Russia, Free World vs...

...In May, 1960, after Khrushchev announced that an American U-2 plane had been shot down inside Russia, the American government insisted that the aircraft was a weather observation plane that had accidentally blundered over the Turkish-Soviet border...

...Whatever happens is viewed in terms of a triumph by one side or the other...

...In emphasis on force and conflict...

...During the summer of 1961, when the Berlin dispute was at the boiling point, James Reston of The New York Times wrote: "The front pages of the American newspapers these days are full of what we call 'Gee Whiz' headlines...

...In its burning focus on the U.S.Soviet aspects of the Berlin dispute, the American press during the first stage of the crisis neglected to report what the German press itself was revealing—that inside West Germany itself there was much dissatisfaction with Chancellor Adenauer's rigid policy, that West Germans were actually obsessed with their own material prosperity to the point of massive unconcern about West Berlin and indifference to reunification...

...and a lead story by the paper's own correspondent which began: "The tumblers and jugglers [presumably other U.N...

...The New York Times reported these developments in straightforward fashion...

...Willard Libby suggesting that most Americans could protect themselves by building fallout shelters...

...The United Press International—shaped by its jingoistic Hearst ancestry and its mandate to produce colorful news—is perhaps the most blatant syndicated peddler of national bias in so-called news stories...

...The distortion is that all the military preparations for the defense of Berlin are being made public and all the diplomatic planning for the relief of the crisis is being kept private...

...It should be made clear at the outset that our concern here is not with anything that appears on the editorial pages of newspapers...

...Any intelligent reader would have wanted to judge the effect of the speech for himself after reading a full and dispassionate account of the President's remarks and the world reaction...

...Despite a critical lack of news from so important a nation, neither the American Newspaper Publishers Association nor such a prestigious exponent of a free press as The New York Times undertook to send a correspondent into China in defiance of the State Department's ban and as a test case...

...Reston was right with regard to much of the American press, although his own newspaper was a commendable exception...

...It is all very grim, but don't let it throw you, for there is a serious distortion in the news these days which is unfortunate but probably unavoidable...

...Moreover, such foreign news as is printed comes through a limited number of channels...

...The best correspondents, and the greatest number of them, are concentrated not necessarily where the most significant events are occurring but where it is easiest and cheapest to send reporters...

...He was formerly associate editor of The Arkansas Gazette...

...members] were hustled into the wings today while the world listened to a man of distinction...

...But in all the furor over alleged managing of the news by the Administration, there has been scarcely a whisper about a far more insidious perversion of a free press—the employment of the news by the editors themselves as a weapon of the cold war rather than a source of enlightenment about world events...

...The same uncritical acceptance of the official U.S...

...government rather than to print the facts as impartially as possible, leaving to its readers the matter of judging whether their government was right or wrong...

...A third fault in press presentation of international events was aptly characterized by Adlai Stevenson as "score-card" coverage of the cold war, evident in the tendency of foreign correspondents to look for events that fit the pattern of cold war diplomacy: Communist vs...

...Men are being called up...

...Newspapers are not—or should not be—in the business of purveying pride...

...This deferential reliance on official and friendly sources has led in recent years to considerable misinformation on what has been going on in such places as the Congo, Laos, and Vietnam^ Early in 1962, Henry L. Bretten, a University of Michigan political scientist with considerable experience in West Africa, charged that the public was not receiving a true and clear picture of what was happening in Africa, particularly the Congo, because the American press was largely dependent for its information on a "captive" African press, a press controlled by expatriate or European interests, by political regimes within the country, or by local political parties and interest groups...

...Yet national pride regularly seems to get the better of objectivity in the reporting of Soviet-American confrontations...

...But the cold war generals of the press in his audience might have profited more from sound counsel on their own management of the news that denies the American people the right to a free and objective press...

...The proper function of the press in a free society is to give its readers a maximum of information about public affairs, and to provide a channel for the criticism of, and protest against, government actions...

...Our concern, rather, is with the reporting of news...

...Not only is international news often poorly reported but it is also not extensive enough to give the American people an adequate picture of what is happening...

...But in the headlines of all three Pittsburgh newspapers Khrushchev's remarks became "boasts," while no such debunking label was applied to Eisenhower's comments...

...The American press pays pious lip service to objectivity, yet in reports of relations between the Communist and the non-Communist worlds objectivity has become a neglected casualty of the cold war...

...When the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that newsmen must be kept out of China because their presence there might "impair" U.S...

...But the Associated Press (serving 1,729 domestic publications and 2,380 broadcasters) is not above going out of its way to slant a story to create a favorable image of the United States or a derogatory image of the Soviet Union...

...In the absence of criticism and protest, government would soon become the master rather than the servant of its citizens...

...This chain (with eighteen newspapers and three million circulation) has been beating the drums in news columns for a tough policy on Cuba, a tough policy on Vietnam, a tough policy on nuclear tests—and let the Soviet Union beware the consequences of any resulting nuclear war...

...Instead, the test was made by William Worthy, a correspondent for The Baltimore Afro-American, and an occasional newscaster for the Columbia Broadcasting System...

...After the truth about the Diem administration finally began to gain wide circulation, the Associated Press in March, 1962, filed a plaintive dispatch from Saigon about the difficulties of reporting from that country because of the Vietnamese government's failure to cooperate...

...JOHN LOFTON, lawyer and newspaperman, is an editorial writer for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette...

...Each speaker dwelt on the state of his country's defenses and on its purported invincibility...

...When the Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile was first successfully tested last year, The New York Herald Tribune crowed triumphantly in a six-column headline: "We Hit a 'Fly in the Sky.' " In stories and headlines extending into the spring of this year, other newspapers (with the notable exception of The New York Times) have given the impression (echoing the theme of armed services public relations releases) that a U.S...

...Under Soviet Communist theory, according to Wilbur Schramm, author of a study sponsored by the National Council of Churches, "The important thing is to select and interpret the news in such a way as to advance the cause of the Soviet state...

...The strong undercurrents of pacifism, neutralism, or anti-militarism which influenced the Japanese attitude on the proposed visit were almost wholly ignored...

...In a story, which was featured by The Washington Post, the UPI, employing its customary boxing ring prose, reported that the Soviet Union "stepped up its attacks" on the Common Market and said Khrushchev had "weighed in" with a lengthy signed article on the same subject...

...The most flagrant fault in press coverage of international affairs is national bias...

...But the real powers of the American press did little to obtain a reversal of the State Department's exercise of authority over the flow of news by withholding correspondents' passports...

...As reprehensible as Castro's repressions have been, they have hardly been more severe than those of some previous regimes which have received little notice in the American press...

...Some individual writers, such as Scripps-Howard's R. H. Shackford, have dropped all efforts at being dispassionate and have unapologetically transferred verbal weaponry from the editorial page (where it belongs) to the front news pages...

...Many editors and publishers have volunteered to fight—not as champions of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression but as swivel chair soldiers using words as weapons to carry out their own concepts of cold war tactics...

...government) to the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem...

...The soldiers have taken over...

...Maps with big black arrows show poor old Berlin lost in a gray Communist background...

...U. S. government versions of Soviet-American disputes are usually purveyed as the whole truth rather than as one factor of a complex international equation...

...In the fall of 1960, President Eisenhower made a much-heralded address to the United Nations General Assembly, one which he hoped would regain for the United States some of the good will lost as a result of the U-2 incident and the summit debacle...

...The title of the series was, "You Can Survive Atomic Attack," and its tone was consistent with the Administration's hard-line diplomatic gambit on Berlin of that period...

...Even when the press differs with the government, it usually does so in the direction of promoting a more bellicose pursuit of the cold war...

...in 1962, with regard to the military significance of the Soviet arms in Cuba...

...American reporters on the scene, he said, were blindly reprinting the propaganda handouts or information pamphlets from such sources...

...Lester Markel, Sunday editor of The New York Times, has estimated that less than five per cent of the news space in newspapers is devoted to international news, including such news originating in Washington...

...anti-Communist, America vs...

...Newspaper dramatization of the "threat" from Cuba in 1962 was similar to press sensationalism over Berlin in 1961...

...At their 1963 meeting, the publishers heard AN PA president, Irwin Maier, publisher of the independent and enterprising Milwaukee Journal, deliver another denunciation of Administration management of news as "a weapon in the cold war...

...Last August the Soviet Union, as an alternative to trading blocs such as the Common Market, renewed an earlier call for an international conference that might set up a world trade organization covering all regions "without discrimination...

...During the 1961 Cuban invasion and the 1962 Cuban blockade, the press allowed itself to be used for officially-inspired misinformation—in 1961, with regard to the Cuban invading force and the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement with it...

...actions were at least questionable—the bulk of the American press acted as though its obligation were to advance the cause of the U.S...

...The wire services, no less than individual writers, have largely discarded any pretense of being objective observers and reporters...

...The American press, in its handling of cold war news, exhibits a trait that is characteristic of the Soviet press...

...But the press converted Cuba into a war threat long before the President did, thus creating an atmosphere that made restrained and deliberative action much more difficult...

...There was much emphasis on Castro's tyranny but little emphasis on the social reforms that have won him a wide following in Cuba among those on the lowest rungs of society...

...But will they get it...

...One of the prime tests of a free press is its independence of government...

...Apparently the Sputnik successes of the Russians, which had astounded most Americans, had not cured our press of the habit of deriding Soviet technology and weapons...

...In the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban blockade—in all of which both the honesty and the legality of U.S...

...I wouldn't know how to interpret our obligation to the government...

...But unlike most other papers, The Times also carried front page stories about diplomatic efforts to avert a military clash...

...invasions...

...American newspaper readers have been given a distorted picture of Vietnam created by the commitment of the press (and the U.S...

...Even the balanced Christian Science Monitor emphasized the negative side of the Soviet trade gesture...

...line was evident in March of this year when the press gave wide currency to Pentagon and State Department claims that two Soviet planes had deliberately flown over Alaska, but paid little attention to later information that the overflights were accidental...

...But The San Francisco Chronicle gave its readers a spoon-fed judgment on the front page—in the form of a banner headline which proclaimed: "How Ike Won the Crucial Day...

...pledges (in the United Nations and the Organization of American States) not to use force against other nations...

...Much of the American press accepted the version put out by the Eisenhower Administration at face value, though the circumstances of the case should have warned editors to be skeptical...

...During the 1962 Soviet-American confrontation over Cuba, the American press, in its news columns as well as in its editorial columns, emotionally supported President Kennedy's blockade and nuclear ultimatum to Russia, virtually ignoring what these steps did to traditional American respect for freedom of the seas and to U.S...

...Early in January, 1960, President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev made significant speeches within a week of each other—the American leader, to Congress...

...Each leader touched on his nation's advance in weapons technology...

...Because of their involvement as cheerleaders for the West, reporters cease to fill their proper role as independent observers...

...In a single story, Lucas managed to observe that the flow of Russian military equipment into Cuba "has now reached the proportions of a major buildup," then added, the "assessment here on the Cuban buildup is not meant to challenge that of superiors in Washington" (who only the day before had categorically denied that there was any major new buildup of Soviet military equipment in Cuba...

...And there are pictures of generals getting on and off airplanes and gloomy shots of the President wiping his brow...

...Then he concluded: "It is my belief that newspapers are arising to meet this challenge and taking advantage of the opportunity"—a self-serving judgment that widely misses the mark in the field of foreign affairs...

...In April The Pittsburgh Press, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, ran a long dispatch from the North American Newspaper Alliance purporting to show how Cuban emigre raiders could free their homeland at no risk of nuclear war to the United States...

...But this is the function of the press in a totalitarian society...

...Shackford is representative of the rise of Scripps-Howard as a rival of Hearst in martial spirit...

...To make matters worse, the quality of AP and UPI reporting is obviously impaired by their heavy reliance on the observation of whatever man happens to be on the scene, whether he be a part-time writer in their own employ, or a second-rate staffer on a local journal, or an employe of the very government on which he is supposed to be reporting objectively...

...When you open your paper in the morning, you are supposed to say 'Gee Whiz,' or the modern equivalent thereof, and no wonder...

...An article by Premier Khrushchev, published in Russia at the time, held out the possibility of "economic collaboration and peaceful economic competition" between Communist and non-Communist economic associations...

...THE PRESS MANAGES THE NEWS by JOHN LOFTON Qince the climactic days of the Cu-^ ban confrontation of last autumn, U. S. newspapers have used countless columns of print to examine the issue raised by Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester when he said that "news flowing from actions taken by the government is part of the weaponry...

...That is where the editor should exercise his freedom to express his newspaper's opinions...

...The press made little or no effort to question the Administration on the validity of its Cuban policies (as important Canadian newspapers did) or the accuracy of its information even when there were legitimate grounds for challenge...

...But in reporting relations between the Communist and the non-Communist world, the American press has largely chosen for itself the role of a propaganda instrument of government...

...foreign policy, some newspapers (with The Washington Post, The St...

...Billions are thrown around like poker chips...

...When Congressional criticism of the Kennedy Administration policy on Cuba rose to a new peak in February, Scripps-Howard war correspondent Jim Lucas was filing stories from Guantanamo Bay ingeniously worded to stir American alarm over Soviet arms, without at the same time taking direct issue with the Administration...

...Yet many editors seem to forget their duty to criticize and to facilitate the free flow of information in the field of foreign affairs...

...As the dispute over Cuba built toward a showdown in the fall of 1962 there was much emphasis in the press on Russian military aid to Castro and the aggressive potential of this aid, but little emphasis on Castro's offers to negotiate or need to protect himself from future U.S...