Nader's Raiders Put the Washington Press Corps to Shame
Duscha, Julius
Nader's Raiders Put the Washington Press Corps to Shame by JULIUS DUSCHA The other day I had lunch with the chief of a Washington bureau for one of the nation's leading newspapers. Over coffee,...
...But there are other reasons...
...Press coverage of automobiles seldom went beyond puff stories, and frequently whole sections are devoted to the wonders of the new models...
...His operations are what good newspapering ought to be all about...
...Dodge's primary responsibility is to keep track of what is going on at the Highway Safety Bureau, which probably would not have been created by Congress had it not been for the extraordinary impact of Nader's 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, and the subsequent clumsy efforts of General Motors to "get something on" Nader...
...In Washington and elsewhere, the press is almost totally oriented to reacting to events, or, in too many cases, to pseudo-events carefully contrived for press coverage...
...But when it comes to stories of a second magnitude, the press generally lags behind the interests of its readers and is too often beholden to its advertisers...
...Once again, this fact reflects the patience of Nader's Raiders, their willingness to wait out the bureaucratic process for a few weeks or months...
...Other students work with the mail complaints about automobile defects that pour into the offices of Nader's operations in Washington, and into the boarding house off Dupont Circle where he still lives...
...The other part of the problem is the definition of news...
...He was responsible for the breaking of the cyclamates story by an NBC News Washington correspondent in the fall of 1969...
...A few blocks away, near the Statler-Hilton and Sheraton-Carlton hotels, is Nader's new Public Interest Research Group, set up last summer, where about a dozen young men and women just out of law school are working as interns for only $4500 a year...
...they have also invoked or threatened to invoke the 1967 Freedom of Information Act, which opens long closed doors to official proceedings, more than have the reporters for whom this long-sought piece of legislation supposedly was designed...
...Not all of this glorification is by any means the result of advertising pressure, however, because in these days of one-newspaper communities advertisers such as supermarkets have nowhere to go but to the monopoly paper in their town...
...First must come the extensive study of the background of an issue, largely through research in books, articles, Congressional reports, and official documents...
...Duscha specialized in national politics...
...The projects under way or recently completed in the two offices ought to make a modern city editor chew his pencil in envy...
...One of the students, for example, is, in Dodge's words, "our man at the Highway Safety Bureau...
...They are seeking to reform existing governmental and corporate bureaucracies, and some of the Raiders spend a good deal of their time actively working for reform through lobbying and other techniques...
...Not long ago, for instance, Nader received a steady stream of letters from owners of 1970 Buicks complaining about a sticking accelerator pedal...
...Why don't you go see Ralph Nader and some of his people...
...Food and supermarkets have always been sensitive issues for newspapers because of real or feared pressures from advertisers...
...But perhaps what is most important about the Center for Auto Safety is that it is there, and is always ready to light fires under complacent bureaucrats...
...Find out what they're doing and what they don't have time to do but would like to do...
...At the Public Interest Research Group's offices young lawyers are researching such problems as the inequities of local property taxes, the public consequences of corporate acts, the responsibilities to the public of government employes and officials, the interest-free use banks have of income-tax and social-security-tax money deposited with them by employers as required by Federal law, and the costs of consumer credit...
...Some examples: % Nader was one of the first to call attention, a couple of years ago, to the rot within the United Mine Workers, a significant story which, with one or two exceptions, the press virtually ignores...
...Jack Nelson of The Los Angeles Times with his sharp coverage of civil rights issues...
...Helping Dodge are several law students and engineers...
...He's closer to the cutting edges of issues in Washington than anyone else I know...
...It is one of a series of muckraking books resulting from Raider forays into the depths of the Washington bureaucracy...
...His articles have appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine...
...The other quality is tenacity in digging out the answer...
...A principal one is the failure of newspapers to comprehend what is genuinely news...
...Sneyd in Chicago Sun-Times "I should have named my son Benedict...
...What was being over-covered...
...Most major, and many smaller, newspapers, have men covering politics full-time...
...And a few more...
...Most of the changes that chemicals and marketing practices have made in food and drugs over the last twenty-five years can be found in public records, but only a few dedicated investigators like Nader have bothered to explore these records, while most newspapers have continued to glorify the supermarket economy which contributes so much each week in advertising...
...What trivia were the reporters masquerading as news...
...Few reporters ever looked into the public record on auto safety, as Nader did in researching Unsafe at Any Speed...
...Working out of a tiny office in the National Press Building and surrounded by bookshelves jammed with government reports and correspondence, thirty-year-old Lowell Dodge operates the Center with Nader's advice and counsel and the help of three paid employes (one at $30 a week, one at $40, and the third at $75) and a few part-time volunteers...
...Over coffee, the conversation turned to what the chief's staff ought to be doing...
...they also need to redefine Washington news...
...Why is the press generally unwilling to do the kind of in-depth investigative work that is the guts of the approach to public issues by Nader and his aides...
...f Because of the persistence of another Raider, the Federal Highway Safety Bureau was forced to order General Motors to warn the purchasers of 200,000 GM trucks of potential wheel defects...
...Morton Mintz of The Washington Post with his exposes of the drug industry...
...Not just for a day or a week, but for weeks, months, even years, as is the case with his long and fruitful investigation of auto safety—or the lack of it...
...We're a combination of lawyer, journalist, and political theorist," explains senior Raider John Esposito, who first went to work for Nader in the summer of 1966 and has researched such problems as gas pipelines, anti-trust policies, professional societies, meat inspection laws, consumer financing, and air pollution...
...He or one of his Raiders sticks with it...
...In the eyes of editors and reporters, Ralph Nader is a "consumer advocate" who makes news by holding press conferences, publicizing reports compiled by his Raiders, and releasing the texts of letters to public officials...
...In agency after agency and on issue after issue, Nader and his Raiders know more about what is going on than any reporter or editor in Washington—and they have learned how to bring their findings to public attention...
...Jim Michael is compiling a handbook on the Federal regulatory agencies...
...Coverage of such agencies as the FTC, the Federal Power Commission, and the Interstate Commerce Commission is virtually nonexistent...
...Jerry Landauer of The Wall Street Journal with his vigilant reporting on the judiciary...
...He is Justin Klein, a full-time law student at George Washington University...
...The average journalist, on the other hand, usually must content himself only with the exposure of facts...
...One is a quality of mind that seeks the answer to a fundamental question: Why don't private and public institutions work the way they are supposed to work...
...Employes of the Highway Safety Bureau acknowledge that they have frequently stayed up until two or three in the morning to try to "Nader-proof" a decision or a new regulation...
...Then follows the interviewing of key sources to discover as much as possible about the current situation...
...But what much of the press fails to appreciate is that Nader is much more than a consumer advocate...
...The hours are long (twelve to fourteen-hour days are not uncommon) but the dedication is great...
...During his eight years as a reporter for The Washington Post, Mr...
...Nader gets more mail on auto safety problems than the Bureau itself does, and Nader and Dodge see that this mail gets to the Bureau...
...Take the issue of automobile safety...
...and what the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State is announcing as "news...
...Robert Walters of The Washington Star with his tenacious quest for facts in a number of strategic areas...
...11 The first Nader report, on the failures of the Federal Trade Commission to protect the consumer, is still having an effect on that agency more than two years after it was issued...
...U Two Raiders dispatched to West Virginia by Nader succeeded in getting Union Carbide Corporation to begin cleaning up their polluting smokestacks and pay a fair share of local taxes...
...He is a reformer challenging not only the responsibilities of public officials but also the accountability of corporations and their officials and employes...
...Ralph Nader has become more than a beat to be covered by Washington reporters...
...The central issue he is exploring, Turner says, is why supermarkets do not make more information available to consumers...
...The letters led to a Bureau decision ordering Buick to tell owners of the affected models about the potential safety defects, and that dealers were ready to correct them...
...He's un-threatening, well-mannered, well-groomed, very conscientious...
...But in the exacting art of investigation the techniques of the law and of journalism are—or should be— much the same...
...There are some other watchdogs in Washington: Jack Anderson and his staff...
...The big, obvious story, like the war in Vietnam or a Presidential campaign, is always covered and often over-covered...
...He and his Raiders are/the best examples to be found of ywhat journalism ought to be in the capital of a country that has produced such great muckrakers in the public interest as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair...
...Another example of the essentially journalistic approach of Nader and his Raiders is the work of Jim Turner, who became interested in Nader's operations when he was assigned by a law professor at Ohio State University to play the role of Nader in a seminar of auto safety...
...He is the author of two books, "Arms, Money and Politics" and "Taxpayers' Hayride...
...Seymour Hersh, whose brilliant exposure of Mylai was in the best traditions of crusading journalism...
...On the other hand, journalists, bent on a story today, become impatient when a definitive answer is not immediately forthcoming...
...Dodge, a neat New Hampshireman out of Yale Law School, does what lawyers for special interests and reporters for the trade press—written and edited for specific industries—have done in Washington ever since New Deal days...
...Nader does not have the staff to investigate and answer individual complaints but there are enough people at the Center for Auto Safety to look for patterns in the complaints and to let the Highway Safety Bureau know what the problems are...
...John Esposito, the air-pollution expert and the author of the Nader Report, The Vanishing Air, is looking into the question of the uses and sources of electrical energy...
...The major reason is the way editors and reporters are oriented toward the reporting of events...
...By carefully keeping track of what was going on in the FDA, Turner was able to establish that the scientists in the agency were convinced cyclamates were potentially harmful, but that for some reason these scientific findings had been pigeonholed by the FDA policy-makers...
...f A report compiled by Nader and some of his Raiders meticulously dissected Senator Edmund Muskie's record on air-pollution legislation and raised serious questions about the efficacy of his approach and about his concern for the sensibilities of major industrial polluters...
...There is little systematic coverage of such departments as Agriculture and Interior...
...And as we talked, I kept thinking about Ralph Nader...
...In Washington, news media all too often concentrate on what the President is doing or, more likely, saying...
...Nader and his Raiders are interested in much more than muckraking...
...Mark Green is investigating the failures of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute monopolists...
...But not only do Nader and his Raiders do a far better job of reporting than do most of the Washington press corps...
...what bill is being approved by what subcommittee on Capitol Hill...
...The list of muckraking achievements by Nader and his Raiders is impressive...
...Every time they take some action over there," Dodge says, "they have to ask themselves whether we're going to explode it in their faces...
...His response was typical of the way the Washington press corps views Nader and his Raiders...
...Good idea," the bureau chief said...
...His book, The Chemical Feast, written with the help of several other Raiders, is a devastating critique of the FDA...
...For years the press dutifully ran auto-accident statistics and regularly deplored them on the editorial page— usually placing the blame on drivers...
...But in general the hundreds of reporters who make up the Washington press corps still spend an inordinate amount of time serving up rewrites of White House and agency handouts, once-over-lightly accounts of legislative maneuverings and meaningless "scoops" on the size of the Federal budget to be announced officially tomorrow...
...Even such a prestigious newspaper as The Washington Post still runs a weekly food section in which advertising is surrounded with recipes and stories that are often puffs for promotion campaigns by food companies...
...Nader put him on his Food and Drug Administration project, and Turner has stayed with FDA ever since...
...I suggested...
...More recently, Turner is concerned with such FDA matters as the safety of saccharine, another widely used artificial sweetener, the use of brominat-ed vegetable oils, the fat content of foods, and the labeling of foods containing additives...
...Nader's Raiders, however, seem to have two special qualities that not enough reporters command...
...Moreover, publishers do have their sacred cows, whether political, bureaucratic, or corporate...
...Finally, there are the conclusions to be drawn and the courses of action to be charted...
...He just took a job with Nader's Raiders" "He's a great vacuum cleaner," says Dodge...
...The mail often turns up cases which lead to action by the Bureau...
...Turner is one of a half a dozen or so senior Raiders who work with Nader out of old office space not far from Dupont Circle...
...There is some truth in this complaint, but it is also true that too many reporters, editors, and publishers are content with the superficialities of stories quickly churned out to meet daily deadlines...
...Without the work of one Raider who provided essential data for a lawsuit, the Environmental Protection Administration would not have been forced to move swiftly to remove DDT and 2,4,5-T pesticides from the market...
...Nader's undermanned Center for Auto Safety is one of the most effective goads to bureaucracy that Washington has ever seen, and is a thorn in the side of the Bureau...
...Turner first worked for Nader as a summer Raider in 1968...
...He is investigating such proposed reforms as unit pricing, grade labeling, and complete disclosure of the contents of food...
...With twenty per cent or so of many a family's income going for food each week, it is reasonable to expect that reader interest in the subject would be high...
...This would require a commitment of journalistic and clerical manpower, but, as Nader's mail indicates, the subject is one of widespread public interest that touches the lives of almost all Americans...
...With the help of only twenty full-time Raiders, Nader puts the Washington press corps to shame...
...Reporters like to blame their generally short attention spans on the demands of their editors for daily copy...
...Nader himself is a lawyer, and nearly all of his Raiders have been trained in the law...
...Yet what these departments and agencies do—or do not do —is often more important to more Americans than what the President is saying...
...It is no excuse to say that not enough happens at some departments and agencies to justify full-time coverage...
...Nader picks an issue, an agency, a target, and embarks on a careful comprehensive study...
...In fact, we probably should have someone covering Nader full-time...
...Nader's Center for Auto Safety provides what amounts to a casebook study for the journalist—or lawyer or lobbyist, for that matter—who wants to know how to stay on top of a complicated but extremely important issue with ramifications extending to every person in the United States...
...But, as Nader's Raiders have demonstrated, there is a great deal of news in what food additives may be doing to us, as well as in the economics of a food industry that has changed rapidly over the last two decades...
...yet the truth is that the political beat is often dull and reader interest in politics is limited in the years when there are no Presidential or Congressional elections...
...This story led Robert Finch, then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, to order an end to the widespread use of cyclamates as an artificial sweetener in soft drinks and many foods...
...He's got short hair...
...In all of the above cases, and in JULIUS DUSCHA is director of the Washington Journalism Center...
...That is pretty close to the truth...
...many more, Nader and his forces are doing no more than what good reporters are supposed to do...
...While so much of Washington journalism continues to wallow in analysis written off reporters' sleeves and in columns belaboring the obvious, Nader and his Raiders are doing the most serious, factual, and consistent job of public service muckraking in the nation's capital...
...Turner is now working on a book about supermarkets and the food industry...
...This particular Nader operation is the Center for Study of Responsive Law, now almost three years old...
...it remains a model of first-rate muckraking...
...What stories was his bureau missing...
...Nader is also a muckraker in the best sense of that word...
...As Nader has demonstrated, editors need to turn loose their reporters for in-depth investigations...
...A major newspaper or one of the wire services could keep track of auto safety problems the same way Nader and Dodge do...
...Yet, as the trade press, lawyers, and lobbyists have shown over the years in Washington, and as Nader and his Raiders are now demonstrating, it is possible for almost any reasonably intelligent reporter or lawyer to discover what is really going on within an agency...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
