THE TEST IS TRUTH

...Much of this is embodied in the medical writers who stand ready to tell their readers about the wonderful new drug for, say, arthritis, but who do not bother to recall the havoc wrought by the last "wonder" drug they touted...

...And this at a time when we know that, for decades, we paid so little attention, so much of the time, to so many things that really matter to people: everything from the lack of occupational health and safety responsible for at least 14,500 deaths and 2.5 million disabling injuries a year, to pension plans that cheat millions of people and chain them to a single employer because they cannot transfer their pension rights, to dirty restaurants that cause outbreaks of food poisoning...

...Former Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska has said he was astonished to find not a word in The Washington Post and The New York Times of March 11, 1964, on the speech he made the previous day, in which he urged the United States to get out of Vietnam...

...Hear about it...

...Without this reporting, and without this awareness, we never would have gotten the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966...

...I am inclined to think that the lack of processes which would force us on some regular basis to examine our premises may well be "the gravest defect of the American press," rather than what Tom Wicker of The New York Times has said that defect is: that the media—print and electronic—merely "react to the statements of important officials rather than trying to make an independent judgment on the facts...

...To whom are we accountable...

...Insofar as he puts truth in the first place, he rises towards—I will not say into, but towards—the company of those who taste and enjoy the best things in life...

...Or he is a conceited man trying to win an argument...

...Another hearing showed that as many as an estimated 60,000 little children per year suffered serious burns by crawling, toddling, or walking onto the searing hot grilles of gas-fired floor furnaces...

...How do we define our mission...

...This is as good a point as any to acknowledge and to emphasize that the press cannot possibly do all it "should" do, including investigating every outrageous claim made by outrageous leaders...

...There are some partial explanations to account for the general under-coverage of some of the stories I have cited, such as, frequently, a too-heavy load on wire service reporters on Capitol Hill...

...The first Senate hearings since 1893 on the safety and purity of drinking water were held on March 20 of this year by the Senate Commerce Committee...

...Why do we have a reporter in Central Europe, but not in the Southeast United States...

...The Subcommittee found rather more—about 5,000 such reports to various Federal agencies involving possibly 40,000 to 50,000 pesticide poisonings a year...

...To editors...

...Last October the Senate Commerce Committee opened hearings on a bill to exempt El Paso from the antitrust laws, or, if I may put it this way, to repeal the Supreme Court...

...He swore, you may recall, that it did not occur to him that a crime was being committed in his presence by Robert T. Carson, the former aide to Senator Hiram L. Fong, Hawaii Republican, when Carson, trying to fix a Federal indictment, offered Kleindienst $50,000 to $100,000 for Mr...

...Most major news media failed to report the hearing...

...you invest time, money, reputation, emotion...

...several years of hearings by the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee on economic concentration that were overwhelmingly ignored...

...My operating theory is that a reliable and systematic process of questioning and auditing of press performance—done by professionals in a spirit of truth-seeking—would be invaluable...

...How well are we executing our mission...

...The New York Times put the story on page sixty-six, back with the ship arrivals and departures...

...Three times the Court has issued and renewed orders to El Paso to surrender this acquisition...

...Morton Mintz is a prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post and co-author of "America, Inc.: Who Owns and Operates the United States...

...The hearings were newsy...

...Newspapers, radio, and television circulated it to millions...

...Walter Lippmann, in a lecture seven years ago "On the Profession of Journalism," said that "the paramount point is, whether like a scientist or a scholar, the journalist puts truth in the first place or in the second...

...At that time, were we not paying rather too much attention—uncritical attention—to then President Lyndon B. Johnson...

...Why do we not do some reporting on Herbert Klein's former newspaper to see how fair it is...

...General Motors, in a sworn deposition filed in 1966 in court in Philadelphia, said it knew of only one or two complaints of fumes or odors in the passenger compartments of Chevrolet Corvairs...

...If The New York Times assigned a dozen reporters to this year's Florida primary and fifteen to the Wisconsin primary, as I haye been told it did, I just do not know how its editors would undertake to persuade an audience of ordinary, reasonably sensible citizens that one of the dozen reporters might not have been put to better use covering, say, the one-morning water-purity hearings in the Senate...

...Taussig testified before the House Antitrust Subcommittee that a sedative called thalidomide was to blame...

...To be sure, some will be tempted to say that such questions—which ask, really, if the emperor has any clothes—are naive...

...A second possible approach would be to free a reporter each week from other duties to write a critique of his newspaper, or part of it, for the staff as well as for the editors...

...Yet another explanation is a persistent hangover from happier days when the going assumption was that new is better, that change is progress, that science, or the schlock that sometimes passes for science, is always beneficent, that we should look ahead, but not back...

...The existing liability system for auto insurance wastes about $5 billion of our money every year...

...For the sake of a consistent and emphatic focus, each relates to an activity of Congress or its investigating arm, the General Accounting Office...

...This only makes it the more essential that we try to use intelligently the necessarily limited resources we do have...

...Taken together, the examples serve, I think, to underscore a fundamental question, along with a few corollary inquiries...

...If criticism is to be apportioned, how much of it is owed to reporters...

...My memory could be betraying me, but I do not remember seeing at a single one of these hearings a reporter for the news weeklies, the networks, or the Washington bureau of any major newspaper chain or principal newspaper other than the Washington Evening Star...

...This was a page-one story nowhere, so far as I know, and it was no story at all, I suppose, in some places...

...at the time had not just a couple of such complaints, but almost 700...

...The general news media gave these hearings absolutely negligible attention...

...The list of under-reported and under-played Congressional stories of great importance is almost endless: Wisconsin's Democratic Senator William Proxmire's hearings on Pentagon waste...

...The implication of "All the News That's Fit to Print"—that the news is a package that we have but to wrap and deliver much as does the United Parcel Service—is misleading, if not false, and would be subject to prosecution were the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act to apply to newspapers...

...A transcript would be made, so that the entire staff could learn what was said...

...The committee's function would be to ask questions of its own and questions submitted by the staff, including desk men, and to elicit answers—not to argue...

...One question might be: why is so little attention paid to Congressional hearings of obvious importance...

...If news is in the eye of the beholder, who beholds the beholder...

...Does it strike you as sensible, or conversely, as odd, that in the succeeding Nixon Administration news media laid out fortunes to fly reporters around the world with Vice President Agnew or with Secretary of State William P. Rogers—in each case for a bunch of "nothing" stories that, possibly to justify the investment in them, often appeared in the nation's daily press on page one—while these same media frequently seem unable to give reporters seventy-five cents cab fare to cover a Congressional hearing on, say, disease viruses in the water supply...

...Not until 1965, when Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff, Connecticut Democrat, began the hearings that developed the General Motors-Ralph Nader "snooping" episode, did the enormous life-and-death importance of vehicle design begin to be reported adequately enough to push it into the public awareness...

...Why do we not send reporters to other countries to write about such things as delivery of health care services, which they do better than we do...

...Actually, the Department of Transportation told the Senate Commerce Committee last February 16 that G.M...

...Early in 1962, Dr...

...And a third explanation is the ego problem— one that ensnares me, I fear, as it does others...

...Can we improve our performance...

...Are the checks and balances on our professional performance adequate when they exist at all...

...The episode that occasioned Wicker's judgment was certainly a classic: President Nixon, in August, 1971, had made a bitter anti-busing statement...

...In plain words, the world's largest industrial corporation was being accused of having lied under oath so as, presumably, not to impair the market for its four-wheeled gas chambers...

...To a possible misallocation of resources...

...In 1968, he said, his unit had reports on fifty-two incidents involving 163 persons...

...A stockholder who pays a few dollars to buy just one share of stock is free to confront the management with almost any question he may care to put at the annual meeting, which is open...

...Not until much later was her testimony reported, and the news divulged that Richard-son-Merrell, Inc., had distributed 2.5 million thalidomide tablets to American physicians on a purported "experimental" basis...

...Neither hearing drew significant attention from most major news media...

...This ghastly epidemic was major news in Europe—yet American news media, which were well represented in Europe, did not make it news here...

...Most likely you did not...

...This was the first public forum of its kind...

...To take an obvious case, the industry and its front groups, while talking incessantly (with faithful echoes in the media) about the nut behind the wheel, never talked about the nuts who refused to recess protruding dashboard knobs that, as they well knew, penetrated skulls of infants and kneecaps of men and women...

...I do not know how editors around the country would deal with the assessment, made by the Columbia Journalism Review, that "newspapers still underestimate stories that cut close to readers' essential concerns of life and health . . ." Lest I be accused of bias against The Times, I might say that were I an editor of my newspaper, The Washington Post, I would not find it easy to say anything but "we goofed," were I to be asked, for example, how we could have played on page twenty-six, deep inside a section labeled "Foreign News," the story about the unbelievable testimony now Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst gave in court last November...

...North Carolina's Democratic Representative L. H. Fountain's hearings, over a period of more than a decade, on unsafe and ineffective medicines and the regulatory failures of the FDA...

...Had we had the necessary reporting of the Roberts hearings a decade earlier, rather than merely endless and mindless episodic recitals of who was killed and injured yesterday and today in collisions in which the victims were identified but the make of the automobiles was not, probably tens of thousands of people would not have been killed, and probably hundreds of thousands would have been injured less severely, or injured trivially, or not at all...

...Why is so much attention paid to crime in the streets and so little to "crime in the suites...

...Since September, 1899, when the first recorded death by automobile occurred, there had been, in a period of fifty-seven years, more than 1,125,000 fatalities—and many million injuries...

...I believe journalism has not done, and is not today doing, an adequate job of reporting the truly important news...

...My first example concerns a set of hearings that former Representative Kenneth A. Roberts of Alabama opened on July 16, 1956, and continued intermittently through 1963...

...One such hearing developed testimony that some 100,000 children a year had been injured, some fatally, by crashing into sliding doors fitted with cheap glass that easily split into shards...

...For more than a decade, the House Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee, headed by Representative Fountain, has audited the performance of the FDA in assuring the safety and efficacy of all sorts of medicines—antibiotics, antidepressants, oral contraceptives, intravenous solutions, diuretics, the cholesterol-lowering agent MER/29, muscle relaxants—prescribed for tens of millions of us...

...We decide what to cover and what to ignore, what to play up and what to play down, what to stay with and what to abandon...

...I suggest it appropriately could have been a page-one story most anywhere...

...For what they are worth, here are a couple of ideas (which, although formulated with The Washington Post in mind, could be adapted to many other newspapers): An elected committee of reporters—with the membership changing on a staggered basis, perhaps—might meet with news management on, say, a monthly basis...

...So saying, Congress provided for the establishment of a National Commission on Product Safety, which found, in turn, that each year 30,000 Americans are killed, 110,000 are permanently disabled, and twenty million are injured in the home as a result of incidents connected with consumer products...

...And, somehow, its value—in your mind and maybe your newspaper's—then begins to transcend the hearing on the Hill that could be much more important...

...The conventional newsroom wisdom was that no one paid attention to Gruening or to then Senator Wayne Morse, as if that relieved us of an obligation to give the public the opportunity to pay attention, should it care to...

...But there are other explanations that are less acceptable...

...Maybe they are, but they should be asked, over and over...

...Why should we entangle ourselves in Vietnam...

...Wisconsin's Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson's hearings on medicines that pharmaceutical houses label one way for American doctors and other ways for foreign doctors, and on drugs these companies make here, but sell for less abroad than in the United States...

...That is a proper goal for journalists...

...and who would read it...

...At the same hearing, the lawyer denied the charge...

...Another explanation of under-coverage of Capitol Hill is, to be blunt about it, that a certain number of reporters are lazy, or prefer more "glamorous" assignments...

...The paper publishing all it "should," while it enjoyed a brief life, could be gotten onto the front porch only with a derrick...

...The Supreme Court has ruled four times that the giant El Paso Natural Gas Company violated the antitrust laws when, in 1957, it acquired the Pacific Northwest Pipeline Company...

...For most news media this was, somehow, another non-story...

...On May 6, 1971, in surprise testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, an official of the Association, Robert H. Joost, performed an "act of conscience": he exposed ATLA's strategy for defeating no-fault legislation...

...The Roberts hearings examined the role of automobile design in this slaughter...

...Is not the "gravest defect" just possibly that we did not have the mechanisms, long before Tom Wicker's column provided a valuable but perishable one, to call into question the process in which the distortions of the President are, as Wicker put it, "trumpeted in headlines, because he is President," while "the facts put forward by" the school superintendent were ignored, "because he was not 'newsworthy' enough...

...Is there, really, anything wild in the idea that staff people who invest something more in the enterprise than dollars should be assured of regular meetings on professional matters with their editors...

...The Washington Post carried it on page two after almost putting it on the financial page—which is not read by most owners of gassy old Corvairs...

...Were The Washington Post to undertake to do all it "should" do, it would need a staff so large as to bankrupt the ownership...

...I don't think the chief of any of the major news operations would have an enviable task if he were to have to try to defend in public—say, on "Face the Nation" or "Meet the Press"—omissions in coverage such as those in my examples...

...If he puts it in the second place, he is a worshiper of the bitch goddess success...

...Physicians, engineers, and other specialists in crash-injury research emphasized that the industry had the capability to design cars that would make it possible for the occupants to survive or to suffer injuries of lesser severity...

...and Senator Nelson's hearings on corporate secrecy...

...Do our definitions of news sensibly reflect the changing times...

...To a system that eludes internal audit by either reporters or editors...

...Helen Taussig, the famed co-discoverer of the "Blue Baby" operation and a pediatric cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University, went to Germany to make a firsthand investigation of the birth of armless and legless babies, later found to number in the thousands...

...And, finally, all of the examples together are a gross understatement because each is part of a relatively narrow and circumscribed personal experience—my own...

...Nixon's re-election campaign...

...The country, not to mention the rest of the world, is too big, complex, interesting, corrupt, newsy...

...The Commission held hearings over a period of two and a half years...

...The then administrator, to cite but one item, assured the Subcommittee that the arrangements of the Pesticide Regulation Division of the Department of Agriculture for obtaining information on pesticide poisonings were working well...

...What good, after all, would a Bay of Pigs accomplish even were it to succeed...

...In a disclosure that any fair judgment would label sensational, the Environmental Protection Agency said, under questioning, that its scientists had made an unprecedented and fearsome discovery: disease viruses had been detected in the tap water of two Massachusetts cities, Lawrence and Billerica, even though they had treated river water with high-quality, modern purification methods...

...For one thing, the chairman of the Utah State Democratic Committee swore that a lawyer for El Paso offered to deposit—interest-free—$100,000 in the bank of which the politician is a vice president...

...This article is adapted from the second annual lecture at the Consumer Journalism Conference at Columbia University...

...And finally, of course, what if anything should be done about it...

...On her return, Dr...

...But it went almost unnoticed," Wicker said, "that the very next day the school superintendent of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, refuted the Nixon position point by point, in an account of the actual experience of that city...

...Kleindienst's revelation—which was drastically underplayed by The Times, too—raised the gravest question about his fitness to be Attorney General...

...I will give some cases in point, each of which impressed me as an extremely important news story, each of which was reported by major news media trivially or not at all...

...You undertake an investigation...

...One is that the media have contributed to the ascendancy of the Presidency over the supposedly coordinate and equal legislative branch by over-covering the one and under-covering the other, partly because it is easier to cover the President and his Administration...

...Will the people of the United States be worse off, on balance, if the Russians get a supersonic transport first, or even exclusively...

...On May 7 and June 24, 1969, in hearings covered only by James V. Risser of the Des Moines Register and myself, the House Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee established that the Federal agency then charged with regulation of pesticides had "failed almost completely" for more than twenty years to enforce a law enacted to protect the public from these dangerous chemicals...

...Another might be, why pay a large sum for and give up space to serializing former President Lyndon Johnson's memoirs...

...Did you read about this...

...Why is Congress as investigator and reporter so poorly covered by major news media...

...In government, we have learned to our sorrow, no one asked comparable questions: What is the national interest...

...About $1 billion of the $5 billion goes to trial lawyers, 25,000 of whom comprise the membership of the American Trial Lawyers Association...

...Most news media, for example, ignored the no-contest plea filed by Richardson-Merrell in response to an indictment charging it with falsifying and withholding data on a drug, MER/29, that had caused cataracts in thousands of users—one of the atrocity stories of our time...

...In a notable action that drew trivial attention, Congress in 1967 adopted without audible dissent a joint resolution which declared that "the American consumer has a right to be protected against Unreasonable risk of bodily harm from products purchased on the open market for the use of himself and his family...