A Free and Accessible Press

...It really does not matter, because "Spectrum" is good journalism...

...Marquis Childs, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and a liberal, has been looking into the question of press freedom for the Ford Foundation and has concluded that the lack of diversity of voices in the media and the feeling among people that they have no access to the media are two of the major problems facing publishers and broadcasters today...

...The CBS radio program "Spectrum" is the best example of efforts by broadcasters to open up the air waves to more diversity...

...A newsman is treated just like another person by the courts...

...The Post has also had an "ombudsman" for the last few years...

...Since the demise of network radio programs following the rise of television in the early 1950s, radio has become largely a medium for music interspersed with frequent and often ear-shattering commercials...

...In discussing the decision to move the cartoon off the editorial page, the Times said: "It will come as no surprise to our readers to hear that sometimes Paul Conrad speaks for the Times, and sometimes not . . . Nuances in a point of view can destroy a cartoon's effectiveness, but they are essential to an expression of opinion based on the spirit of moderation...

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...Cases are coming along that will put reporters in real trouble...

...There is no good in preaching the First Amendment," Childs added...

...There are two principal attitudes toward the press," Childs told the conference...

...One case involved a hearing in a civil rights case in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where a Federal judge told two reporters that they could sit in on the hearing but not write about it because he feared that newspaper articles would prejudice the defendant's rights in a pending criminal trial...

...CBS denies this, but Buchanan may be right...

...The commentators who present their views on these five-minute programs range from Nicholas von Hoffman on the left to James J. Kilpatrick on the right...

...And the winner of the auto race represented all of the traditional American values—he got over $30,000 for winning, he lives in a nice mansion eight miles from the racetrack, and his winnings so far this year have gone over a million dollars...

...In the meantime, there is radio, which, despite the large number of stations on the air, remains a neglected and largely untapped communications resource...

...Much of the underground press represented shoddy journalism, and the movement has long since passed its peak...

...Nevertheless, the underground papers filled a need, and the movement has spawned a national publication like Rolling Stone, which produced some of the best political reporting in the country in 1972...

...The contempt citations were reversed by the U.S...

...The National News Council, the first effort to set up an American press council on the twenty-year-old British model, is just getting under way in New York under the direction of former Look magazine editor William Arthur...

...It will monitor the performance of the national media...

...Thomas R. Asher, a Washington lawyer who heads up the Media Access Project, told the Journalism Center's conference he thought that the media were most hostile to right-wing views, and Asher's own political orientation is to the political left...

...He cited a CBS News television account this fall of a major automobile race at Darlington, South Carolina, which he said emphasized "male chauvinistic piggery, bathing beauties and the 'good old boys' who drink their way through the day and then pour water over the head of the winner of the race...

...Most people don't know what the First Amendment is...

...The editorial was unusual not only because just ten years ago the Times was a strident voice for a virulently conservative brand of do-nothing Republicanism that often spilled off the editorial pages into its news columns, but also because of the mere fact that the newspaper took space to explain itself...

...Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its uncovering of the Watergate scandal, told the conference he thought that the Watergate exposures lifted the Nixon Administration's siege of the press and that "the next President would have to run a more open shop...

...The Long Island newspaper Newsday announced in the fall of 1972 that it would no longer endorse political candidates on any level of government...

...Most of the underground papers that sprang up in the middle 1960s were printed cheaply on offset presses...

...Recently the Times also hired its only avowedly conservative columnist, William L.(Safire, a former Nixon White House aide...

...At a Washington Journalism Center Conference on the Media last fall, the access problem kept coming up, from both the left and the right, from speakers representing the media and from such leading critics as Ben Bagdikian and Victor Gold, the former press secretary to Vice President Agnew and newly-minted syndicated columnist...

...But the chances are just as good that government attacks on the media and nagging criticism from private individuals and organizations may result in a healthier press receptive to more ideas...

...The New York Times' op-ed page is the best-known example of recent efforts to open up newspapers to a wide range of views...

...The key question of access to ever-shrinking media outlets held in the hands of fewer and fewer people is likely to be a more important press issue in the years immediately ahead than the skirmishing that continues between the press and the White House or even than the freedom-of-the-press cases now finding their way into the courts with disturbing frequency...

...Petersburg paper also maintains a twenty-four-hour-a-day telephone line for readers who want to register complaints over the way the paper is reporting or not reporting news events...

...The second is a misunderstanding by the press of what is going on in the courts...

...The result at both the Times and the Post has been better, more imaginative journalism, as well as a demonstration to readers that the papers are hospitable to a variety of views...

...As a result of Watergate, the reaction on the right is that the sole purpose of the press is to destroy elected officials, a reaction that has been abetted by President Nixon's criticism of the media at his press conferences...

...No discussion of the media today can go for long without mention of Watergate and its effect on the press, and the Nixon Administration's extraordinary efforts both to intimidate reporters and editors and to make ordinary Americans feel that the press is their enemy...

...The Louisville Courier-Journal and Times and a few other newspapers around the country have ombudsmen, too...

...The Washington Post has expanded its letters-to-the-editor column and has also opened up its editorial page to views opposed to its own...

...Former Vice President Agnew's attacks on the media unquestionably have had much to do with these recent efforts by publishers and broadcasters...

...It's futile...

...The case is now before the U.S...

...The editorial went on to announce that the drawings of the Times' brilliant cartoonist, Paul Conrad, would henceforth appear on the page opposite the editorial page because "he works in black and white [while] the editorial writers work in shades of gray...

...exposure of the candidates for the top partisan offices makes our judgment on these dispensable...

...I would love to stand on First Amendment rights, but the First Amendment is what the courts say it is, and that is a far different thing today from what we were all taught about the First Amendment...

...Charles Morgan, Jr., director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the conference he believes that there is an Eastern Establishment press, highly articulate and often out of touch with readers and viewers...

...Clay T. Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy and the man tapped by Nixon to keep broadcasters on their toes, emphasized in his remarks to the conference that much of his criticism of radio and television has been aimed at bringing more voices to the airwaves...

...These two actions by The Los Angeles Times, which in the last decade has become one of the better newspapers in the country, are part of a developing trend in the press to try to meet one of the principal complaints of readers and critics of the media—the helplessness often felt by readers confronted with monopoly newspapers...

...Radio talk shows-were popular in the 1960s, and for a time offered considerably more diversity than listeners had ever before been accustomed to on radio...

...Discussing the legal problems confronting the media today, Washington lawyer E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., who has represented reporters in subpoena cases, pointed out: "There are two misunderstandings that seriously affect the media...

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...In more recent years all-news radio has developed, but with only a few exceptions it is in the staccato, bulletin tradition of American news broadcasting...

...our readers have more than ample information on which to make up their own minds...

...One views the press as a public service that had better be delivered like water or light, and the other view is of the media as an entrenched monopoly concerned only for profits...

...And that, if you'll pardon the expression, is a hell of a way to have to get access to a press which claims it reflects the community it serves...

...One is a misunderstanding by the courts of the media and their proper role...

...Two of the cases were mentioned by Jack Landau of the Newhouse Newspapers Washington bureau, one of the founders of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an organization set up to help reporters fight back when their rights appear to be threatened by the courts...

...Asher suggested that with the fairly large number of radio stations operating in major metropolitan areas, considerable diversity might be developed among the stations...

...One possibility discussed by Asher of the Media Access Project was the suspension of the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine, which requires broadcasters to present all sides of controversial issues...

...This decision, too, is being appealed...

...Since it began more than three years ago, the page, which appears opposite the Times' editorial page, has run a wide variety of articles and commentary, much of it in disagreement with Times editorials and news coverage...

...He writes occasional columns on news coverage and other problems facing the press and deals directly with individual readers' complaints about news stories...

...The late Bill Baggs, who was editor of the Miami News, once said that if Jesus Christ reappeared and walked down Flagler Street in Miami proclaiming the Second Coming, he would probably not get space in the papers unless he hired a press agent and had his publicity man call a press conference to proclaim the glad tidings...

...Conceding that the Administration's own voice "got a little loud, a bit strident" in its appraisal of the media, Whitehead maintained that all he and other Administration critics of television have been trying to do is make sure that the nation has "a television system that provides adequate diversity for the American people...

...Whitehead and other conference speakers saw considerable hope in cable television for the development of a greater diversity of views over the airwaves, since cable will make it possible to provide 100 or more channels in any community...

...Court of Appeals in New Orleans but the court said that even an invalid contempt citation must be obeyed until it is reviewed...

...The conference sessions indicated that other pressures on the press will continue...

...The other case cited by Landau involved an attempt by the judge in the Gainesville Eight case to prevent an artist not only from sketching in the courtroom but from sketching the courtroom from memory...

...Prosaically headed "Some Changes in the Editorial Pages," it reported the decision of Publisher Otis Chandler to end the Times' editorial endorsements of candidates for major offices...

...Media critic Ben Bagdikian pointed out to the reporters and editors attending the conference that the development of new, less expensive printing techniques ought to make it easier to establish more newspapers for specialized audiences...

...Much of this ferment could merely persuade an already excessively timid American press to take refuge in still more blandness...

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...One station, for example, might present a conservative viewpoint, another a liberal position, and so on across the political spectrum, in the manner of opinion magazines...

...Petersburg Times now runs long pro-and-con editorial-page articles on a major issue on the day the paper itself takes a stand on that issue...

...When the reporters did write about the hearing, the judge found them in contempt of court...

...The Times noted that readers "find it hard to believe that this newspaper's editorial page endorsements really don't affect the news columns . . . especially so when this paper endorses a candidate in those elections that arouse the sharpest political passions—for President, for Governor, for Senator," and that "the wide public Julius Duscha, who writes frequently for The Progressive, The Washingtonian, and other magazines, is director of the Washington Journalism Center...

...During the 1960s it was as difficult for the New Left to get its views a fair hearing in the nation's press as it often has been for the far right to break into daily newspapers and radio and television...

...Yet auto racing is as important a sub-world as rock music, which gets far different treatment on television...

...And in Washington a small, right-wing oriented group called Accuracy in Media headed by a former USIA employe, Abraham Kalish, is also having some impact, despite the obvious political bias of most of its complaints...

...You have to prove that the newspaper is a service to the reader...

...And only last October—a week before the New Jersey gubernatorial election—The Newark Star-Ledger took a similar stand, declaring that its editorials would discuss issues but let readers "draw their own conclusions" on candidates...

...And, the editor continued, to get the story out of Miami and onto the wire services, it would be necessary for one of the Miami papers to get a special angle so it could copyright its story and thus make the wire services take notice of it as something obviously extraordinary...

...Access to a diminishing number of channels of information is a problem that concerns both the left and the right...

...White House aide Patrick Buchanan, who wrote Agnew's speeches and has been orchestrating the Nixon Administration's campaign against the media, claims credit, for example, for goading CBS into starting the "Spectrum" programs...

...And there would be still other stations adhering to efforts to be strictly "objective...

...But the realization of this potential is still a long way off, and like all broadcasting it will be expensive...

...Cited again and again were the frequent court cases calling into question basic First Amendment rights long taken for granted by the press...

...If I were part of the sub-world of auto racing and had seen that on television," Morgan added, "I would know that I had just been put down...

...But neither Bradlee nor other speakers at the conference felt that Watergate had suddenly and miraculously vindicated the press in the minds of the general public or of government officials...