Reporting Reporters
d'Arazien, Steven
Reporting Reporterg the boys on the bus, by Timothy Crouse. Random House. 371 pp. $7.95. reviewed by Steven d'Arazien Each Presidential election seems to produce a special book. Out of the 1960...
...Bernstein, the writer of the team, had been sidelined for getting caught (by an editor) for napping in the District building...
...d'Arazien is a newsman who was on Senator George McGovern's staff in New Jersey during the 1972 Presidential campaign...
...Beyond this inequality, the press is limited by its conception of objectivity...
...Experimentation is risky...
...The Nixon campaign was a sealed box car heading for victory...
...The President was Presidential...
...Ron Ziegler found he could make 180 degree turns in describing policy changes simply by saying he had "misspoken" himself...
...Mr...
...Peace was at hand...
...It was not wining and dining with the elite, nor was it taking abuse from a White House aide...
...The 1968 campaign inspired Joe McGinniss to write The Selling of the President, an expose of Richard Nixon's television-oriented campaign, which was designed to avoid any uncontrolled contact with the people of the press...
...Now Timothy Crouse, an associate editor of Rolling Stone, has written a special book on the 1972 campaign...
...Both saw it as a way out of their malaise, and because both their marriages were on the rocks, they could take all the time necessary to explore the campaign's inner workings on an almost continuous basis...
...One of the book's best chapters deals not with the campaign but with the relationship between the White House press office and its clients...
...Formerly he was an investigative reporter for the Public Information Center in Washington and a Vietnam correspondent for the UJS...
...They got the story because it was first regarded as a local crime story, and someone had the brains not to yank it from their hands and give it to a star...
...It became a struggle simply to write a readable account of the day's events...
...Woodward was known as a tireless digger but could not write his way out of a paper bag...
...Moreover, while a Hunter Thompson—with the luxury of a limited Rolling Stone audience— could hammer away at reality, the national reporters were writing for diverse audiences...
...They went on to report some of what the candidate said, but were unable—lest they get spiked for editorializing—to assess whether it was true or not...
...The reporters were expected to file daily stories and were bound by the convention of the hard news lead based upon a pseudo-event staged by one of the candidates...
...They report what one candidate said, then go and report what the other candidate said and with equal credibility . . . What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality...
...His account is valuable not only as a critique of this process, but also as an examination of how journalists see their role and how that role is limited by the institutional structure in which they work...
...Crouse quotes Brit Hume, Jack Anderson's former assistant: "The so-called objectivity is just a guise for superficiality...
...There are other reasons why the coverage failed to enlighten the public as post-Watergate developments have done...
...Their stories often sounded the same, and no wonder...
...Analyzing the result, Crouse writes: "In the end, Nixon's 1972 campaign became a triumph of public relations...
...There was great pressure to be "fair"—which meant being inoffensive to either candidate...
...Student Press Association...
...He tells us some of the reasons why...
...Watergate is not unique, of course...
...It takes time to dig, and there is always the risk that a lengthy investigation will turn up nothing, or something that you cannot substantiate...
...Two relatively unknown reporters for The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, showed what investigative reporting was about...
...They were trapped in a press bus or plane most of the time, exhausted by the travel, the long hours, and the pressure of daily deadlines...
...Like any profession, you advance if you perform the traditional functions better than anyone else...
...Bernstein and Woodward uncovered the real story of the 1972 campaign—the laundered money, the dirty tricks, the corporate bribes, and promised rewards...
...They wrote for the Metro section, which covers local Washington news...
...Crouse tells the story well...
...The situation will change only when reporters rebel together, Crouse believes: "The curious thing about political journalists is that they often work as a herd when they should act as individuals, and they claim the right to perform as individuals when they should close ranks and act as a group...
...Reporters could, and did, dig into Senator George McGovern's campaign and uncover such embarrassments as Larry O'Brien's threatened resignation...
...No one in the White House press corps knew that Gordon Strachan was H.R...
...He has contributed to The Nation, American Report, the Boston Phoenix, and other publications...
...So why is it covered so badly...
...His focus is how the press, especially print journalism, reports a campaign...
...Writing about the campaign press corps in an engaging style that combines anecdote with analysis, Crouse points out that the nation's top political writers did their best to cover the 1972 debacle well and yet failed to tell the real story...
...The flaw in the White House press corps system—which could partially have been eliminated by quicker rotation of White House correspondents—was revealed when the Watergate story broke...
...And careerism—that awful clawing toward the top of the heap, toward the Georgetown house and the national byline—keeps reporters from examining whether what they are doing makes any sense or whether by combining their intelligence the public might reap a greater benefit...
...Crouse does not go into this point, but at least he raises the question...
...I suspect this inversion is endemic to journalism in a profit-making setting...
...Out of the 1960 race came the first Theodore White book, The Making of a President, 1960, which focused attention on the inner workings of a campaign...
...According to Crouse, Nixon had learned from his 1968 experience that he could afford to isolate himself from the press without a mutiny...
...Agnew was calm and conciliatory...
...And perhaps he, or someone inspired by him, will take off in that direction...
...More important, there is little pressure to dig deeply...
...Crouse covered the reporters who covered the campaign...
...Bernstein and Woodward were in the doldrums of their careers...
...There are hundreds of sordid stories each year in Washington—the pay-offs, deals, and manipulations that hurt only the American people...
...It was a search for the truth...
...The press had become too weak, frightened, and demoralized to try to dent the Administration's handsome verifier...
...Crouse notes the staggering inequality of the two campaigns...
...Haldeman's chief political aide...
...This, not the self-serving rhetoric of the politicians nor the bills in the Congressional hopper, is the true substance of American politics...
...they were uniformly bored by the seemingly endless repetition of the same speeches and events...
Vol. 38 • February 1974 • No. 2
