DOING TIME

...The incident didn't really surprise me...

...It should come as no surprise that the sources for corporate journalism are corporations...

...Today, a more sophisticated Time beguiles millions of readers who depend on it for the news...

...In a story entitled "That New Energy Buzz Book," the popularity of the study is ascribed to those "fervid environmentalists" who "can find in it justification for their thesis that nuclear power and coal are dirty, dangerous, and unreliable, while solar energy and conservation are good and can provide the necessary energy...

...The last line of the parable is the quoted confession: " 'Maybe we were completely wrong on Vietnam.' " The Reliable Source...

...I asked Grant...

...The senior editor of the Nation section discarded the idea without hesitation...

...Such attitudes should come as no surprise...

...But the assignments are made anyway, quickly and perfunctorily, in the "conferences" that often last no more than two minutes...

...Both television operations are expanding rapidly, as are Time-Life Films and the Time-Life Satellite Network...

...Earlier in the week, I had been assigned a story on the Congressional defeat of the Consumer Protection Agency and, more specifically, on what had become of Ralph Nader...

...itself is a giant multinational, with revenues of $2.5 billion—the largest magazine publishing company in the world (Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, Life, and Discover...

...n foreign policy, for example, Time appeals less to inflated patriotism and more to a sense of America's sacred duty as the world's greatest superpower...

...Book-of-the-Month Club, and large interests in publishing firms in Germany, France, Mexico, and Japan...

...Early in my tenure, when I was working on a story assessing the issue of nuclear waste, the first version reflected a certain horror at mismanagement of disposal sites...

...As a result, the sources chosen obviously are crucial to the story's outcome...

...Its recommendations constitute a qualified endorsement of what solar advocates have been proposing for years—big investments in conservation and renewables and a go-slow approach to nuclear and synfuels...

...The files from the Washington bureau had been a bit on the derogatory side, but the written story had turned out to be fair, I thought, considering that Nader's personality occasi6nally gets in his own way...

...When the Republican Party made a different choice, Grunwald flew to Rancho Mirage to try to persuade Jerry Ford to run again...

...It's always easier to fit things to what you think the top editors will want...

...and John Sawhill, Nixon energy czar and Carter synfuel chief...

...Its "inside cover" on cable television in 1979 was thought by many staffers to be scandalous...

...a television station in Michigan...

...One "news" story declared: "The imperial regulatory juggernaut has clearly gone too far...

...Resolve and duty do avail if we dust off the old-school shibboleths— increase Pentagon spending, loosen the reins on the CIA, show the flag in the Persian Gulf, prop up our right-wing friends ("the challenge," diplomatic correspondent Strobe Talbot tells-us, "is to distinguish between viable authoritarian regimes and ones that are doomed...

...It's all so simple...

...One innocent wondered aloud about Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, noticeably absent from the list...

...For all its tirades against Big Government, Time is a perfect example of a stultifying bureaucracy...

...Luce and his successors have refined a strategy of managing the news in the service of corporate America...

...This blend of claims—that the magazine is both accurate and gives an incisive analysis greater than mere reporting—has, over the decades, created a spurious air of insider's authority buttressed by an endless stream of insignificant details...

...The wretched of the Earth, once they have been invited into the marketplace, are expected to defend it...

...Woodward, Inc., a furniture manufacturer...

...A recent "American Scene" told of the conversion of a 1960s Seattle peace activist who has forsaken his Left politics and signed on with a real estate developer ("Even profit doesn't bother me as it did...

...It's likely that stories on that Monday list will be changed, or killed, or postponed by week's end...

...they draw their understanding of the world from Time files, People portraits, and Fortune commentary...

...Military glory was particularly dear to Henry Luce in the halcyon days of "America First," but after the ascent of Luce's successor, Hedley Donovan, a sense of probity appeared, hazily reflecting the nation's outrage over Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and other instances of U.S...

...His support of farmworkers, ecology, anti-nuclear and pro-solar politics are not appreciated in Rockefeller Center...

...In addition to his stint at Time, John Tirman has written for The Nation, Newsday, The New York Times, and other publications...

...The casual reader of Time is likely to notice its lively prose, its apparent breadth (if not depth) of knowledge, its amusing anecdotes, its ponderous political centrism...

...One business writer, when I pressed him for some fairness in a story about the costs of clean air, replied that it was futile: The editors wanted the sniping, and whatever balance he put in would be edited out...

...By fragmenting the functions of journalism, Time fragments responsibility for content—and vastly enlarges the capacity for editorial control...

...Time's political posturing is rarely so pompous or visible...

...But the acting bureau chief, Bob Parker, came to my office and informed me that he would not send the suggestion through—a highly unusual block of the flow...

...virtually the only remedy endorsed by Time was cutbacks in Government spending for domestic programs...

...Reason: They're the problem...

...Church went to work on the copy, shifting sentences, honing the ridicule...

...You can soothe your conscience by throwing in a few opinions of your own at the end of your file, but you know that these will usually be discarded...

...Easily the most efficient way to manage the news is to exclude coverage of those aspects that do not correspond with the corporate view...

...For his honesty, Friedrich was saddled with the lead article...

...Jim Grant was editing that night, and he called in two of us who were working on the story...

...Eighty per cent of the effort each week is spent trying to avoid problems," says another Time veteran...

...Moreover, the assembly-line system keeps most staffers— editors, writers, researchers—in house, with no connection to the flesh and blood of the news...

...The nuances of politics, the unconventional perspective, the diversity of opinion are left out because they present problems...

...Effective dissent is checked at any of several junctions in the system, and frustration in the bureaus is an oft-heard refrain...

...the most colorful coverage of the week— and the most accurate...

...This journalistic arsenal includes what I call Omission, Misdirection, Derision, the Reliable Source, the Fact Fetish, and the Style Machine...

...Just read Time magazine...

...Time magazine's service to the conglomerate it spawned is frequent and warmhearted...

...Omission...

...Another striking example concerned inflation...

...The insularity breeds not only a dependence on others' eyes and ears, but an almost inescapable cynicism...

...But it is also true that the bureau reporters have a degree of leeway...

...The written suggestion was routinely sent to the New York bureau, through which it would, ordinarily, circulate to the appropriate editors...

...Bolstered by their sense of class and the magazine's own long history, Time editors exude a certain arrogance...

...In its most offensive expression, this includes a certain "liberated" sexuality, acclaimed in the semi-nude suggestiveness of Cheryl Tiegs or Mardi Gras dancers in Rio...

...But the machine's effect—probably intentional—is far more pervasive...

...These people, as sources, were virtually excluded...

...These corporate executives—largely white, male, Ivy League, and suburban (from Grunwald down to the editors and senior writers, twenty-four of twenty-five are men, and all are white) have a view of the world that is informed by a relatively simple faith in corporate management, military power, and a fuzzy cultural pluralism...

...They never need to change, because facts only enhance Time's editorial position, providing a veneer of documentation...

...Indeed, the magazine perfectly reflects the hierarchical structure and division of labor that characterize our economic system...

...When an incomes policy was suggested, it was cursorily dismissed, without a thoughtful assessment, as "unworkable" (even though the 1973 wage-and-price-control inflation rate of 3.2 per cent looks fabulous today...

...The typical Time story springs to life on a Monday morning in several small gatherings of the staff...

...The Fact Fetish...

...From the moment it is sent out, the shape of the story has been established...

...t And so the magazine retaliated...

...It can get a story into print quickly, while preserving Time's distinctive language...

...One friend at another of the Time Inc...

...At times the magazine's pursuit of self-interest is blatant...

...The monotonous advocacy of laissez-faire mythology is partially due, as one writer puts it, to a "conspiracy of obsequiousness" at the magazine—the constant tendency to play it safe...

...The cover was finally dropped, a decision more hurtful to Brown's candidacy than even an unflattering portrait would have been...

...The evolution of the Time system has supplied them with several potent weapons...

...In last year's election, for instance, Time's choice, John Con-nally, was blessed with a Time cover six months before any of his Republican rivals...

...The corporation also owns a marketing data company called SAMI...

...Remarkably, the decision to make this astonishing event a cover story was not reached until Friday morning, four days after the hundreds of deaths were known to the world...

...An example is the recurrent theme of "excessive" Government regulation...

...The piece not only sings praises of this model apostate, but vilifies progressives as "the dwindled, sullen ranks of the New Left" who invoke Bernadette Dohrn as a "cult role model," and indulge in the politics of "Jane Fonda chic" or "Hanoi hysterics...

...Just read TIME magazine.' BYJOHNTIRMAN The evening began as most Friday evenings do at Time magazine: We were hanging around, waiting for copy to be edited...

...Among national leaders, few have been targeted for more nastiness than California's Governor Jerry Brown...

...A dozen or more people may work on any given story...

...But the generals and tycoons are still the heroes...

...One of the ways he expressed his anger was to order two staff members to go through each magazine's story line by line to check for factual contradictions, then to find out which was correct...

...Time clarifies the complex and explains the significance of what is elsewhere merely reported...

...It has shed its jingoism and Social Darwinism for the cool manipulations of Madison Avenue...

...The nation can no longer afford the luxury of costly and inefficient Government control...

...Pioneer Press, which publishes suburban Chicago newspapers...

...Lumberman's Investment Corporation...

...Andrew Kopkind, a Time reporter in the 1960s, notes the crucial link between system and style: "The atmosphere of extreme alienation helped produce many of the effects which readers of Time can easily spot: the phony crisis, the false narrative integrity of a story, the flip cynicism, the hollow know-it-all airs, the adolescent sexual leers...

...The chief of correspondents, he adds, is careful about whom he hires and where a reporter is assigned...

...Time stories began to take a "liberal" view of the complex problems of the Third World, the need for foreign aid, the wisdom of detente...

...The fact fetish can be carried to humorous extremes...

...Renewables, the article concludes, are "a bad bet...

...The global assembly line is then set in motion...

...It is the very essence of "group journalism," the system perfected sixty years ago by Henry Luce...

...The Style Machine...

...Only when Time targets its enemies does a more obvious sniping emerge, what literary critic Edmund Wilson once called Time's "jeering rancor...

...Says one reporter, "It's really a mas-turbatory job...

...That dogmatism is never acknowledged as advocacy journalism...

...Even to a Time neophyte the message was clear: The company brass presided over Time Incorporated from the thirty-fourth floor...

...senior editors edit, and frequently rewrite, the writers' version...

...His evidence...

...Ray Cave, Grunwald's successor as managing editor, is said to have screamed a sexual epithet in an editorial meeting and demanded that Streep be "covered" whether or not she wanted it...

...Henry Grunwald," he said, "just hates Ralph Nader...

...sipping Scotch with others in the "Economy & Business" section...

...And reliable...

...Henry Luce's Time marches on...

...A cover story on "The New American Farmer" happily cautions: "The rule is: Get big or get out...

...Time Inc...

...A constant air of self-importance, an illusion of omniscience, are as integral to the Time style of journalism as its Mom-and-Pop American veneer...

...His implication was, of course, that the top editors would not accept such bald skepticism about the nuclear industry...

...Early in 1979, a Time Inc...

...magazines likes to call this outlook "Preppie Goes to Wall Street...

...Probably the most widely acclaimed book on energy in recent years is Energy Future, compiled by Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin of the Harvard Business School...

...Profiles of Alexander Haig and General David Jones extol the virtues of "resolve" and brinksmanship...

...Misdirection...

...Or consider the suggestion to cover the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies, which would draw thousands of progressive activists...

...Factually, that is...

...The story, seeking to discredit wherever possible, finds little ammunition...

...If the Government started an antitrust action, we'd scream about it being punitive and hide behind the First Amendment...

...The editors are quick to frame issues in ways most amenable to their ideology...

...Indeed, the staff is scrupulous about details, with every name spelled correctly and double-checked, every figure on target, every quotation carefully confirmed...

...Reporters are sent "queries," the sometimes elaborate set of questions that convey how "New York" wants the story reported...

...I had joined the staff only a month before, but I was already familiar with the end-of-the-week routine—idle hours spent watching the network newscasts, making sure nothing important had happened...

...For a cover story on leadership in America, the editors selected fifty young go-getters, including the somewhat puzzling choices of Frank Shorter, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and museum director Phil-lippe de Montebello...

...The tone of our version was too anti-nuclear, he said, and he'd have to moderate it...

...The story, which was somewhat technical in nature, was shifted enough to mute the impact, but the "facts" never changed...

...researchers check the story for accuracy...

...The resultant Time story trumpeted the expected: "The purpose of antitrust policy should be to enhance efficiency...

...The editors have consulted with their higher-ups, have read story suggestions from reporters in Time's thirty bureaus around the world, and have constructed a "story list...

...I just know this has to be changed...

...Even the corporate brass will get in on the act now and then...

...corporate editor Henry Grunwald had spoken...

...The senior editor of the Business section, George Church, had left the story largely intact, and we were awaiting word from the "top" editors, the final judgment for all Time articles...

...This attention to minutiae allows the magazine to claim a kind of accuracy that implies an unwarranted omniscience...

...One is hard-pressed to find a Time story critical of corporate behavior, whether the subject be the timber industry, postal rates, or publishing takeovers...

...Stuart Schoffman, who was a Time writer for four years, now describes that role as one of "an apparatchik in the service of the corporation's ideas...

...A few weeks later, Peter Stoler's rabidly pro-nuclear essay, "The Irrational Opposition to Nuclear Power," appeared in the magazine...

...The sources: utility company executives, strip-mine operators, pro-coal Government planners...

...Time's determination to define political legitimacy requires the exclusion of critics of big business...

...The "Renewal" package, incidentally, was a colossal bore and generated only one-tenth as many letters as an average cover story...

...John Lichtblau, head of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation...

...At about nine o'clock, Associate Editor Jim Grant came by my cubicle to tell me the Nader story was in trouble: The "thirty-fourth floor" wanted the story changed...

...Energy Future is, in effect, a detailed refutation of much that Time has advocated in energy policy...

...And that was that...

...In May 1978, a lengthy story reported increasing coal production after the long miners' strike...

...A typical Time subscription pitch boldly proclaims the magazine's devotion to the truth: "Time...

...But on occasion the corporation will take direct, if quiet, political action...

...What does Grunwald want...

...settling in for another post-midnight wrap-up...

...Nothing illustrates Time's arrogance more than last winter's corporate extravaganza called "American Renewal...

...Georgia Kraft Company...

...The antitrust conference, perhaps cynical, merely maintained the magazine's repeated endorsement of corporate giantism...

...A hatchet job," he said...

...apparently Ray Cave was reluctant to part with the scheduled cover topic, an incisive study of the Muppets...

...My colleague was incensed, and a shouting match ensued...

...Just as the leaders of business are treated with deference, their adversaries are frequently treated with contempt...

...The bureaucratic system, coupled with its knee-jerk adulation of its corporate brethren, has been the source of Time's relentless weakness as a purveyor of current events...

...Arnold Safer, economist for a New York bank...

...Sorry, Parker replied, the suggestion won't go...

...The routine then rolls forward through the week until the late Friday close: Reporters and researchers gather information and compile "files," writers read the files and construct highly-stylized prose...

...The real empire strikes back...

...The editors' prejudices are no more remarkable than those of their classmates and neighbors who now hold similar rank in other enterprises...

...At the highest levels, the preppies are serious about managing the news in Wall Street's favor...

...Says Schoffman, "The institution embodies the very system it extols—the alienation of the workers from their own work...

...after all, the final copy is fashioned largely from the information they file...

...Hugh Si-dey, the inveterate White House columnist, sniped at Jimmy Carter after the failed rescue mission in Iran: "If as Shakespeare's Hamlet warns, Carter's enlarged conscience makes a coward of him, then by almost every measure in this sad nation, the future is bleak...

...In my years at Time, a week hardly went by without a caustic swipe at the "zealous" regulators who hamper the free-enterprise system...

...Nuclear power wasn't really in trouble, he said, and besides, we need nukes...

...We have to make the Nader piece tougher," he told me...

...lawyer confided to me that the Justice Department was "looking" at the company for possible antitrust action...

...In 1973, it enlarged its forestry division by purchasing Temple Industries, making it one of the largest landowners in the United States, and added the Inland Container Corporation in 1978...

...bought the American Television and Communications Corporation in 1978 to complement its own creation, Home Box Office, now the largest supplier of pay television programs in the country...

...Derision...

...If you're wondering whom Time regards as real energy experts, consider the story published a few months earlier, subtitled, "Experts answer almost everything you ever wanted to know about energy...

...Morris Adelman, oil industry consultant...

...Another ad: "Time brings you more than just the news...

...It is only in retrospect that I realized I was mouthing opinions not my own...

...Otto Friedrich, a senior writer, is reported to have told Grunwald that he found the idea pretentious: 'Time's besetting sin has been to preach, and this is more than preaching...

...Cultural liberty, equality of opportunity, and lifestyle diversity are ultimately encouraged because they expand the arena of consumerism: The "Me Decade" was good for the tycoons...

...Unreliable...

...As a rule, it is delicately woven into the fabric of a story...

...What is less visible, what is finely threaded through the magazine, is a rigid dogmatism pervasively integrated with the "news...

...At times the personal attacks are indirect...

...And so, Time snipes: The study's projections for solar energy are "highly questionable," its hopes for fuel efficiency "are enormously high estimates," and it is "defeatist about fossil fuels...

...Rather, it parades as "Americana," the sober judgment of experts, the tough choices of a free-enterprise society...

...Even in its handling of the civil rights conflicts of the last two decades, for which it won a reputation for liberalism, Time's, limited approval of equality is best understood not as tearing down the walls of racism or intolerance, but as opening the doors to the rime-defined American Dream...

...A generation ago, the magazine's flagrant biases were widely recognized...

...Time editors have never been shy about its incestuous relations with the captains of industry...

...Individual "sources" of information, sifted and evaluated for credibility, constitute the guts of a reporter's work...

...Connally, of course, was the darling of the nation's board rooms, so it made sense for the magazine that culture critic Dwight Macdonald called "the top chop house organ for the American business community" to endorse the Texan...

...If Time's promotion of the Pax Americana has been stalwart, its defense of the American Way of Life has been positively giddy—a trendy fascination with lifestyle, culture, and personal ethics...

...Well," replied Executive Editor Jason McManus, "we want to pick people who agree with us...

...Ad hominem attacks are familiar to Time readers...

...A telling incident occurred when actress Meryl Streep declined to be the subject of a Time cover story...

...The story cites no "experts" in its own defense...

...After the tragic events at Jonestown in Guiana, Time did its usual cover-length article...

...Not to be denied its share of the booming video communications market, Time Inc...

...There's no Left in America," he said...

...after a reasonably fair version was submitted to a senior editor, whole paragraphs explaining his record as governor were axed to make room for gossip about Linda Ronstadt...

...Several decades ago, the magazine was widely recognized as an apologist for tycoons and generals, but as the American corporation has evolved a more sophisticated image, so too has Time...

...And the sharpened ax of Time did fall on Nader ("imperious," "a driven zealot") and his "consumerism empire...

...I argued, a little meekly, that I thought the story was tough, and fair...

...The predictable result of this survey was a blast at the ecofreaks pushing clean air and land reclamation, miners wanting their share of the profit pie, farmers worried about scarce water, and the few Federal officials unwilling to give away leasing rights...

...The distinguished panel: Walter Levy, oil industry consultant...

...In the last two years, however, Time has struck more of the old Lucean notes—but in the muted corporate style of Henry Kissinger (Grunwald's idol) and the Trilateral Commission...

...Listen," Grant finally said, "I don't care about nukes one way or the other...

...Occasionally the reliability of acknowledged experts must-be torpedoed as well...

...Essayist Lance Morrow writes, "Jerry Brown, with his sleek vocabularies of 'planetary realism,' sounds like an item from The Whole Earth Catalog...

...This system serves several purposes...

...Little, Brown & Co...

...Newsweek, however, did a twenty-six-page extravaganza that put Time to shame and threw Grunwald into a rage...

...One editor described the conference as a "cynical, preemptive strike on the Justice Department...

...bullying...

...All honorable men...

...It was the embarrassing product of Henry's monumental ego," observes one Time staffer...

...Word filtered down that Cave wanted to "get" Brown...

...Time's peculiar system of group journalism helps fix and perpetuate those attitudes, for the editors and writers need never leave the Time & Life Building...

...Grtinwald, following Donovan as the corporation's editor-in-chief, decided it was time for Time Inc.'s six magazines to tell America how to retrench and revitalize...

...and several real estate and land development ventures...

...Brown possesses a disco Jesuit allure...

...The bias in any Time story," says one Time writer, "begins with the query...

...It owns The Washington Star, Time-Life Books...

...Church paused, swallowed a mouthful of Dewar's White Label, and sighed...

...He is, intoned Morrow, "a welterweight opportunist...

...A few months later, the magazine sponsored an antitrust conference in Washington, D.C., with dozens of business barons in attendance (including executives from Gulf, Bechtel, Transamerica, Phillips Petroleum, Arco...

...Most conference participants felt that a further tightening of antitrust policy might promote inefficiency...

...Under the guidance of the "intellectual" managing editor, Henry Grunwald (1968-1977), such permissiveness reached its apogee, and the endorsement of personal freedom appeared to signal a distinct departure from Luce's Philistine prudery...

...Business editors, in particular, accepted uncritically the widest estimates of regulatory costs but never reported the many careful studies showing the broad, if hard to calculate, benefits of environmental or occupational health standards...

...Early in 1979, a Brown cover story was assigned in anticipation of his challenge to Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Presidential nomination...

...There is a certain amount of freedom we have," observes a veteran of the Washington bureau, "but that really works two ways...

...top" editors edit the senior editors' copy...

...I hurried to Church's office...

...In the summer of 1978, I suggested a story on the manifold problems of the nuclear power industry (new plant orders down, cancellations by the dozens, costs skyrocketing, protest mounting...

...But the change has been mainly in the packaging, not in the essential product...

...I noted that suggestions are simply meant to provoke ideas and that the reporting would uncover the real story...

...After all, this was the magazine of Henry Luce, and the powerful institution he founded in 1923 has never failed to carry his banner: the celebration of big business, the ethos of mass consumption, and the blossoming of the "American Century...