The Quote Circuit
Bethell, Tom
The Quote Circuit by Tom Bethell With the assassination attempt by Sara Jane Moore, it was high time to crank up the Quote Circuit. Two assassination at tempts in three weeks, sandwiching the...
...Dr...
...There is no such thing as undisputed truth lying like a stone on the pavement waiting to be picked up...
...Ottenberg went on to say that “it reflects the unresolved tensions of the Vietnam war, the lying and cheating of major agencies of government and the unresponsiveness of government to people’s needs...
...At the time of the impeachment Broder would draw up lists, say of Republican state chairmen, that sort of thing, and everything was happening so quickly at that time that the lists were kept up...
...In the case of the two recent attempts on Ford, again a “larger” explanation is sought...
...I asked...
...When Nixon .resigned...
...And when discussing these issues they take sides, avoiding scientific neutrality...
...I asked...
...Brookings is a Washington Quote Shop, YOU might say-the Treasury in Exile...
...The “explanation” is sought because the potential consequences of the act-a new President, a new Administration, a new foreign policy-are out of all proportion to its cause, namely a disgruntled or deranged person squeezing a trigger...
...Everyone was too alienated to bother...
...With a major event like that, you have to have a lot of space devoted to it,” he said, and a little light went on in my head...
...It would not be ethical to do so...
...In such cases many people will seek a new cause that is commensurate with the effect-seek, in other words, large and global explanations that thereby imbue the event with appropriate meaning...
...How does the Quote Circuit work exactly...
...And they all quoted me accurately...
...Chicago psychiatrist David Rothstein, for instance, was given space in Time to speculate why likable Presidents (e.g...
...David Broder is an associate editor at The Washington Post...
...There are no lists...
...Ottenberg...
...It’s a perfectly legitimate question, when you have a second assassination attempt so soon after the first, to ask ‘Why?’ Well, who are you going to ask why...
...Sometimes they were written even before the resignation speech was made...
...They’ll give him names from their field...
...I asked...
...But you know, we’re reporters, we’re not here to give our own opinions...
...Sometimes they were written even before the resignation speech was made...
...I asked...
...And that seemed like enough quotes for one article...
...The Times provided Ottenberg with a platform to opine that government leaders’ “lack of candor, their hypocrisy, their inaccessibility, manipulation of media, prolongation of a nasty, dirty war, lack of followthrough on many social and health programs” had “created a situation resigned...
...This time, however, the demand for extra explanation is not necessarily rational...
...Any psychiatrists...
...You call up the psychiatric department at Stanford...
...In the economic field it’s really terribly bad...
...Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial Church...
...Then came Time and Newsweek, adding the comments of eight more psychiatrists, some of them overlapping with those quoted by the Tinzes and the Post...
...It started out being fallout and then moved into other areas of pollution...
...It’s kind’ of stupid .” “But I guess there was a need for copy,” I said encouragingly...
...How, then, to rise above the common herd...
...How does one get onto it...
...At that moment an ambitious professor with his eye on the Circuit stayed close to the telephone...
...Which group was that again...
...Another possibility, of course, was that Presidents Johnson and Nixon had kept prudently under cover during their presidencies...
...Judd Marmor, president of the American Psychiatric Association, that “it would be wise” for Ford “to be extremely careful in the immediate future...
...I asked...
...Why are psychiatrists quoted so much...
...He wrote about what he called ’anything authorities,’ people who appear on TV talk shows and so on...
...The professor was speaking clearly, articulately, distinctly...
...So if you want to say there’s an official Washington Post list you can say that, but basically the reporter doing the story makes his own contacts...
...YOU begin to know who to call...
...An inspection of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek for a three-week period shows that in the related and sometimes indistinguishable fields of social psychology, psychiatry and sociology a fairly tightly knit group of doctors and professors currently dominate the Quote Circuit...
...1 am a psychoanalyst as well as a psychiatrist, and a professor at the university, so I have lots of credentials...
...Dr...
...If you meet someone interesting in the course of doing a story you write down his phone number...
...This, more than anything, accounts for the currently widespread search for a new “explanation” of the Kennedy assassination: We are expected to believe, according to the official explanation, that the Johnson Administration and all that it entailed, possibly including the debacle of Vietnam, was set in motion by one man who had quarreled with his wife...
...They only quoted about one per cent...
...In the case of the Kennedy assassination, of course, this means looking for a conspiracypreferably a large one...
...How did you get the names of all those psychiatrists you quoted...
...Sometimes it’s just a rewrite job, say when Nixon resigned...
...Kihss quoted half a dozen psychiatrists...
...But you know, we’re reporters, we’re not here to give our own opinions...
...If the Gospels had been written according to the rules of American journalism,” he went on, “they would have had to give equal time to the devil...
...On the same day The Wasliiizgtoii Post ran a piece by Stuart Auerbach entitled “COOL OFF PERIOD” quoting several more, two of them overlapping with the Times list...
...Clearly the professor had strayed rather far from Freud...
...And when the Quote Circuit provides them-beware...
...Why are psychiatrists quoted so much...
...For instance, on a list I drew up, Lawrence Freedman appears four times (in the Post, Time, Newsweek, U. S. News), Dr...
...But the fact is, when great power is vested in one man, as in the President of the United States, it is always possible that a small cause (a microbe in his blood, for example, leading to a fatal disease, leading to a new President, leading to a “Vietnam”) can trigger a large effect...
...If you’ve been a reporter you know that that happens all the time...
...The American Psychiatric Association...
...That’s ‘React,’ ” he said, explaining the newsroom mechanics...
...1 was very surprised,” Auerbach told me...
...It’s marvelous...
...The British approach to news is not always the same as the American approach...
...I specialize in medicine,” he told me, thus deflating my fantasies about sinister directives coming down from the top...
...I must go now because I’m keeping someone waiting...
...React’ is the story you’re interested in...
...That one assassination attempt might trigger others was essentially what they said...
...My feeling is a) this leads to bad writing, b) it’s completely unconvincing-it would be better if the writer himself said the significance is this and the reasons are one, two, three...
...He wrote the Sara Jane Moore reaction story and had done a parallel story when Nixon resigned...
...The effort was to get fellows who had some authority on the thing...
...Thus when Saigon falls, at the end of more than ten years of American presence, there is a feeling that in addition to giving a bare description of the arrival of the North Vietnamese army, something else needs to be explained-a justifiable feeling in this instance...
...And so, by analogy, when the President is shot at (another big headline event), people feel that this needs to be explained, too...
...those already wired in merely had to put out press releases...
...Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...You couldn’t just print Nixon’s speech by itself...
...I asked...
...But he did have the ability to pull a complicated issue together succinctly...
...The Quote Circuit was busy, all right, but several questions came into my mind...
...He was pretty pushy on the theme of the environment...
...secondly, they tend to be colorful in various ways, thus giving them “identity” in the mediaMargaret Mead with her long forked staff, Ehrlich talking about his vasectomy, Dixie Lee Ray talking about her trailer and two dogs...
...What about when Nixon resigned...
...It’s a perfectly legitimate question, when you have a second assassination attempt so soon after the first, to ask ‘Why?’ Well, who are you going to ask why...
...Ottenberg went on to say that “it reflects the unresolved tensions of the Vietnam war, the lying and cheating of major agencies of government and the unresponsiveness of government to people’s needs...
...The Times provided Ottenberg with a platform to opine that government leaders’ “lack of candor, their hypocrisy, their inaccessibility, manipulation of media, prolongation of a nasty, dirty war, lack of followthrough on many social and health programs” had “created a situation The Washington Monthly/December 1975 where desperate individuals may feel a certain legitimacy” to invoking violence...
...I mentioned the Quote Circuit to someone I know on The Washington Post...
...Ottenberg...
...They put out press releases...
...There is that,” said Stephen Barber, who for 13 years has covered American news for the London Daily Telegraph, “but there is something else-this is especially true of wire service reporting-and that is the passion for getting opposing points of view...
...But that’s what he said...
...How about Dr...
...He was one of the Post’s Quote Circuit experts, clearly...
...Say it’s an assassination attempt, the main story is ‘Shoot.’ One person does ‘Shoot,’ another does ‘React,’ another does ‘Girl,’ if it was a woman who did it, another might do ‘Parents,’ another would do ‘Protect,’ about the Secret Service protection...
...I got quotes from one or two others, including PBS-TV talk show host Martin Agronsky, who said, “I have a rather low regard, by and large, for psychiatrists who extrapolate to the state of the national mind, sort of in a vacuum, without any personal knowledge of the individual concerned...
...The Quote Circuit was humming along nicely...
...But that’s not the main pointthe use of quotes to bias a story,” Lewis continued...
...Barry Commoner has been fairly aggressive...
...I mean if you’re going to stay in the union . . . .” “Does the Post keep lists...
...Broder keeps lists of names...
...I hinted...
...Next I called Stuart Auerbach at The Washington Post...
...But call me back if you want to discuss it further...
...To see the way the Times does it,” my man went on, “take a look at the latest major airplane crash in the U. S., for example...
...I think Karl Menninger was the “DO these people you have been studying put out press releases...
...Why are psychiatrists called so often on these occasions...
...In its instant explanation of just about everything, psychiatry ends up by seeming to explain nothing...
...you know they are strong...
...The conflicting explanations provided by psychiatrists on these occasions certainly provide food for thought...
...The wrapup is done by a generalist, and he’ll go to the paper’s specialists-reporters who have a special knowledge in a field...
...Another characteristic is that they all discuss issues that are perceived as b e i n g b o t h r e l e v a n t a n d controversial-I...
...Of course it’s possible to do that...
...His comment about the “inaccessibility” of government leaders appeared grotesquely at odds with the circumstances under which Ford was shot at, and not really consistent with the advice of another psychiatrist, Dr...
...Ford’s being the symbol of a government that alienates can be presented as the explanation of why someone shot at him, but it could equally serve as an explanation of why no one shot at him the day before or the day after...
...They would be Quote Circuit people...
...He had answered the phone himself, and told me that he had very little time to talk because he was between patients...
...They tend to have solidly established scientific reputations, and they tend also (for that reason) to be above the average age for scientists...
...And especially, how does a psychiatrist get onto the Quote Circuit-not necessarily an easy feat considering that there are about 26,000 psychiatrists in America, most of them dispensing a similar brand of wisdom...
...Rae Goodell inquired after telling me all this...
...I asked...
...My recollection is that there wasn’t any great difference of opinion,” he said...
...Or they might have names of their own...
...Nice for them, I was thinking darkly to myself...
...I asked, imagining myself on the trail of a conspiracy...
...So if you want to say there’s an official Washington Post list you can say that, but basically the reporter doing the story makes his own contacts...
...You’ve done it yourself, right...
...It’s standard journalistic practice...
...But, she told me, the most visible scientists, in the sense of being known to the general public, include Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, Linus Pauling and B. F. Skinner...
...Instead I decided to get a few quotes from someone who had been described to me as a Quote Circuit expert, Dr...
...Two assassination at tempts in three weeks, sandwiching the Patty Hearst capture -that’s enough to make a nervous editor reach for his Rolodex containing a list of professors and pundits who can be relied upon to provide a quote, to discern the deeper meaning, to tie these apparently random events together with an explanation...
...I asked him...
...I used to kid Lesley Oelsner when she did criminal stories for us...
...The correspondent has to provide his explanation of what happened, and if his bosses don’t like his explanations, then they can get someone else...
...What happened was the reporters called the American Psychiatric Association, and then headquarters gave out the names of half a dozen individuals, mine among them, thereby offering a selection process as well as a legitinuzation of the views of the Association...
...The reporter is not allowed to say so and so, but if he can get someone else to say it for him, then that’s all right, you see...
...Rae Goodell told me that the “visible scientists” share certain characteristics: first, they are all highly articulate...
...Do you keep lists...
...No, his name did not surface as being that well known...
...And so it was that a day after the San Francisco shooting The New York Times published a piece by Peter Kihss entitled “VIOLENCE FEARED BY PSYCHIATRISTS, They Voice Concern Over Alienated People’s Views...
...and Peter Kiliss of The New York Times, who said that although the Times tried on these occasions to get a “cross section” of comments, they didn’t necessarily have to “balance” each other...
...Journalism is supposed to be more than a tape recorder business...
...Paul Lewis of the London Finuncial Times was on the line, referring to the Quote Circuit as “a perverse offshoot of the doctrine of the separation of powers...
...A strict distinction between comment and news must be maintained...
...Some people say we bow too much to credentials...
...Rae Goodell at MIT, whose Ph.D...
...arrange to get quotes that conform to his own opinion...
...1 helped form a task force on social issues for the Association,” Professor Ottenberg went on, “I’ve also worked with the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, was very briefly a consultant to the President’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence...
...A guy named Yale Kamisar at the University of Michigan cropped up in virtually every legal story she did...
...If the government announces a budget deficit, for example, then that’s an immensely emotional and complicated issue...
...Here he yielded up a tiny laugh, somehow suggesting that with all his years in Washington’s National Press Building, Barber knew finally that the world and its ways were beyond redeeming...
...So you hear the editors saying, ‘Let’s have a reaction sidebar.’ ” “DO you think there’s a tendency for the reporter’ to...
...The Tirnes also ran quotes by eight other figures, half of them professors (three at Harvard), and Douglas Kneeland wrote a “Mood of San Francisco” piece, quoting liberally from Rev...
...Explanations, then, are not always in order...
...a ‘Medical’ story, ‘On Scene’ story, one by the Aviation expert, and a ‘Reaction’ story...
...In the Post he was quoted as saying that attempts are being made on Ford’s life “because he is the symbol of a government that has alienated large numbers of Americans...
...The Wusliirigtori Post, The New York Times, a reporter for the Scripps-Howard group and a columnist in Washington,” Ottenberg said...
...It can’t be presented in a totally neutral fashion...
...I called a man I know at The New York Times...
...At the time of the impeachment Broder would draw up lists, say of Republican state chairmen, that sort of thing, and everything was happening so quickly at that time that the lists were kept up...
...Marvin Wolfgang, sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, three times, Dr...
...Robert Coles...
...Like a small book on the subject being put out overnight...
...Well, let’s be honest about this,” he chided...
...Julian Bond, the Georgia state legislator who is known principally for appeaiing in print on these occasions, appeared in print...
...Is this just a devious form of editorializing...
...I mean if you’re going to stay in the union . . . .” “Does the Post keep lists...
...It’s done according to a formula...
...I would not initiate any of this on my own,” Professor Ottenberg told me when I called hini in Philadelphia...
...Marvelous in the sense that it’s done very swiftly...
...Kozol was reported as thinking “that Fromme may really have been striking at Nixon when she took aim at Ford...
...How about Dr...
...Kennedy, Jackson, Lincoln) attracted assassins, while disliked ones (Johnson, Nixon) did not...
...You call up the American Psychiatric Association, in the case of the story you are referring to...
...I asked...
...Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960, has said that in psychoanalytic circles “a lavaflow of ad hoc explanations pours over and around atl difficulties, leaving only a few smoothly rounded prominences to mark where they may have lain,” and this is pretty much what 1 have in mind...
...Judd Marmor, president of ‘the American Psychiatric Association,’ three times (Times, Post, U. S. News), Dr...
...And so we turn to the Quote Circuit, there to find one group for whom explanation is its very life blood and raison d’etre: psychiatrists...
...I asked...
...That’s the way it works...
...Not merely Sara Jane Moore, not Squeaky Fromme, but something like alienation in Americu must be the cause...
...They put out press releases...
...But this ingenious theory had already been knocked on the head a couple of weeks earlier, in the same magazine, by a different psychiatrist, Harry L. Kozol, who is director of the Massachusetts Research Program on the Study of Dangerous Persons...
...Perry Ottenberg, psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, twice, while another favorite was Philip Zimbardo, social psychologist at Stanford University, who seems to have a good rating at The Wushington Post...
...Some people say we bow too much to credentials...
...But that’s what he said...
...1 was very surprised,” Auerbach told me...
...Arthur Okun at Brookings, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, is forever turning up with comments...
...In addition, Newsweek ran a separate Quote Circuit article, as had the Times several days earlier, publishing the views of “a wide range of Americans who have studied or had close personal experience with campaigns,” addressing the question: “Should techniques of Presidential campaigning be changed...
...The one point out of the many raised that seemed worth concentrating on, by way of a grand finale, is Auerbach’s remark that “people want to know ‘why.’ ” With certain big events, or events that fill a great deal of media space/time, the bare event does not seem to contain within itself an adequate explanation of its existence...
...In the Post he was quoted as saying that attempts are being made on Ford’s life “because he is the symbol of a government that has alienated large numbers of Americans...
...How do you mean, marvelous...
...said my man, thinking back an aeon...
...My study was limited to scientists, so I can’t tell you all you want to know,” she said when I called...
...But it was amazing how the predilections of the writers determined what they quoted from what I said...
...I asked...
...Do you know about Arthur Herzog, author of The B. S. Factor...
...Some do...
...Q., vitamin C and so on...
...who had, as it were, gotten out of bed on the wrong side that morning, and found a gun lying there...
...No, we don’t keep lists,” he replied...
...And of course there’s a tendency towards political bias...
...Rothstein concluded “that perhaps likable Presidents may be more vulnerable to attack, since they stir up the greatest hopes and thus the greatest potential for disillusionment !in, the minds of the deranged...
...Nixon’s resignation was a big moment for the Quote Circuit...
...There will be the ‘Overall’ story...
...How many reporters called you...
...Perry Ottenberg, a psychiatdst at the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted both by Auerbach and by Peter Kihss of the Times...
...The cause doesn’t fit the effect...
...dissertation, “The Visible Scientists,” will be published next year by Little, Brown...
...Perhaps you should talk to him...
...Among those quoted were such familiar Quote Circuit riders as Kevin Phillips, Frank Mankiewicz and Richard M. Scammon-and only one psychiatrist this time, Lawrence Freedman of the University of Chicago...
...They had everybody around here calling up senators and press secretaries-anyone you could think of...
...I regarded myself as a spokesman for the group...
...I came to the conclusion that I was in fact fishing for a quote from him that would confirm my suspicions about a Quote Circuit conspiracy, and so I decided to call one or two English journalists I know...
...Perry Ottenberg, a psychiatdst at the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted both by Auerbach and by Peter Kihss of the Times...
Vol. 7 • December 1975 • No. 10
