Letters

...As to your assertion that “the papers almost never carry critical assessments of the costs and purposes of specific military programs,” I have attached a list of 21 such articles by me-including features, analysis, editorial page pieces and news stories that go into considerable background-which you might have come across in 1974 alone if you cared to take a longer look...

...In juxtaposing these criticisms with emphasis on the Post’s pre-eminence, I was not merely making a stab at “balance...

...I don’t see how you can lodge such a complaint without looking through the clips to see if we do just that...

...The author replies: I apologize to Michael Getler for the imbalanced impression left by my two-week survey...

...Letters After four years cbvering the Pentagon for R e Washington Post, I have learned that very few so-called press critics can resist the easy target of the Pentagon and the reporters who cover it...

...As for your comment that these news stories “contained just enough on-the-otherhand material to save them from being Pentagon shills,” I would point out that it is precisely to try and keep Pentagon statements in perspective that we put much more background into daily stories than you see fit to give us credit for...

...MICHAEL GETLER Washington, D.C...

...Though you confine your comparisons to a two-week period, you criticize us for not stepping back several times a year to write more detailed explanations of how the Pentagon is spending our money...

...The latter, of course, was my reason for examining the Post...

...It still annoys me, however, and since you find it easy to make judgments on how a reporter spends his time on the basis of two weeks worth of clippings, permit me a perhaps too lengthy reply to some of the points made in your January piece on the Post...

...This and similar comments have convinced me to say something more about why I wrote the article in the first place...

...Had you looked even 10 days beyond your September 29-October 12 period, you would have found just such a lengthy analysis on the debate over rising defense costs in the October 21 paper...

...One way to go about evaluation of professional standards is to expose the least competent practitionersin this case, a paper like the one in Austin...

...The other approach is to select those institutions that represent the profession’s best efforts, and examine their limitations as a guide to the values and techniques toward which their competitors aspire...

...It seems to me that newspapers also have an impact on their readers by the quality and balance of their everyday coverage-as well as the special features-and thus it is worth the effort to get what you condescendingly call just enough “on-the-other-hand” material into what otherwise might be a heavy dose of unleavened Pentagon viewpoints that might come over the wires and onto editorial desks...

...The best work of many other Post writers went unrepresented in that sample, and I apologize to them as well...

...Such an approach produces criticisms of the might-have-been variety, demonstrations of unrealized potential rather than overt error...

...Ben Bradlee and His All-star Revue,” ,James Fallows, January...

...Finally, I regret not giving Ben Bradlee adequate credit for assembling the sort of staff he has brought to the Post, an accomplishment that did not take place by accident...

...the Post’s excellence, compared to other papers, was the very reason for the article...