What the Times and Post Are Missing
Kotz, Nick
What the Times and Post Are Missing by Nick Kotz Question: What do the following four statements have in common? .Attorney General Griffin Bell, as a federal judge, probably violated the law...
...Louis PostDispatch...
...A classic example was The Des Moines Register’s 1975 examination of commodity trading...
...Morton Kondracke, who was a crack reporter in the Chicago Sun-Times’ Washington bureau until he recently quit to become an editorreporter at, The New Republic, describes the frustration: “I was really bothered by this problem...
...Some of them contribute mainly to pack journalism, reproducing the obvious stories and offering versions of them little different than the wire-service accounts...
...Another story that should have had Washington impact but didn’t was Saul Friedman’s examination of Gerald Ford’s mix of service to a bank with service in Congress...
...For example, Adam Clymer, then of the Baltimore Sun, and a team of writers from the Los Angeles Times-Jack Nelson, Robert Jackson, Ronald Ostrow, and Gaylord Shawproduced numerous scoops on Watergate stories after the initial WoodwardBernstein phase...
...They appeared in the Knight newspapers (which include The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Detroit Free Press, andThe Miami Herald) and in several large papers that subscribe to the Knight news service...
...The stories that often don’t make it back to Washington are ones outside the current page-one news and stories that are not easy to duplicate because of their complexity or interpretive nature...
...The 7,500-word series, based on two months of research in the Georgia state archives, provided the most original and revealing account of Carter’s record as governor, including both his failures and his accomplishments...
...I was depressed that writing good stories just made no difference here...
...It is not just the expos6 or the lengthy interpretive story that often fails to get deserved attention in Washington...
...But because it was a provincial reporter’s story the Post ran it on page eight and the Times gave it similar ho-hum treatment...
...Editors like Ben Bradlee and Maynard Parker, national editor of Newsweek, and Washington bureau chiefs like Hedrick Smith of The New York Times, Hugh Sidey of Time, and the Associated Press’ Martin Arrowsmith believe that really good stories produced by other reporters in Washington will somehow find their way back to Washington, via their own correspondents in the field, the wire services, or interest in Congress...
...Most of these reporters only occasionally produce news of national significance...
...But the story still has not become national news and less than a handful of Washington reporters know that there is a new commodity trading commission that warrants careful watching, The Minneapolis Tribune is Nick Kotz, formerly a reporter with The Des Moines Register and The Washington Post, is a Washington writer...
...I called it the ‘Chicago Truth Machine.’ You sent things out to Chicago and they never came back...
...The stories appeared in early September 1976, at a time when they provided valuable information for voters who wanted to know more about presidential candidate Carter...
...it fell down a rat hole,” says Joe Albright about the impact of his comprehensive and revealing reportage in Newsday on the Nixon White House’s largesse to the shipping industry...
...The Post’s New York circulation is only 1,600, but it is read by executives at the networks and news magazines...
...In New York, the Times dominates, followed by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post...
...The stories were pertinent to every American consumer, yet they never became national news-that is, they never appeared in the Post, the Times, the news magazines, or the networks...
...Times reporters have complained for years about the Post’s neglect...
...Instead it either ignored them or used them as a tip sheet...
...The Gailey-Epstein stories weren’t exactly poured down the drain...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, Marty Nolan of The Boston Globe, and from the L.A...
...However, in one case, Jack Nelson’s scoop on the tape in which Nixon tells Mitchell “I want you to stonewall it,” and advises that others “plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up,” it seems probable that if the Post or Times reporters had gotten the story, it would have been treated as the smoking gun and would have brought the Watergate cover-up to an end months earlier...
...Many of these reporters do their job well...
...Because the Post and Times did not cover that development, it escaped the attention of most people, and particularly in this city where the Senate was about to vote on Bell’s confirmation...
...The Washington correspondents far papers outside Washington and New York are virtually unanimous in their complaint that AP and UP1 wire senrice offices out in the country do not pick up their exclusive stories and move them back to Washington and New York via the national wire...
...Answer: Each of the above statements was the thrust of a newspaper story written by a Washington correspondent...
...Exceptions are the Washington bureau of Newsweek and the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal, where reporters are assigned to read The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, The Detroit News, St...
...Interviews with Washington correspondents from the so-called “provincial press” (the non-Washington or New York press) reveal two unfortunate patterns...
...Louis Post-Dispatch , The Des Moines Register, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Baltimore Sun...
...Friedman, of the Knight bureau, has long been one of Washington’s best investigative reporters, but his work is seldom noticed in Washington...
...I used to joke about what happened to my stories...
...There are 1,200 newspaper reporters accredited to the congressional press gallery, and only a fraction of them are employed by newspapers that are read regularly in Washington or New York...
...Government officials respond most readily to newspapers with the greatest power to help or hurt them...
...Attorney General Griffin Bell, as a federal judge, probably violated the law in ruling on a case in which he previously had been involved as a private attorney...
...The theme of lost stories is sounded by every Washington correspondent who has had a good story with potential Washington reverberations that never happened because the story never got back to‘washington...
...But most of these stories were momentary scoops from which the Post and Times recovered in a few days, so that the only thing that was lost was proper credit to the reporter who had the story first...
...I see good stuff in all those papers and others that we don’t really utilize,” says Milqe: Miller, the Journal’s Washington bureau chief...
...The Register stories nevertheless led to new regulatory legislation because congressmen from Iowa became interested in the problem...
...They work for news operations as diverse as the two-man bureau of the Louisville Courier-Journal and the 23-member bureau of the Los Angeles Times...
...The first is that their own work does not have the public impact that it should, an impact that would provide more diversity in the national news...
...The story might as well have not been written...
...They were never seen again...
...Unfortunately, stories have a great deal of trouble coming back upstream to spawn in Washington...
...The stories featured internal memos between Carter, Hamilton Jordan, and Bert Lance, showing graphically how they worked...
...Describing that process, Jack Nelson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, says: “News seems to flow downstream from East to West...
...George Anthan, Clark Mollenhoff, and James Risser of the Register’s Washington bureau wrote several dozen stories detailing potential manipulation and price-fixing in America’s multibilliondollar commodity exchanges...
...None of the stories produced any significant official reaction in Washington...
...Nelson’s particular frustrations were compounded because even The Washington Post, which shares a news service with the Los Angeles Times, did not use many original Times stories...
...Arrowsmith of AP and Grant Dillman, Upl’s Washington bureau chief, dismiss much of this criticism as unfounded but acknowledge that wire service editors outside of Washington often are not well informed enough about the nuances of Washington reportage to know whether a story represents a new and exclusive development...
...When that chemisfry is at work, an investigative expose may force a political reform, and an informed interpretive story may cause a reevaluation of government policy...
...Richard Dudman’s account of Griffin Bell’s possibly illegal conflict of interest was based on public testimony at Bell’s Senate confirmation hearing...
...Dudman, Friedman, Albright, Gailey, and Epstein are among the hundreds of Washington correspondents whose work does not appear in Washington and seldom becomes a major part of the political chemistry that occurs in the interaction between the federal government and the press...
...Gerald Ford, as House minority leader, served a bank of which he was a board member by keeping it informed of pertinent legislation on banking...
...I think we are losing something...
...But there are at least several hundred correspondents from newspapers outside New York and Washington who seek to cover ’ the national news as well as issues of local interest...
...Not only are these reporters frustrated that their stories lack impact in Washington and are not read by their news sources or friends, they also receive fewer news leaks than do the more influential reporters from the Post and the Times, and they have more trouble getting their telephone calls returned...
...Their primary task is regional or local coverage-the important job of keeping people back home informed of the actions of their congressmen and of federal actions that affect them...
...Moreover, 7he New York Times and The Washington Post dominate the national news process in Washington and New York, both directly through their presence and indirectly by influencing not only the television networks and weekly magazines, but the hundreds of newspapers that subscribe either to the Times or the Post-Los Angeles Times news services...
...That was the most telling development of the whole hearing but it got no play at all in the big Eastern papers,” says Dudman, Washington bureau chief of the St...
...And each was written by a reporter frustrated that his story did not have the impact that he thought it deserved...
...But the articles never became part of the national election story...
...Because they did not appear in The Washington Post or The New York Times...
...others do little more than reproduce handouts from the government...
...None of the stories appeared in a Washington or New York City newspaper...
...President Nixon spent millions in federal funds beyond the amount legitimately needed to support the American maritime industry...
...In addition, Arrowsmith said the wires usually are too overloaded to move a long and complicated story...
...Had the series appeared in the Times or Post, the papers read by official Washington and New York media managers, there probably would have been public outrage and a congressional investigation...
...Jimmy Carter, as governor of Georgia, practiced secrecy while preaching openness and used the political clout of highway construction projects to reward friends and punish enemies...
...It was like pouring good whiskey down the drain,” complains Phil Gailey, who, along with Aaron Epstein of the Knight Newspapers’ Washington bureau, wrote a comprehensive series about Jimmy Carter’s record as governor of Georgia...
...Finding Their Way Back Most of the editors in Washington and New York do not think they are missing much by not reading the Washington reports of The Des Moines Register or the St...
...Times bureau, which is as good as any in town...
...Only a Fraction My own unscientific survey of news executives in Washington and New York indicates that the Post and the Times are the newspapers they read most closely in Washington, followed by The Wall Street Journal, the wire services, and The Washington Star...
...Whether a story makes its way back into the Washington-New York national information mill depends to some extent on its complexity and its relationship to hot items then in the news...
...The complaints have reached the ear of Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who recently issued a strongly worded memo ordering his editors to use good Times stories and properly credit them...
...Louis PostDispatch...
...Some of the best stuff coming out -of Washington is from Tom Ottenad and Dick Dudman of the St...
...Very few of these national news organizations attempt in any systematic way to monitor many newspapers from outside Washington and New York, although Hedrick Smith at the Times and Deputy Managing Editor Richard Harwood at the Post both say they are going to initiate such monitoring projects...
...The Times has a Washington circulation of 19,000 daily, and The Wall Street Journal’s is about 40,000...
...But there are dozens of outstanding reporters who produce competent and original news of national interest...
Vol. 9 • March 1977 • No. 1
