most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the “ best” sources. So passive is the press that even seemingly bold “ adversarial” stories often have the sanction of the highest officials. In December 1982, Time questioned President Reagan’s queer mental equipment in a cover story entitled “ How Reagan Decides.” This was the first such story given prominence in a major news outlet. Yet the story’s source, it turned out, was none other than the President’s own White House aides, who thought it would help them club Reagan awake. Without White House approval the story would never have run, as the Time editor involved, Steve Smith, told the inquisitive Mark Hertsgaard. Five months later, with an economic summit conference scheduled for Colonial Williamsburg, the same White House aides set about repairing any damage to Reagan’s image they might have inflicted in December. To make sure that the President’s fictive competence would be the media’s line at the conference, Reagan aide Michael Deaver invited Hedrick Smith, a star reporter at the Times, to lunch at the White House in order to press home the point. This kind of source journalism is almost irresistible to a reporter. As Wicker tells us with admirable candor, “ I regret...to say I have on too many occasions responded like one of Pavlov’s dogs when summoned to the august presence of a White House official; whatever information he had for me, I usually grabbed and ran,” knowing full well that it was almost certain to be “ a self-serving bill of goods.” Hedrick Smith, author of The Power Game, did likewise. “A few days later the Times ran a page-one story on President Reagan’s vigorous preparations for the summit,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “ But the real payoff was how Mr. Smith’s piece set the tone for the television networks’ coverage of the summit. All of the TV broadcasts conveyed the image of a President firmly in charge.” As Lyndon Johnson once remarked, “There is no such thing as an objective news story. There is always a private story behind the public story.” While serving as Reagan’s treasury secretary, James Baker promoted Third World debt policies that were profitable to himself. Yet that gross impropriety, though part of the public record, went completely unnoticed by the press for nearly two years, and con tinued unno ticed wh ile the Senate was ostensibly examining Baker’s appointment as secretary of state. The new secretary had no sooner entered upon his duties, however, when “ someone in the administration” —White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, as it turned o u t - peached on Baker to the press, thereby turning the newsworthy into news. For some reason one of President Bush’s White House henchmen had used the press to humiliate the President’s most powerful adviser. That was the private story, now becoming public, seen darkly through the looking glass of news. he private story behind our A nationa l news is usually found in Congress. The powerful sources seen darkly through the glass of news are congressional leaders telling the press what to think and say about anything that happens in the capital and anyone who matters in the capital —excluding themselves. “This is a well-known ‘secret’ in the press corps: Washington news is tunneled through Capitol Hill,” notes Stephen Hess, rightly italicizing a secret well worth knowing: that congressional leaders make and unmake the nation’s news. As long as Congress made aid to El Salvador contingent on improvement in~ human rights, Salvadoran death squads and political crimes were news in America. To keep well supplied, the Times put a local investigative reporter on its staff. As soon as Congress lost interest in El Salvador, in 1982, the murderous regime virtually ceased to be news; the Times investigative reporter— Raymond Bonner— was promptly replaced by a reporter more amenable to the new congressional line. another story.) Similarly, the preposterous “ news” that President Bush was haplessly “ adrift” six weeks after his inauguration was whispered to reporters by congressional Democrats and “ Republican insiders”— leading politicians of both parties. That is surely Hertsgaard’s “ power to define reality,” and just as surely, that power is not in the hands of a passive press and its source-bound reporters. The myth of media power is nothing more than a political orthodoxy that conveniently masks the purloined truth: .the professional politicians of Washington quietly shape our national news to suit their interests. It should not come as a surprise that an orthodoxy so useful to the powerful (not to mention flattering to the press) has achieved the prominence it has. r I 1 he passivity of the press is -A . commonly—and mistakenly —called “objectivity,” the ruling prin- . ciple of American journalism ever since World War I put an end to the The overwhelming majority o f stories are based on official stories. For some years evidence of Pentagon waste and corruption had been available to the press in the uncommonly graphic form of $660 ashtrays and $7,622 coffeepots. Yet this welldocumented information lay in a sort of jou rna l is t ic limbo un til m idSeptember 1984, when certain political leaders held a well-orchestrated Senate hearing on Pentagon waste. Thus licensed as news, outrageous ashtrays became common knowledge and struck home with extraordinary force. The entire country was so enthralled and appalled that the wanton arms buildup stood in political peril. Something had to be done to stanch the flow of enlightening news. At the urgent request of congressional leaders (frightened perhaps of th e ir own tem e r ity ) , P res iden t Reagan established in mid-1985 a b ipa rt isan comm iss ion to take charge of investigating Pentagon p ro cu rem en t. In ty p ic a l mock deference to lofty presidential commissions—those black holes in political space—Congress fell silent about defense corruption. No official source remained but the Pentagon soup kitchen, which ladles out no news of Pentagon malfeasance. Once again minus its congessional news license, Pentagon waste and corruption disappeared into journalistic limbo. On matters of public consequence, it is not news editors but the powerful leaders of Congress who decide what is news and how it will be played. Do we harbor a clear and distinct impression about national affairs? Quite likely it comes from congressional leaders. “To a large extent, the reputations of Presidents and their top political appointees—cabinet members, agency heads, etc.—are made or broken on Capitol Hill,” Broder notes in his memoirs. The “ news” that President Carter failed to “ consult with congressional leaders” came to us from congressional leaders. (The truth of the matter was quite Progressive revolt against oligarchy, monopoly, and privilege. The code of “ objective journalism” is simplicity itself. In writing a news story a reporter is forbidden to comment on his own, or draw inferences on his own, or arrange facts too suggestively on his own. Yet even in the most “objective” story, as Wicker notes, nothing can be said “ unless some officialenough spokesman could be found to say so.” In 1984, the President and Congress were in agreement that a large voter turnout in El Salvador’s presidential election would prove that “ a step toward democracy” (as the New York Times would later characterize it) had been made, justifying massive aid to the ruling faction. The turnout proved large; the results were hailed and Congress voted increased military aid at once. In the vast farrago of El Salvador news one fact was missing: voting in El Salvador is compulsory. What rule of objectivity kept the American press from telling us the simple, salient, objective fact that gave the lie to the whole futile policy? None. On February 25, 1986, the New York Times reported, a presidential panel investigating the crash of the space shuttle Challenger proved incapable of explaining “ the cause of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s apparent insistence that the liftoff proceed on Jan. 28.” According to the Times, the panel was baffled by NASA’s “ changed philosophy” of launch safety and puzzled by its sudden decision to put engineers “ in the position of proving it was unsafe [to launch], instead of the o ther way around.” What went unmentioned in the Times story of official bafflement was a fact formerly known to a ll—that on the night of the ill-fated launch President Reagan had planned to deliver a State of the Union paean to “America moving ahead” (in the words of a Reagan aide explaining why the speech was postponed). What rule of objectivity required the Times to omit mention of this “ coincidence” and so shield its readers from the blatant dithering of a p res iden tia l panel? None, of course. There is no public information more objective than an official government document, yet “ few Washington news operations have their own facilities for serious documents research,” notes Hess. Even when there is time, there is a “ shunning of documents research.” What rule of objectivity accounts for the shunning of unimpeachably objective sources? None, yet even the most newsworthy documents disappear into journalistic oblivion at the mere behest of the powerful. On February 26, 1987, Reagan’s “special review board,” known as the Tower Commission, issued its long-awaited report on the Irancontra scandal. An hour’s reading revealed a president obsessively concerned with, and intensely curious about, Iran-contra matters, and determined to keep those matters in the hands of close personal advisers. To the press, however, the three members of the commission said exactly the opposite. In public statements, interviews, television appearances, and private meetings with leading editors, they insisted that Reagan was victimized by a “management style” that kept him in complete ignorance of everything blameworthy. That disgraceful lie, which in effect accused the President of his own defense, was endorsed at once by Democratic leaders and duly became the day’s news, as if the report had never been written. When the Irancontra comm ittes of Congress issued their report on the scandal, congressional leaders told the press at once that the whole sordid chapter was closed. The press did as instructed and closed the books at once on the most extraordinary abuse of power in presidential history. The report itself was ignored; a wealth of newsworthy information, impeccably “ sourced,” sank into journalistic limbo. The report termed Reagan’s private war against Nicaragua “ a flagrant violation of the Constitution,” but that grave charge, worthy of blazing headlines, was scarcely noticed in the press and ignored entirely by the Times. What rule of journalism dictates such base servility to the powerful? No rule save the rule of the whip, which po litica l power cracks over the press’s head. “Aggressive challenges to the official version of things” arouse what Wicker calls “ Establishment disapproval” and bring down the Establishment lash: “ lost access, complaints to editors and publishers, social penalties, leaks to competitors, a variety of responses no one wants.” “To examine critically the institutions and mores of government,” notes Leonard Downie Jr., managing editor of the Washington Post, “might mean breaking friendships with trusted government contacts, missing the consensus frontpage stories everyone else is after, or failing to be followed down a new path of inquiry.” Punishments need not be draconian. “ Manipulating access,” says Wicker, “ is the most standard means of stroking and threatening, and by all odds the most effective, even against bold and independent reporters.” If draconian methods are needed, political leaders do not scruple to use them. When David Halberstam’s Vietnam reporting for the Times angered President Kennedy, his White House henchmen whispered to Wicker “ the slander that Halberstam was a Saigon barhopper who had never been to the front.” Twenty years later, Robert Parry’s Central America reporting for the Associated Press ran afoul of Reagan ’s State Department, which launched a wh isper campa ign against him, accusing Parry of being 20 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989
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