a Sandinista sympathizer disguised as a journalist. Self-serving politicians bully and threaten the publishers’ employees, hinder their work, and weaken their stories, yet almost no audible protest corries from the “ super-rich and powerful businessmen who ultimately controlled the U.S. news media.” Slandered by State Department hatchet men, Parry discovered that, as he told Hertsgaard, “ if you don’t succumb to all that, you get the line from your editors that maybe they should take you off the story, since you seem to be pursuing a political agenda. When the government attacks you, even your colleagues begin to doubt your credibility.” Assigned by the A.P. to the Pentagon beat in the 1960s, a young reporter named Seymour Hersh sidestepped its informational soup kitchen, found his own high-ranking official sources, and duly infuriated Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester, master of the soup kitchen at the time. Sylvester phoned Hersh's boss to complain about the “ little ferret,” as he was known in the Pentagon, and out went the inquisitive Hersh. The fact that his stories were impeccably “objective,” that A.P.’s member newspapers had been pleased to publish them, meant absolutely nothing. The Pentagon had spoken, and A.P. obeyed. The obligation of a free press to “ act as a check on the power of government” is checked instead by the power of government. Fearful of losing access, “ beat reporters must often practice selfcensorship,” notes Herbert Gans, “ keeping the ir most sensational stories to themselves.” Fearful of offending the masters of the soup kitchens, they “ have little contact with an agency’s adversaries.” Servile by need, Washington reporters all too often become servile in spirit, like prisoners who come to side with their jailers. “You begin to understand,” as I.F. Stone once put it, “ that there are certain things the people ought not to know.” For nearly twenty years reporters covered the FBI beat without reporting that the bureau was engaged in massive domestic spying under the transparen t guise of “counterintelligence.” For ten years reporters covered the CIA without reporting on the agency’s own illicit domestic spying operation, although they surely had wind of it. For the “myopia of a Washington political beat,” says Broder, “ there is no sure antidote.” Were the power of the media anything more than a shabby fiction, there might be some hope. In fact, there is none. he political whip that falls on reporters also falls on the media “ powers that be.” The publisher or broadcaster who allows his reporter to delve into the forbidden mores of government or to challenge the official version of things by making “controversial charges...quoting unidentified sources,” says Wicker, “ is likely to be denounced for ‘irresponsibility.’” His patriotism may be questioned, his advertisers roused against him. He can be held up to public contumely as a prime example of unelected elitist power, with what effect on profits the “ powers that be” do not wait to find out. “All too many of [them] are fundamentally businessmen,” says Wicker, and nothing scares more easily than a billion dollars. After President Nixon assailed the Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers, “ the nation’s most influential newspaper,” as William Rusher calls it, grew so frightened that “we bent over backwards trying to cultivate Nixon,” in the words of Max Frankel, now the executive editor of the newspaper. After the Reagan White House publicly scolded CBS for its vivid prime-time documentary on the plight of the poor in 1982, “CBS News management,” reports Hertsgaard, “ began pressing journalists... to tone down criticism of President Reagan.” CBS was the protagonist, too, in one of the most telltale stories of political power and the national news media. On October 27, 1972, CBS News carried a fourteen-minute survey of the Watergate scandal as it stood after four months of brilliant investigative reporting by the Washington Post, which had dared treat the break-in as a crime to be solved, even without official approval. Elsewhere in the media, however, the story had been “ bottled up,” notes Halberstam in his account of the episode. The rest of the press treated it as mere partisan bickering; the Times, for its part, was still “ bending over backwards.” Now, millions of CBS viewers heard Walter Cronkite describe in detail “ charges of a high-level campaign of political sabotage and espionage apparently unparalleled in American history.” A second installment on laundered money was scheduled to follow. At the White House, a coarse-minded scoundrel named Charles Colson was in charge of intimidating the press for the President. The day after the broadcast he telephoned the great power-that-be William S. Paley, board chairman of CBS, to hector and berate him. If Paley did not stop the second program, warned Colson, CBS would be stripped of the licenses to operate its five lucrative television stations. A frightened Paley tried his best to carry out the White House order. His newspeople, to their credit, resisted, and a compromise was reached: the second show was cut nearly in half and substantially weakened. That was not compliant enough for the White House, however. A few days after Nixon’s re-election, Colson Reporters are puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings. powerful to account? Yet here was a president grossly abusing the power of his office (which was newsworthy in itself) in order to censor the news (which was doubly newsworthy) so that the electorate might not hold him accountable at the polls—which was newsworthy three times over. In John Adam’s thunderous words, a free people has “ an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.” Now a ruler was subverting our inalienable right to dreaded knowledge of him. Surely that was newsworthy, yet it didn’t become news. It rarely does. The news media in America do not tell the American people that a political whip hangs over their head. That is because a political whip hangs over their head. “ The Washington po lit ic ian ’s view of what is going on in the United States has been substituted for what is actually happening in the country,” former president of the A.P., Wes Gallagher, pointed out in the mid-1970s, a time when the press enjoyed a brief hour of post-Watergate freeness. And why would Washington politicians The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. called up Paley’s longtime lieutenant, Frank Stanton, to issue a still more sweeping threat: If CBS persisted in broadcasting hostile news about the President, the White House would ruin CBS on Wall Street and Madison Avenue. “We’ll break your network,” said tyranny’s little henchman. Stanton suppressed his rage. Paley, deeply ashamed, told no one of Colson’s threats. Why didn’t these two media magnates turn those threats into news? What else is a free press for if not to help a free people hold the want us to know that our knowledge of them comes from them? That is the kind of knowledge that awakens a sleeping people, that dissolves political myths and penetrates political disguises. To keep all such dreaded knowledge from the rest of us is the “ information policy” of those who rule us. And so it is we hear, from the left as well as the right, the steady drone about media power. p I rom the “ frightening information policy” to the impeachable offenses documented in the shunned Iran-contra report, the private story behind every major nonstory during the Reagan administration was the Democrats’ tacit alliance with Reagan. It is this complicity, and not the Reagan administration ’s deft “ management” of the news we hear so much about, that explains the press's supineness during the Reagan years. As usual, it was Congress that was managing the news. “ It was very hard to write stories raising questions about Reagan’s policy, because the Democrats weren’t playing the role of an opposition party,” said A.P.’s Parry, explaining to Hertsgaard why the press seemed to be “on bended knee” during the Reagan years. Congress, said Leslie Stahl of CBS News, “ has not been a source for the press in the whole Reagan administration. They don’t want to criticize this beloved man.” Even good stories fell flat, said Jonathan Kwitny, a Wall Street Journal reporter at the time, because “ there is no opposition within the political system.” When the Times, to its credit, reported on August'8,1985, that White House aides were giving “ direct military advice” to the President’s private contra army, Reagan replied at a press conference that “we’re not violating any laws.” Democratic leaders asked the President’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane (later convicted for his answer), whether the President was lying, after which they assured the press there was nothing to the report. And for many months one of the most momentous stories of our time “just went nowhere,” as Larry Speakes, Reagan’s press secretary, boasted to Hertsgaard. Even s to r ie s w ith em inen t sources “ just went nowhere” during the Reagan administration, because the political leadership in Congress, unwilling to challenge the President, refused to license them. For nearly six years New York’s Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan charged in numerous speeches and Op-Ed articles that our present paralyzing budget deficits were deliberately created by President Reagan and his faction. By slashing taxes (not to mention doubling military spending), they planned Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 21 I
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