Inside Stories
The Opinionmakers.
by William L. Rivers.
Beacon Press. 207 pp. $4.95.
The Washington correspondents of major American newspapers are, by and large, better educated and more competent than their foreign colleagues in capitals abroad. As Mr. Rivers observes, they also are often better trained than the officials about whom they write. In London, the notion that Oxbridge is as valuable as several years on the provincial press is just beginning to catch on. Things are worse in Paris where journalism is usually regarded as a launching pad for some more serious occupation. There is a comparable gap in craftsmanship. Clarity is regarded as a virtue in Washington; the arcane and unintelligible allusion dear to Continental journalism is not. Attention to detail, even trivia, is one test of a Washington correspondent's performance. This may lead to an absurd expenditure of effort to verify the precise sums provided in the minor provisions of a new bill. It is, nevertheless, more praiseworthy than the casual disdain for grubby fact and the imaginative invention of quotations that mark so much European journalism.
Having said this, it must be added that European newspapermen prize one quality that has relatively little value in Washington: independence of judgment. Most Washington reporters on most days view the world through an official optic and see issues framed in the manner of the administration in power. To be sure, Washington reporters produce their share of embarrassments, of disputes that some official wants hidden. But in general, the corps operates on the assumptions of those in executive, and sometimes legislative, office.
In the abstract, the correspondents zealously defend their right to report everything that affects the public interest. In practice, however, they turned angrily on Arthur Schlesinger for reporting President Kennedy's limited admiration for Dean Rusk. Similarly, the nominal guardians of unfettered information solemnly questioned the propriety of Senator Fulbright's attempt to correct official fictions about the intervention in the Dominican Republic. (Happily, this bureacratic vision did not inhibit some of the Washington reporters who filed from the scene.)
A taste for authoritative irrelevance is particularly marked in the area I work. Long after the macroeconomics of Keynes had become operating policy in Europe, Washington correspondents reported deadpan the preoccupations of officials obsessed with that peripheral accounting instrument, the administrative budget. In the same way, the corps generally accepted at face value the simple-minded cops-and-robbers narrative of union corruption offered by the McClellan Committee. It was beyond the practice—not the wit—of newspapermen to relate these incidents to market structures and business values.
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As Mr. Rivers wisely observes, this deference has nothing to do with conventional corruption. Cash subsidies, a commonplace in the age of Jefferson and Jackson, play a marginal role in Washington. Only a handful of correspondents nowadays accept “special” writing chores from government officials, corporations, or unions. A subtler corrosion weakens the corps—the lures of “insiderism,” of access and status. The joy of knowing things others don't is one of the unacknowledged if simpler attractions of newspaper work. In the same way, editors value correspondents who can quickly reach an assistant secretary or cabinet officer for a definitive and inside view of an event. Inevitably, these privileges flow in the greatest number to correspondents who are “responsible,” “understanding,” “sympathetic.”
Just as important is the correspondent's struggle for place in the pecking order. In a city dominated by civil servants, the notion of rank is crucial. Among the newsmen, the struggle for prestige takes dozens of different forms but few of them have much to do with unconventionality. Some of the prestige marks are the frequency with which a correspondent's story is picked up or commented upon in other journals; his influence over the stories of his peers; the use of his name by officials at press conferences. Standing does not necessarily depend on compliance—witness Walter Lippmann—but in general, the correspondent's chance of being first to uncover a new policy, disclose a new appointment, or receive the other items on which editors place a high premium, depend to a considerable extent on the correspondent's amenability to the powers. Protecting sources in the Washington argot means much more than simply refusing to reveal a name. Of course, the better correspondents are never completely at one with their subjects. Status is also acquired by discomforting the establishment from time to time. But this must not be overdone or the correspondent runs the risk of being labeled “crank.” A splendid recent example of such discretion was provided by the New York Times and the Washington Post. They had been the principal sources of information about the important link between the legislative process and the former Secretary to the Senate Majority. Both newspapers quietly disbanded their investigation teams the day after Mr. Johnson became President.
William Rivers, who worked for the Reporter magazine and as a Congressional assistant in Washington, is shrewd and knowing about the capital press corps. He rightly underlines Washington's incestuous quality. It is a one-industry town in which correspondents and officials work and play in a narrow circle. Any administration has infinite opportunities to impose its view of things and every administration exploits them. If a reporter explains its position in writing often enough, he tends to absorb it. This same phenomenon infects diplomats and correspondents working abroad, producing the disease the State Department calls “localitis.” In effect, reporters in Washington and elsewhere confront a Hobson's choice: range widely and sacrifice intimate feel, or else gain intimacy and sacrifice independence.
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In his book of loosely connected essays, Mr. Rivers touches on many of these points with a pungent intelligence. Some of his individual judgments seem odd—the inclusion of Meg Greenfield of the Reporter in a list of influential generalists and the omission of Philip Potter of the Baltimore Sun; the suggestion that Time magazine has taught reporters how to put news in perspective. But these are details. More questionable is Mr. Rivers's ambiguity toward the spurious issue of “news management.” All governments color events to suit their needs, and lie from time to time. The frequent show of dismay over this fact of life is one of the innocent charms of the Washington corps. In the first part of his book, Mr. Rivers rightly dismisses as “absurd” the idea that there is anything new in this practice. But in two later essays, he barely hides his moral disapproval at the techniques employed by Eisenhower and Johnson and appears to think he must defend similar tactics employed by Kennedy, a President he likes. His book is also padded out with conventional and admiring accounts of Lippmann, Reston, the New York Times, and David Brinkley. All are useful institutions but of very different degrees of worth. Mr. Rivers sometimes accepts at its own evaluation the status order about which he writes more discerningly elsewhere.
At bottom, lack of relevance rather than compliance may be the chief shortcoming of an otherwise generally talented group of men. Officials' concerns are necessarily limited to the unavoidable. Reporters must necessarily report on these concerns. But there is no iron law prohibiting the corps from reporting them with the detachment and perspective of, say, Le Monde or the essayists in the Financial Times of London. More than it cares to admit, the Washington corps manages the news for its own convenience and that of its official clients.
