To the Editor:
Edward Jay Epstein’s article, “Journalism and Truth” [April], which will be read by the predisposed as proof that journalists are inherently unable to be truthful, opens more speculations than it closes. . . .
If not the present system of truthlessness, what will take its place? Since both the Mob and Mammon feel a certain need for the system as it now stands—its bulk, its timeliness, its variety of inclusion, and even its immensity of exclusion—deconditioning them will be a difficult process. It will be even more difficult without a clearly realized substitute, some well-organized way to fool the neural responses that are now masked as a hunger to know what’s going on. . . .
Academics have lately turned to journalism in fierce numbers. They used to think they could govern us better than our governors, but when they got their chance their greatest achievement was to provide the raw material for David Halberstam’s book. This had not been their aim, so, as a class, they turned on news. Command of the media, a word they singularized, might give them the means for social engineering they had so badly booted in Washington. Their first step was to analyze the weak link, the journalist with his feeble and unworthy claim that he had no conscious desire to change things, no wealth to garner except from being better paid, no power to achieve. As badly as he did his job, he seemed to think he could do it better than others because he liked his work. And it is true, once you consider the power for evil of such work, that that seems small enough reason for practicing it. Better to seek out men who know the truth, and how to find it, and what to do with it.
Newsmen, says Mr. Epstein, are not themselves inadequate, but they work under the limitations of “time, space, and resources that can be allotted to any single story.” His alternative, when he comes to offer it clearly, will provide unlimited time, space, and, resources. . . .
But the journalists, whose inadequacies did not in paragraph one create the divergence between news and truth, in paragraph three “lack forensic means and authority to establish the truth about a matter in serious dispute.” Here Mr. Epstein raises not only problems with his methods, but problems with his solution. His solution—although he does not really state it—seems to be to engage the expertise of recognized practitioners within the relevant bodies of discipline, certified as experts by their professional organizations, and subject to the supervision of expert peers. (“. . . The process of review by other scholars in the field through which, presumably, objections to the thesis are articulated and errors corrected.” Vide supra.)
Rather than belabor the obvious, let me give an example. Take any newspaper from any recent day. Mark any story where action of some kind has followed, or seems likely to follow, from the fact that it was or is being reported. Then establish a timetable of steps which would necessarily precede such action if its reporting were to be formulated as a doctoral dissertation. Or the life work of some scholar. Or a study accorded unlimited time, space, and resources, which would take even longer than either of those.
Clearly, Mr. Epstein doesn’t mean that. But what does he mean? If his clearly-stated purpose were his real one, his article would not have been worth writing. . . . The total truth is not present in every news story. Of course not. You could hold a circulation contest with prizes for the reader deriving the most reductiones ad absurdum from the concept that each news story must show the derivation of the event from the Creation, and its ramifications to the far Philippines. And if that is not what Mr. Epstein means by truth, what is? Will historians judge the Times version of what the Pentagon Papers said and meant as truer or less true than the academic version he cites? What would Watergate be without Woodward and Bernstein, and their irrational persistence? Granted that they persisted mostly in seeking who would leak and caring little why. Would truth have been served if they hadn’t?
Even were one to accept Mr. Epstein’s entire thesis, I see nothing accomplished in stating it. It rests on this flimsy base: Newsmen now almost invariably depict themselves not merely as reporters of the fragments of information that come their way, but as active pursuers of the truth. Mr. Epstein must have just come from an awards luncheon when he wrote that. Or somebody had been showing off for him. The newsmen I know don’t depict themselves as active pursuers of the truth. At least not to me. . . .
Besides which, I submit that any sentence which begins, “Newsmen now almost invariably depict themselves . . .”is ipse dixit nonsense. But without this sentence the piece is pointless. Mr. Epstein is warning his readers that newsmen are not what they almost invariably depict themselves to be. He identifies for journalists their dilemma, that either they must uncritically use leaks from a materially interested source, or do their best with the leaks by discounting the interest, matching it with other leaks, and similar examples of their skill and guile. But if they do that, they might make mistakes, since journalists, apparently uniquely, don’t know everything. Mr. Epstein’s solution to the dilemma is to identify the source of a leak, at least as to its interest, and then lay it down uncritically. That is a small conclusion for so much argument. But it is also the wrong conclusion. It would make for dumb news and lousy newspapers.
Reuven Frank
New York City
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To the Editor:
In his essay on “Journalism and Truth,” Edward Jay Epstein displays a deplorable lack of understanding of the practice commonly referred to as “investigative reporting.” His ignorance is perhaps not surprising, for experience has taught me that many conventional journalists themselves fail to comprehend the demanding disciplines that govern the conduct of the professional journalist-investigator.
It is ironic, however, that one who expresses such concern over the alleged failure of reporters to measure up to standards of scholarly research should himself report a distorted version of the truth. Mr. Epstein mentions, without any qualifications whatsoever, “the well-timed leaks to the press by elements in the Nixon administration which ultimately forced Justice Abe Fortas from the Supreme Court. . . .”
As a professional who has spent much of a twenty-eight-year career in journalism as an investigative reporter, and who researched and wrote the original article on Justice Fortas to which Mr. Epstein refers, I suggest that for an accurate account of the painstaking effort that went into establishing the truth of my story (which appeared in Life) he read Robert Shogan’s excellent book on the Fortas case, A Question of Judgment. My original disclosures, which stemmed from a tip—a mere fragment of information—from just such a government source as Mr. Epstein describes, were not “leaked” as a package by anyone for any particular partisan political purpose. The lead came from a career federal employee late in October 1968, before Nixon was elected to the Presidency, and a report of my ongoing investigation was communicated directly to Justice Fortas in November (a fact of which I was unaware until I read Shogan’s book) by no less an authority than Ramsey Clark, then serving as President Johnson’s Attorney General.
Paul Porter, who had been a law partner of Fortas before the latter’s appointment to the bench, confirmed the essential facts of my story as early as December 1968, when I interviewed him in his Washington office. However, considerable additional research was needed for me to establish whether a causal relationship existed between Justice Fortas’s financial dealings with Louis Wolfson and Wolfson’s troubles at that time with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the office of U.S. Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau. I spent the better part of five months working on that story, examining and re-examining facts as I assembled them—all in the search for “truth.”
But “truth,” as Mr. Epstein must admit, is often an elusive quality. It resists precise definition. In the sense that it reflects reality, it is a noble goal sought by all good journalists and historians and lawyers—and even, one hopes, essayists specializing in press criticism. That it is difficult to attain does not mean that it is impossible of attainment. The truth of my disclosures in the Life article has never been disputed publicly by Mr. Fortas, although Mr. Wolf-son bombards almost anyone who will listen with a lengthy litany of my alleged irresponsibilities. My account of the relationship between the two was not complete because, as Mr. Epstein rightly points out, journalists are not favored with such means as compulsory process to obtain information. But it was accurate and realistic. The full story of the lifetime contract between the Wolf-son Foundation and Fortas, which surfaced later in the daily press, reinforced my original disclosures.
I have no doubt that the story of that contract came from some government agency after the Nixon Justice Department began investigating the Fortas affair. But I am reasonably confident that had I not received that original tip and investigated the matter, the Fortas-Wolfson relationship with all its implications would never have come to light. Top officials of the Nixon Justice Department had no knowledge of it at all until they learned of my independent investigation. (Apparently Ramsey Clark had not passed along what he knew of it to his successor, John Mitchell.) Moreover, I was extremely displeased when I discovered that the Nixon administration knew of my investigation. The subject matter obviously was delicate, and the last thing I wanted was to produce a story tainted, however undeservedly, by any hint of partisan politics.
I agree with Mr. Epstein that many of the news stories growing out of Watergate stemmed from deliberate leaks, and were passed off as “investigative.” The only genuine investigative reporting on the Watergate affair was accomplished in the early stages of the scandal, before the self-servers began to unload their tidbits. Surely by any reasonable standard, the work of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in those early months was investigative, dependent to a very limited extent, if any, on leaks from official investigators.
However, it should be pointed out that Watergate was not a typical investigative story; it was, rather, a “running” daily story, and the competitive rush to print unfortunately and inevitably produced some erroneous reports. The typical investigative story is one that ordinarily would never be revealed; one that some wrongdoer hopes can be concealed; and one that, when discovered by a reporter, is quietly and meticulously researched, documented where possible, and in every case has all of its substantive facts corroborated in some fashion or another. No single-source news story is ever entitled to the honorific, “investigative.”
Often, of course, tangible documentation to substantiate a story is unavailable, and the reporter must then rely on testimonial evidence. I could cite many examples, but one of my favorites is Seymour Hersh’s disclosures of the Mylai massacre. His stories originated in a tip from a source whose information proved in large part inaccurate, but Hersh corrected those errors during a four-month investigation, in which he interviewed about forty members of Lieutenant Calley’s infantry company. Does anyone really believe that his five stories revealing that ignominious episode were less than truthful?
Mr. Epstein also expresses the novel notion that the motivation of the source of the tip or leak is a necessary element in the “truth” of a story. Source motivation, it seems to me, is irrelevant. If thorough research and independent corroboration substantiate the original lead to the story, and the resultant product is accurate and soundly evaluated, of what moment is the original tipster’s motivation? Who cares whether the lead came from a disgruntled bureaucrat, a self-serving politician, or an anonymous phone caller?
Further, Mr. Epstein makes the bald assertion that “. . . journalists generally lack the technical competence to evaluate evidence with any authority. . . .” I submit that professional investigative reporters, a relatively small but well-trained lot, are not empty-headed information collectors. They are familiar with the rules of evidence and the disciplines that govern scholarly research. When they need additional expertise, they seek it from those who can provide it impartially.
I have doubts that I can convince Mr. Epstein, whose rather harsh judgments about journalists and their practices seem to be embedded in concrete, but most investigative reporters worthy of the designation do indeed search for truth, not just random facts.
William Lambert
Rye, New York
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To the Editor:
Edward Jay Epstein is right to emphasize the limits to what journalists can find out, but he oversimplifies when he suggests that journalists merely report what official and unofficial “sources” choose to tell them. There is a good deal more to it than that.
In writing some stories, of course, journalists are only a sort of middleman between the source and the public, passing on information, sometimes true and sometimes not, which has been handed to them in a take-it-or-leave-it package. Jack Anderson’s report of Eagleton’s alleged record of drunken driving, cited by Mr. Epstein, is a good example of this. . . .
The most important stories, however, contain more than a single nugget of fact and the information comes not only from willing informants, who may have their own purposes, but also from people who do not know they are providing it or who are providing it against their will. Even when information comes from a willing source its bias is not necessarily hidden, and, where hidden, it may be irrelevant. The motive of the IRS employee who leaked Nixon’s tax returns may have been high or low or beyond human comprehension; it doesn’t really color the nature of what he was handing over. The motive of the man who first revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia did not cast doubt on the truth of his report; quite the contrary. Ellsberg’s motives were mixed and complex but of secondary interest and importance to the Pentagon Papers themselves. The important thing, it seems to me, is not the bias of the informant but his veracity.
Mr. Epstein cites the reports of Eagleton’s medical history and mentions that copies of them were found in John Ehrlichman’s safe. If he means to suggest that journalists (or Jaworski) ought to look into how they got there, I certainly agree. But if he means to imply that Eagleton’s medical history is somehow irrelevant because it was made public by Ehrlichman, then I find his position curious to say the least.
Mr. Epstein suggests that the proper model for “truth-seeking” is the law, with its powers of subpoena, compulsion, and punishment, but I wonder if lawyers would agree. The purpose of legal process, after all, is the establishment of legal guilt or innocence, something a good deal narrower than “truth.” The guilty sometimes get off and the innocent sometimes go to jail. In his Watergate troubles Nixon has sometimes tried to suggest that even though he may be “technically” guilty of wrongdoing, he is not “really” guilty. This is not a distinction without a difference and it suggests the limits of the law where truth is concerned.
What journalists do is actually closer to the practice of history, I think, than to the law. They use the same sort of evidence in much the same way to establish a similar sort of truth. It might be difficult to prove in a legal way that Stalin was responsible for the purges of the 1930’s and yet it is so. The lack of legal proof is less important than the presence of other sorts of evidence which allow historians to determine what really happened. This is the sort of truth which journalists attempt to establish. The difficulty, of course, is that journalists see only a small part of the total record eventually available to historians.
Journalists cannot compel testimony and their cross-examination does not have the weight of the law behind it, but that does not mean they must accept everything they are told humbly and at face value. Far from it. If journalists are not by nature skeptical they soon learn to be so; they are constantly approached with information tainted by the obvious bias of the informant. If they accepted it all blindly their careers would be short indeed. . . .
Every City Hall reporter is slipped a dozen inside stories a week. Congressional reporters all but stagger under their load of unreported scandal, malfeasance, and outright criminality. My point is that far from being overtrusting of unofficial stories, journalists often err by being too skeptical, coldly and even rudely rejecting information of genuine value because it seems tainted by spleen, or because they have heard the story too often before, or because they are tired and want to go home.
Writing good journalism is not easy but Mr. Epstein describes it as being hard in the wrong way. In a sense he has simply inverted the real problem, which is that journalists are far too dependent on official sources, too indifferent to reports of official failure and wrongdoing, and too accustomed, after a time, to things as they are. Police reporters do not often uncover police graft, just as White House reporters do not often uncover White House scandals. The problem, in short, is not an over-eager and irresponsible willingness to take rumor-mongers at face value, but a kind of unconscious collusion with those in authority, whose interest in truth is, if anything, even feebler than that of journalists.
Thomas Powers
New York City
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To the Editor:
Edward Jay Epstein underestimates the part played by the predispositions of newsmen in making current news reporting fall as far short of the truth as it does. It is true, as he says, that “plausibility” is an unsatisfactory criterion for reporters to apply to stories they are given, because liars can always shape their stories to the prejudices of those they tell them to. But consistency in slant suggests a willingness to be deceived.
It seems significant to me that the four stories cited by Mr. Epstein which were published and later proved to be false all reflect a willingness on the part of reporters and editors to accept without much question the malignity of U.S. government officials and of anyone in opposition to a self-styled socialist government (outside the USSR and its East European allies). Clearly it is easier to credit stories about an organized genocidal campaign against Black Panthers, a White House plan to assassinate Panama’s head of government, a private order by Henry Kissinger to “tilt” toward Pakistan while publicly proclaiming neutrality, or the brutal murder of Chilean workers in the coup that overthrew the Allende government, if you believe that local police forces are not only racist but murderous, that U.S. foreign policy is not only dishonest but base, and that the opposition to any government calling itself socialist (with the exceptions noted above) is bound to be vicious. And it is easier to accept substantial editing of the Pentagon Papers for publication in the New York Times as merely contributing “artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” if you are convinced that the edited version tells the essential truth.
Perhaps it is because, as Mr. Epstein reminds us, modern newsmen have more formal education . . . than their predecessors that they are less able to apply the test of plausibility. Old-time newsmen, who were not educated in the conventional critical attitude toward the Establishment, . . . questioned the reliability of critics of the Establishment as well.
Cicely A. Ryshpan
New York City
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Edward Jay Epstein writes:
Since Reuven Frank seems to have confused the argument I made in “Journalism and Truth,” let me briefly restate it. Journalists rarely have the time, space, or budget to seek more than fragmentary bits of information about events, but even if they were not so constrained, and had limitless time, space, and money, they could not be expected to establish the truth for society because they lack an accepted procedure for eliciting information, testing evidence, and dealing with objections to a thesis. There is thus a very crucial difference between news and truth. Mr. Frank should have no problem accepting this difference, since as executive producer of the NBC Huntley-Brinkley news, he prescribed in a memorandum a set of formulas and rules for presenting the news, and noted: “Every news story should, without any sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action.” These are obviously not necessarily the attributes of history or other forms of systematic inquiry (or even of human experience).
Mr. Frank then asks what alternatives there are to journalism. I would recommend that anyone seriously interested in establishing the truth about controversial events turn to other institutions of organized intelligence which have commonly accepted procedures for evaluating evidence, such as universities, national commissions, grand juries, criminal courts, courts of inquiry, Congressional committees, and private study groups. Granted these institutions may be imperfect or faulty, but if strengthened, such non-journalistic institutions have the means of establishing evidence.
In asking, “What would Watergate be without Woodward and Bernstein?” Mr. Frank illustrates the journalistic blind spot toward all other fact-finding institutions in society which I discussed in these pages last month [“Did the Press Uncover Watergate?”]. The public learned of the planning of the Watergate break-in, the execution of these plans, and the subsequent perjury, cover-up, and obstruction of justice not through Woodward and Bernstein but through the televised hearings of the Senate Select Committee (and subsequently from the House Judiciary Committee and Special Prosecutor’s office). During these hearings, Magruder, Mardian, Dean, Mitchell, and other protagonists sketched out the genesis of Watergate (though there was disagreement on who approved of what) and the perjury in the trial of the Watergate burglars (as well as the “enemy list,” the Ellsberg break-in, the 1970 intelligence plan, etc.). How did the Senate Select Committee come to know of this conspiracy? Again, it was not Woodward and Bernstein, or any other journalist, but John Dean, James McCord, and Jeb Stuart Magruder who told federal prosecutors the plot in the course of bargaining for immunity or less severe sentences. They were compelled to do this not by vigilant journalists, but by a vigilant judge, who levied heavy sentences on those convicted of the break-in. How did the judge know about the break-in? Again, it was not through the efforts of journalists, but because the Washington police caught the burglars—including an official of the Committee for the Re-election of the President—red-handed in Watergate; the FBI traced the money immediately to the Committee for the Re-election of the President (and Liddy), and one of the conspirators, Alfred Baldwin, came forward and told federal prosecutors all the details of Watergate (including the transcripts and prior break-in) a few days after the break-in. This information was then presented to a grand jury (it still had not leaked out to the press), and after that was presented in open trial. To be sure, the Washington Post leaked various parts of the investigation to the public, but they weren’t the only institution doing it: the Democratic party filed a multimillion-dollar law suit over Watergate, and Senator McGovern rarely missed an opportunity to suggest that the White House was behind Watergate (though the vigilant press didn’t always report his charges in full).
William Lambert also raises an interesting point when he discusses his own experiences in “exposing” Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. Mr. Lambert certainly wasn’t working under any deadline pressure in searching out a “causal relationship” between the acceptance of money by Fortas from a foundation controlled by financier Louis Wolfson and Wolf-son’s treatment by the court for the offense of selling unregistered stock. Yet he was never able to establish such a nexus—Fortas disqualified himself from any of the proceedings involving Wolfson. To be sure, by dredging up what seemed to be unexemplary conduct on the part of a Supreme Court judge, he assisted in an unofficial impeachment (by the press). He cannot comprehend that there were members of the Nixon administration who strongly desired to replace Fortas with a Nixon appointee (Nixon and Senator Griffin, interestingly enough, were campaigning for this just about the time Mr. Lambert received his tip from a government employee).
Mr. Lambert, illustrating the working ethic of journalism, notes: “Source motivation . . . is irrelevant.” But is it? Subsequently, Charles Colson showed Mr. Lambert a forged cablegram which implicated President Kennedy in the assassination of Diem. To his (or his editors’) credit, he never developed a story on this “leak”; but NBC News, when it was offered the bait, by Colonel Lucien Conein, presented this allegation as part of a nationally-televised documentary on the causes of the Vietnam war. In this case, I think both Mr. Lambert and Mr. Frank would admit that “source-motivation” was not irrelevant.
Finally, Mr. Lambert argues that not all investigative journalism proves false—and cites the excellent example of Seymour Hersh (who was not at the time working for a newspaper). I agree journalists can find truth. Astrologists can also predict events that at times occur, but this hardly proves that their procedures are reliable.
