June 13, 1973
Page 19456
ANALYSIS OF THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION'S RELATIONS WITH THE PRESS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Professional Relations Committee of the National Press Club, in cooperation with the Communications Department at American University, has just completed a most comprehensive analysis of the Nixon administration's relations with the media. I commend it to my colleagues as a significant commentary from a responsible group of journalists with deep concern about free and full access to Government information.
Because this study bears directly on numerous policy issues and legislative matters pending in Congress, including the question of public television financing, the Freedom of Information Act, the White House Telecommunications Policy Office, and the so-called Newsmen's Shield law, I ask unanimous consent to have the bulk of the Press Club report printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the report was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE PRESS COVERS GOVERNMENT: THE NIXON YEARS FROM 1969 To WATERGATE
(A Study by the Department of Communication, American University, Washington, D.C., for the
National Press Club, with conclusions and recommendations by the Professional Relations Committee
of the National Press Club)
PREFACE
The Department of Communication at American University joined in this study with the National Press Club in the hope that it could help people better understand the role of the news media in Washington, and some of the problems involved in reporting on the federal government.
The Press Club's Professional Relations Committee asked the department to examine press- official relations during the first Nixon Administration. The committee had been charged by the club's board of governors in June, 1972, with carrying out and publishing such a study. It subsequently was decided not to begin work until after the 1972 elections to remove any suggestion of partisanship.
The study director was asked in October to put together a team of volunteers, and to complete the report by January, 1973. The time later was extended to secure all the interviews, and to include developments in the early months of the second Nixon term.
The study team was made up of 20 Press Club members, American University graduate journalism students and recent graduates. Each volunteered time out of a busy schedule with the only recompense being his or her feeling that the end product would be useful to many people.
The team did not pretend to be antiseptically "objective" in its outlook. But every effort was made to retain a fair and independent view of the process. For the interviews, for example, we asked the same general questions of both officials and correspondents. The idea was to try to induce them to talk freely about their work and their views.
Thus, it was disappointing that only three out of the 15 White House officials we approached would join in the spirit of the study.
Innumerable efforts were made to discuss the interviews and the aims of the study with White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler. Ziegler pledged repeatedly that he was interested, and would meet with us. He did not, however, and waited nearly four months before he finally told committee chairman James McCartney on March 1, 1973, that he had ruled out all White House participation. A promised letter of explanation was never received.
It is not felt that the White House refusal measurably affected the validity of the study's conclusions. Three officials did talk to us extensively, and we included their observations, though Ziegler insisted that they were not speaking officially. In addition, much of what the other officials who were approached think about the press is a matter of public record.
The overall findings are outlined in the first chapter of the report. The final chapter sets forth the conclusions and recommendations drawn up by the Press Club's Professional Relations Committee after its members had reviewed the study.
The deeper our examination of the issues, the more it became apparent that a fuller, ongoing review of this process is urgently needed. It is hoped that this report will be seen as the first step in a periodic appraisal of press-government relations in succeeding administrations that would be welcomed by the press corps, and by politicians of both parties.
I am grateful to the many people in Washington and outside who offered us encouragement throughout the study. Special thanks are owed to Donald Larrabee, president of the National Press Club for 1973, and his predecessor, Warren Rogers; to James McCartney, Grant Dilemmas, Samuel J. Archibald and the other members of the Professional Relations Committee; and to Jack Germond, who served as liaison for the Press Club board.
Above all, this study could not have been pursued as it was without the support and unflagging faith invested in our efforts by Dr. Robert O. Blanchard, chairman of the Department of Communication.
Lewes W. Wolfson.
CHAPTER. 1
THE TRUTH ABOUT GOVERNMENT: THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION VERSUS THE WASHINGTON PRESS CORPS
(By The Professional Relations Committee, the National Press Club, and Prof. Lewis W. Wolfson)
We knew when we undertook this study that while both officials and journalists pledge to inform the public fully, they hardly see eye to eye on what is full information about government, even in the best of times.
Politicians want news people to be "constructive" on behalf of their programs and their view of the national interest, as former White House press secretary George Reedy has pointed out. And, though the President and other officials are given an expansive, uncontradicted forum for their pronouncements in much of America's news media every day, they still will not readily accept the fact that for news people that is not enough. No journalist can remain true to his trade if he simply reports what officials think is "constructive" news about government.
This debate over defining what should be reported became news itself in the last two presidential administrations, starting with the Johnson Administration's crisis of credibility, and continuing with Nixon officials’ efforts to discount much of the press's reporting of Washington and so, many feel, to try to discredit its appraisal of their performance.
The public needs no coaching to mistrust the media. But there is much evidence that Americans do need to recognize that this clash over the openness of government is not simply a matter of journalists' peevishness, as officials might try to picture it; it is the public's battle as well. The truth of this finding was brought home with unexpected force even as we were completing the study, as the Watergate exposures unfolded.
Watergate already stands as a landmark in American journalism. It was the press, and essentially the press alone, that unearthed the most scandalous misuse of the powers of government in this century. Watergate showed again how all of us profit when a single news organization persists in a lonely crusade in the face of massive official pressure and public indifference. It demonstrates beyond words the press's responsible pursuit of its First Amendment charge to act as a free and independent check on government.
The exposures early in Nikon's second term seemed almost to be the fated result of the unprecedented official suspicion and dislike of the media that, we found, had grown up in Nixon's first term. The contempt that some members of this administration have shown for the role of a free press has, in good measure, visited this tragedy upon them, and upon the country.
Had there been more access to officials, more frankness in government, more honest dialogue about the press's role instead of harangues on its failings, restraints might have been set on the secretive instincts of the officials who created a web of covert political operations that led to their downfall.
But; while government clearly has hampered the press in its reporting during the Nixon years, this was not meant to be a one-sided study. Another lesson of the Watergate is that that are many in the media who did not try to search further when they might have, and many other stories of government that remain untold. Thus, before examining further the deterioration of press-official relations, it seems appropriate to first look generally at the state of reporting from Washington.
THE PRESS'S FAILURE TO KEEP UP
Changing public needs flash by the press with stunning rapidity these days. But, despite the new demands that this places on the federal government, America's news organizations rarely seem to pause to review their coverage to ensure that they are keeping up with government's changing responsibilities. Too often the news media seem to leave it to officials to "discover" problems and prescribe national priorities for dealing with them – frequently in terms of their own political fortunes rather than the public's interest.
We found no shortage of men and women in the national press corps who are clear-eyed about the press's failings. They know that it is not necessarily true to its independent role here, no matter how often editors and reporters may invoke the press's freedom to be independent under the First Amendment. Indeed, some felt that the news media should be held to account equally with public officials for any breakdown in "the system" that can be attributed to the public's poor information about the state of government and the country's other political and social institutions.
But the 'press corps' that fans out in Washington each day is hardly monolithic either in the thoughtfulness of its members about the reporting of government, or their wherewithal to tell the story. One or two-man bureaus that must daily grind out items for strings of newspapers or broadcast outlets might as well be on another planet from the 41-man Washington staff of reporter-analysts for The New York Times, or the network newsmen whose names are household words for millions of Americans.
They do look alike in one respect: all often seem to be scrambling helter skelter in pursuit of the day's story. Washington press practices still develop nearly as "informally and haphazardly" as when Douglass Cater wrote that line about them more than a decade ago. Reporters still move in herds much of the time, writing the same stories and following formulas for coverage of Washington that may no longer be relevant to the reporting of complex issues.
The press thrusts itself compulsively into the task of chronicling all the 'breaking' news, often at the expense of providing explanation and analysis. Much federal decision-making remains a mystery to the public, making it hard for people to intelligently debate policy that may change their lives. The press explores government's mistakes only on a hit-or-miss basis, and it rarely alerts people to tomorrow's problems until they are upon us.
The press corps still can count some notable successes during the last four years. The Washington Post and others acted in true press tradition when they pursued the Watergate scandal undaunted by supposedly authoritative government denials and derision. The Pentagon Papers fight gave new heart to reporters to ferret out information that government tries to conceal. And aggressive probing produced many in-depth newspaper, magazine and television stories that showed how government aggravates social problems as much as it solves them.
But the wrenching experience of the Vietnam war, and other policy failures, have made many more journalists conscious of how often they have left it to high officials to make vital national decisions without the challenge of informed public debate. And some correspondents concede that there are whole areas of government – the Congress, for example – that the news media scarcely penetrate despite their enormous impact on people's lives.
The press has been looking at itself more in the last four years, at least in part because of the sudden spotlight of criticism from the White House and others. But even with advances in coverage, it cannot be said that news organizations are moving smartly to deploy their forces to give people a better picture of the workings of the system. While they fend off critiques by self-interested politicians, America's news executives have only timidly reached out for suggestions for improving reporting on government so that the public achieves a better grasp of what is going on in that "mystery off there" that so often decides their fate, as Walter Lippman once described the federal government.
The need for such soul-searching seems particularly acute at a time when public confidence in both the press and government is perilously low. It also may be that America's journalists have less time than they think to stake out their role in government news reporting before others do it for them. Today's attempts to manipulate coverage may well seem tame by comparison with the apparatus for instant publicity that could open up to public officials as cable television and other new technology generate a sudden pressure for more news of Washington.
The changes ahead obviously pose great opportunities for the news media. But they also will lay on them an even heavier responsibility to exercise independent judgment in news-gathering and reporting. If they fail to meet that challenge, it inevitably will mean that America's news media more than ever will be leaving it to the politicians to feed the public a steady diet of "constructive" news of government.
A NARROW VIEW FROM THE TOP
Eight years ago, in a report to a group of leading House Republicans (called Operation Enlightenment), Bruce Ladd pointed out to the GOP that they have "no exclusive monopoly on truth." He said that even if a journalist may personally favor the Democratic Party, officials should recognize that "a newsman's personal political beliefs rarely have influence on his professional competence as a reporter." Newsmen, like politicians, "want superior performance in reporting," Ladd said. He called this "the mutual interest and mutual challenge" of both the press and Republicans.
Officials professed to pursue that interest in the first Republican Administration since Ladd wrote those words. But, as they seized upon the "bully pulpit" of the White House to discuss media responsibilities, Nixon Administration leaders showed little of this spirit of a shared search for better reporting of government. It seemed to be attack, not dialogue, that Vice President Agnew and others most had in mind.
There was no hint of an admission of their own frailties. No official critic would concede that his favored brand of "objective" reporting well might abet the Administration's purposes without really serving the public's interest in knowing what goes on in government. None showed much sympathy about the pressures on the news media.
In short, with their narrow-gauged approach, and statements salted by such oversimplifications as "Eastern establishment" and "ideological plugola," top Nixon officials debased a genuine opportunity to give the public a greater appreciation of the news media's problems in developing more thoughtful reporting of Washington. It is almost as if they were telling Americans that the more simplistic the reporting of government, the better off they would be.
THE DETERIORATING ADVERSARY RELATIONSHIP
In the end, the study's main concern was to go beyond the public exchanges and examine what had happened in day-to-day relations between Nixon officials and journalists, and how that affected the quality of reporting of government.
We found in the press corps an overwhelming feeling that Washington's traditional adversary jousting between journalists and officials had deepened into an attempted freeze by government on any but the most superficial "straight news" reporting of the Nixon presidency.
Even in the worst moments in previous Administrations, correspondents felt, most Washington- wise politicians seemed to adopt certain unwritten rules for their encounters with news people.
The adversary battle was a love-hate relationship. You talked to the press, even if you wanted to say as little as possible. You were friendly when it served your purposes, suddenly unavailable when you didn't want to talk. You could play favorites. You could rage at the reporter who, you thought, had 'burned' you. You could even cut him off for a while, though rarely for good. After all, you did need the press.
And sometimes both of you could even let down your hair over a late-afternoon scotch, with the greater mutual understanding between the journalist and his sources that develops over a period of time. You gave a little to get a little, and everybody had a vague feeling that somehow good government was being served, even if journalists and politicians could never agree on exactly what the public should know about what went on in Washington.
In the first Nixon Administration it was different, the correspondents say.
White House and other officials who came here with little previous experience in national politics were not used to having reporters hanging around outside the door while they were making decisions and picking over policy after it had been set. They were not inclined to abide by the traditional adversary conventions. From there, it was only a small step to trying to put the press on the defensive by discrediting its reports about government.
Indeed, Nixon Administration officials reacted to the traditional give-and-take by framing a policy of massive official hostility to all but a few, selected portions of the news media – even while they argued that it was the press that was overreacting to their criticism.
The hard-nosed reporter who had gone through the minuets of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, and the often unprecedented slugging matches in the Johnson Administration to get sound information on policy decisions, felt that there was now a calculated effort to make it difficult for him to report on anything other than the official view of what was going on in the federal government.
Was Richard Nixon's first Administration an 'open' one, as promised? we asked. Most said that, to the contrary, this was the most 'closed' Administration in memory, both in the access to information, and in access to the people who knew how the decisions had been made.
There was praise for communications director Herbert Klein's efforts to make agencies more responsive on routine requests for information and interviews. There was ready acknowledgment that some officials (most notably Henry Kissinger) did give out reliable information on policy on a regular basis, as had key officials in past administrations. But the people interviewed felt that the whole approach of the White House on even minimally sensitive questions was to discourage such dialogue and to try to diminish whatever impact their reporting might have on the public's insight into this administration.
White House reporters, especially, felt that they were at the mercy of a very sophisticated presidential public relations apparatus that aggressively sought out television coverage in controlled settings, simultaneously downgrading the importance of in-depth questioning about policy, and trying to undermine the integrity of the national press corps in the public's eye. The Nixon people "tried to shift the credibility gap from the presidency to the press," as one person put it.
All the other moves of the last four years – the disdain for the tradition of periodic presidential press conferences, attempts to bypass the press corps to influence local editors, the 'suggestions' from Clay Whitehead about the content of network news, the subpoenaing of news people – were seen by correspondents as part of the pattern of throwing fences up around free and searching reporting of the federal government, and trying to keep the most influential – and most troublesome – news organizations on the defensive.
Some correspondents felt that the official freeze probably could not, and would not, be sustained in Nixon's second term. But most of the members of the press corps whom we interviewed felt that the basic Administration attitude toward the news media would not change, even if there were periods of more amicable relations.
THE URGENT NEED
It is hard to be certain at this point whether this burst of attention to Washington reporting will prompt a sharper awareness of the press's responsibilities, or whether the deepening resentments of the last four years have pushed further out of reach the ultimate objective of getting across to the American people the real news of Washington – what Cater has called the "essential truth" about government that makes democracy possible.
In the long run, debate of any kind seems a sign of health. Anything that is so important to good government as improved reporting should be a matter for national discussion, and the news media should welcome that. It is difficult to argue that their operations in Washington cannot stand more scrutiny and planning. Nor is it to be doubted that the local view of the federal government, which Nixon Administration officials have so passionately sought, must be heard in the press and on television.
But national leaders don't enhance the debate if they play politics with journalism's shortcomings. A politician might decry "instant" analysis of government; a statesman will also call for fuller, more thoughtful analysis by America's news media. He will seek the common objective of full reporting by all agents of a free press, no matter what risk that "multitude of tongues" might hold for his own public image.
We found in this study an urgent need for a will on the part of both officials and journalists to seek superior reporting of complex public issues and of the decisions being made by the most powerful government in the world. If 'the system' is in trouble, then it would seem to be in the interest of this (or any) administration, and of the press – adversaries though they may be – to awaken to the fact that the American people need to know what's really going on at its center in Washington if they are to feel more a part of democratic government than they do now.
CHAPTER 2
JOURNALISTS AND OFFICIALS TALK ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE PRESS IN WASHINGTON
Top national reporters believe that officials in the first Nixon Administration had a sharper restricted understanding of the traditional give-and-take between American journalists and federal officials and virtually unprecedented tunnel vision about the role of the press in Washington.
In 21 wide-ranging interviews, journalists – some of them veterans of covering as many as eight presidential administrations – could recall no other recent period when their latitude to report the workings of government had been so severely limited by such a narrow approach on the part of high government officials to their relations with the national press corps.
Bureau chiefs and White House correspondents for major newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets told us that news people who wanted to give the public insights into the planning of policy and other government actions found themselves thwarted by the concentration of power among a small circle of decision-makers who were far less accessible for information than presidential staffers and other high officials had been in past administrations.
Reporters felt that this declining access to knowledgeable sources and key information was reinforced in the bureaucracy by the hard line taken toward the press by leading officials in public statements, turning what President Nixon promised would be an open period in American government into one of the most closed administrations in memory.
The White House officials who consented to be interviewed for the study (all three were press officers, not policymakers) felt that they had maintained an open administration despite considerable problems in getting fair press coverage. They complained that many news people – some of whom had always been hostile to Nixon, they felt, shaded their reporting with a liberal bias. They also felt that some Washington correspondents tend to slip into a parochial, Washington-oriented approach to reporting that does not take into account the view of government held by many Americans.
The Nixon advisers said there is a need for the press to explain what government does. But they felt that many of the 'interpretative' stories correspondents think are essential to explaining government's actions really amount to "advocacy" journalism – stories that promote a particular point of view.
The deep estrangement between the press and government in the first Nixon years clearly posed serious problems for both institutions, and for the public whose interest journalists vow that they are representing in Washington. To examine the causes of this rift and its effect on the flow of information to the public, we asked correspondents and those White House officials who agreed to talk to us (plus some media commentators) to discuss such broad issues as the press-official 'adversary' relationship, how "open" this administration had been, and the charges of bias and attempted intimidation that have been traded between the press and officials.
THE CORRESPONDENTS
The correspondents were deeply troubled about the attacks on their credibility and the subsequent public feud between the press corps and the Administration. Some described it in impassioned terms as a struggle over the press's constitutional right to report the news free of government interference, and the public's right to know what the government is doing.
To reporters accustomed to fencing with those in power, it seemed natural that the Nixon Administration would try to manage the news. "Every President ... tries to tell his story the way it does the most good for him. That's human nature," said Benjamin Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post. News people for their part tend to be suspicous of government statements and press handouts, and not a little ‘ornery',toward those in power, as one correspondent put it, because they have been manipulated so often by public officials.
But reporters came to believe that Nixon advisers failed to accept the traditional adversary sparring despite the President's own avowed relish for "tough questions" in his encounters with the press. Correspondents felt that White House aides, in particular, persistently misread the news media's professional probing of the people in power as personal hostility toward the President. The officials seemed to lack the experience of dealing with reporters who are as "knowledgeable and skeptical" as the experienced Washington correspondent often is, media critic Ben Bagdikian said.
When we asked about the charge that the press corps' approach to reporting was colored by a "liberal" outlook and personal bias against Nixon, several newsmen branded this as a White House attempt to neutralize the press's effectiveness by using a broad-brush condemnation of its reporting.
Were they biased against Nixon from the start? To the contrary, said Dan Rather, White House correspondent for CBS. News people were so determined to keep any biases out of their reporting that they, in fact, "leaned the other way," especially during the early months of the Administration. Rather and others felt that Nixon received a full measure of the uncritical press 'honeymoon' that is invariably accorded a new President. Besides, said Newsday bureau chief Martin Schram, what is often forgotten is the fact that there are many reporters "who liked Mr. Nixon personally" from the beginning of his first term.
Most of the correspondents interviewed conceded that a majority of the press corps probably votes Democratic (though some disputed even this assumption), and that reporters often are "liberal" in the sense that they are impatient about seeking solutions to the public problems they encounter.
But the crucial question, newsmen said, is whether this outlook affects their ability to report fully and fairly about government, no matter who is in power. A number of people said that the fact that the national press corps was tougher on George McGovern than it was on Richard Nixon in its coverage of the 1972 campaign was, as Wall Street Journal bureau chief Alan Otten put it, "a perfect refutation of the liberal bias theory."
On the other hand, some of the correspondents do think that their colleagues exhibit a bias in the way they select sources and what they choose to report. Liberals in the press "tend sometimes to color their copy or (let) their sentiments get in," said Hugh Sidney, Time bureau chief. "But the suggestion that because we are liberal we are constantly ... out there to belittle the President is nonsense."
Clark Mollenhoff, bureau chief for the Des Moines Register and Tribune and a former White House hand himself, charged that many of those in the news media who aggressively probed the Watergate case had failed to pursue government scandals with equal vigor during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations because, he felt, they had a partisan bias. Severest with his colleagues was syndicated columnist Robert Novak who maintained that it is no longer a point of pride among many reporters to cover a candidate for office or an official without letting their personal beliefs creep into their writing. He said that such reporters are "not very interested in pursuing objectivity" but, rather, are advocates of a "liberal" line.
But some correspondents, such as Martin Nolan, bureau chief for the Boston Globe, said that whatever bias there might be in the press corps is far offset by the fact that the American press as a whole is overwhelmingly conservative.
Nearly all the correspondents denounced "advocacy" reporting, though a few said that it sometimes finds its way into the news columns, usually in subtle form, But many reporters said that interpretation of government news that goes beyond what officials say is happening is a must if readers are to understand how complex federal action will affect their lives. News people said that they would mislead their readers if they reported just the bare "facts" of an issue.
What does the Nixon Administration's coolness to the press corps really cost the news media?
Newspapers still sell and the networks manage to get the news of Washington out every night. But newsmen and women here believe that the Nixon aloofness has exacted a high price in reporting by limiting their ability to describe what goes on in government the way they think the story should be told. And, ultimately, contended Courtney Sheldon, bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, "if you and I do not know what's going on in the White House, there is one big loser – the American public."
THE OFFICIALS
The White House officials interviewed felt that they had helped to conduct an open Administration during the first Nixon term.
They described themselves as the "pro-press" people in the White House, and said that they had compelled foot-dragging federal bureaucrats to provide more information to reporters than they had before. Herbert Klein, director of communications for the executive branch, specifically noted that he had used the Freedom of Information Act as "a major help in forcing open the bureaucracy."
The question of what constituted "openness" in government and help to the press was hotly disputed. While Washington newsmen said they were shut off from access to the President and top policymakers, the press aides argued that, to the contrary, the White House improved journalists' access to government by opening the Administration to reporters and editors who work outside of Washington.
"Newsmen around the country have had more opportunity to question Administration officials than in all previous administrations put together," said Klein. DeVan Shumway, public affairs director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, said that the Washington press corps "considers itself deified ... but I don't think it has a vested right in talking to the President of the United States."
A chief weakness in some reporters, the officials said, is that they lack initiative and a willingness to probe for stories. "Too often, reporters don't take the trouble to make the extra call or dig for the extra fact, (though) maybe that's because of deadlines," said Klein. "And when there's a correction, it often doesn't get the same play as the original."
Ken Clawson, deputy communications director, said one way a newsman can get a response out of the White House is to "get off your butt and go to work and come up with material of a meaningful nature that nobody else has got. Then, by God, the White House guy doesn't have any choice but to talk to you."
He and his colleagues complained about "advocacy" reporting where, as Clawson described it, "you weave your own feelings into the material." All three singled out the ITT-Kleindienst confirmation hearings as a prime example of the correspondents' urge to advocate a cause and their obsession with what the presidential aides saw as "negative aspects" of a story.
"All you'd hear on a day-by-day basis was somebody making a critical statement – usually Senator Kennedy or Senator Tunney or Birch Bayh, someone of this kind," said Klein. "... The public got a distorted picture of what was happening until the results (of the Senate vote) came out (confirming Kleindienst's nomination). It was a big surprise.
But the three spokesmen felt that there was one period during the first Nixon term when the Washington press corps was notably fair in its reporting: the 1972 presidential campaign. Said Klein: "I raised the question as to whether newsmen might become emotionally involved in this particular election and would tend toward more bias in their coverage. Having observed what happened, I don't think that took place."
(The interviews were conducted between November 1972, and March 1973)
Question. Was this an "Open Administration," as President Nixon had pledged it would be?
Answer. I think it's probably the most closed administration since I've been in Washington, and that goes over 25 years. Maybe it's part of a continuing trend and we'll be saying this about each succeeding administration. I rather doubt it ... I think when Nixon came in he did make some moves in the direction of openness. There was a period when some of us hoped for better days. The Johnson Administration had not been terribly good from that point of view. But I think the Nixon Administration has gotten increasingly worse as power has centralized in the White House, as the decision-making circle has drawn tighter and tighter, and their suspicion and distrust of the press has deepened. – Alan Otten, Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Nixon is a closed man, so the idea that he was going to run an open administration is probably impossible to begin with. He's constitutionally incapable of it. Beyond that, he has a deep distrust and dislike of the press. He always has had, probably always will. – Hugh Sidey, Bureau Chief, Time.
Now I happen to believe that there are certain people within this administration who sincerely believe that theirs has been an open administration. There are some (who) know damned well that it hasn't been. There have been efforts to open up in some very important ways ... Particularly in the beginning, cabinet officers were more accessible than they had been in the preceding administration. But in the most important way – the accessibility to the President himself – this administration has been closed. It isn't simply a case of not being as open as preceding administrations. It has been closed. – Dan Rather, White House Correspondent, CBS News.
Well, I think it's on a par. As a matter of fact, I think we get more information than ever ... In this administration than in some previous ones ... If a reporter has a reputation for being fair and honest and not out to advocate an adverse point of view – not out to make a monkey out of somebody – he can generally get to see whomever he wants to. – Garnett Horner, White House Correspondent, Washington Star-News.
I have seen three administrations and would rate them just about even. The Kennedy Administration, when Salinger was press secretary, was perhaps the most flamboyant operation. I think Bill Moyers was probably the most opinionated news secretary, and Ron Ziegler is the best one. – Raymood McHugh, Bureau Chief, Copley News Service.
An administration should make everything about the public's business available unless there is a national security question involved, and I don't mean an imaginary national security issue ... These people have a tendency – as every administration has – to fail to distinguish between their own political security and national security. – Clark Mollenhoff, Bureau Chief, Des Moines Register and Tribune.
This is the fourth administration I've been in Washington for ... and none of them has been very open. I doubt seriously that I'm going to see an open administration . . . Government of any kind – whether it's democratic or authoritarian – wants to keep secrets and, particularly, to cover up its mistakes. So this so-called "openness" is mostly a public relations gimmick. – Robert Novak, Syndicated Columnist.
I think that if you really opened up the government – if you answered questions honestly – pretty soon the novelty would wear off and it would be treated normally. There would be no condemnations for things that went wrong – or there would be less of it ... It just seems to me that (in order to govern effectively) in this country, an administration has to keep the people as much informed as possible about as much as possible. – Richard Valeriani, White House Correspondent, NBC News.
Question. What has been the effect on the news media of Vice President Agnew's critiques?
Answer. I don't regard Agnew's (comments) as serious or meaningful journalistic criticism. He was engaged in a political exercise against certain parts of the press. The fact is that he has not been exercised at all about some of the worst performers in the press field ... because their political communes are closer to his ... I think it is a mockery that he did, in fact, pick on the most effective journalistic operations. – Max Frankel, Sunday Editor, New York Times.
Journalism, like every institution, needs reform. He latched onto popular ... suspicions about journalism and a few truths, and painted (the field) with a broad brush. And whether he intended to do so or not, he used the traditional technique of the demagogue in pitting one group of people against another ... On balance, I have to say this has had an adverse effect because it has poisoned the air. It has (caused) unnecessary rancor between reporters and their sources, and between reporters and the public. From that standpoint, you would have to say that it has hurt – and hurt a lot. – Dan Rather, CBS News.
In many cases it created kind of a psychological undertow that forced some people in our business to pull their punches, to be a little more cautious than they might be justified in being. – Peter Lisagor, Bureau Chief, Chicago Daily News.
The purpose of a good part of these attacks was not to set the record straight but to intimidate the press – particularly television and radio, which are more directly subject to government control. I think it was completely and obviously nonsense to say that they were seeking fair coverage. They were seeking coverage that would be quote 'fair' – unquote, in their favor Unfortunately, they have succeeded to a considerable degree in intimidating some people, particularly in the broadcasting field, and making other people lean over backwards to give them a much fairer shake than they sometimes deserve. – Alan Otten, Wall Street Journal.
I would guess that I've answered more questions from newsmen or from the public than anybody in the Administration, and in four years I've not met an intimidated reporter. I (don't) expect to and I don't think I should. I think the idea of intimidation by the Administration is not well taken at all. The Administration should not, has not and will not (intimidate). – Herbert Klein, Director of Communications for the Executive Branch.
Question. How do you feel about the suggestion that the Administration has encroached on some news freedoms? There have been complaints in that area.
Answer. I think that that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. – Ken Clawson, Deputy Director of Communications for the Executive Brach.
I think the press is a little oversensitive to criticism of itself. The right to freedom of the press is a terribly important part of our Constitution, which we've got to protect. There's a sensitivity in the press that when you criticize them and you're in an official government position, you're stepping on that right. Well, you're not ... You're protecting that right. – DeVan Shumway, Public Affairs Director, Committee for the Re-election of the President.
(His critiques) probably were ill-advised, but they were accurate on facts . He's got every right to ... argue with the press on anything. We certainly should not be beyond criticism The problem (comes) when they suggest governmental control or cutting into our free access (to information). (The criticisms) are a hell of a lot less of a menace than is the negligence of the press itself in not taking care of its own rights. – Clark Mollenhoff, Des Moines Register and Tribune.
The (critiques) probably had a good effect overall because they've made the intelligent editor be self-critical and examine the (journalistic) decision-making processes ... But it also has had a negative effect in making it popular to be critical of one of the major institutions of a democratic society. I don't think a society whose institutions are constantly under attack and disbelieved is healthy. Agnew's attacks have made the journalist's job more difficult. – Benjamin Bradlee, Executive Editor, Washington Post.
Question. What understanding does this administration have of the traditional adversary relationship between officials and journalists?
Answer. Not many public officials (understand). Most really believe that the press's (job is to) make their decisions understood and accepted by the public. The (officials) have looked at the alternatives and come to this decision ... And they see the press as spoiling it ... by reporting contrary arguments that they already have struggled with ... I don't blame them for feeling that way. I blame them for not understanding the Constitution and the way our society should operate. This administration, in a way, has said publicly what most politicians feel privately: that we want support from the press and we want them to give hell to our enemies. – Ben Bagdikian, Media Critic.
The President understands (the adversary relationship) very well. The way he was quoted in the (Washington) Star-News interview indicates his understanding of it. That doesn't mean he always likes it, but he understands it. – Herbert Klein, Director of Communications for the Executive Branch.
No person who is on the other end of it ever enjoys it. (But) by the time they're reached the upper reaches of a (presidential) administration ... politicians ought to be able to understand its importance ... The key people in this administration – partly because of their lack of background in government – do not understand this, and just completely regard us as the enemy. – Alan Otten, Wall Street Journal.
I am in favor of the adversary relationship. I think the people in this administration ... understand it. The problem is that the adversary relationship gets out of hand and reporters begin to become prosecutors. The adversary relationship gets exaggerated, and (reporters) run amuck. – James Keogh, Author, President Nixon and the Press.
(The Administration) goes through elaborate charades to make sure that they put out just what they want to and to hide other things ... Our purpose is to put out the whole story ... I hope there's never a resolution of the adversary relationship. If there is, it means that we're working in concert with them. And, if we're working in concert with them, we're not doing our job. – Martin Schram, Bureau Chief, Newsday.
They would like to make cheerleaders out of newsmen. And when newsmen don't agree to be cheerleaders, we have the constant struggle to find out more than they want us to know ... You can invest that with all kinds of grandiloquent rhetoric, but it boils down to the simple fact that we're in the business of finding out what's going on, and they're in the business of only telling ... us what they think we, or the public, ought to know. And as long as we represent the public's interest, we'd better keep at it as aggressively as we can. I suspect that the more aggressive we are, the less inclined they may be to withhold (information). – Peter Lisagor, Chicago Daily News.
Question. How accessible have the principal Nixon administration policymakers been to news people?
Answer. I feel that when you look at the complaints, there's certainly been no lack ... access basically to most people. It's just that all reporters haven't been able to get to all the people at the right time for themselves. – Herbert Klein, Director of Communications for the Executive Branch.
Most of the top officials in the White House act pretty much on their own. As a former White House reporter, I can tell you how you get dealt with. You can get off your butt and come up with material of a meaningful nature; and then, by God, the White House guy doesn't have any choice but to talk to you. When you've got the material, his choice evaporates, because ... any damned fool knows that you're better off talking about it than not talking about it. – Ken Clawson, Deputy Director of Communications for the Executive Branch.
They maintain a closed shop over there ... I happen to think it's a tragedy. They should share with the people the deliberative process of government – where you create legislation (policy) ideas. This crowd in the White House now has a very limited concept of the idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people. I think they have a duty to inform the public, and to create public debate, which they are ignoring. – Hugh Sidey, Time.
The truth in government is infinitely harder to get at because the people in the White House are harder to get at. For all Lyndon Johnson's bellyaching – God knows he bellyached about Newsweek – the White House was a more open place. You could call up an aide on the White House staff, for instance, with a reasonable assurance that you'd get phone calls back, and that you could get in to see (him). In this administration, frankly, all you do is pray that the phone will ring. We've gone for months where the phone calls would not come back on routine things. I know reporters who have been on the so-called freeze list where orders have been issued someplace in the White House not to return their phone calls. There are other officials there who make it a policy never to return phone calls of certain publications ... In general, there are reporters and publications who have been in the doghouse. The difference is that when we were in Lyndon Johnson's doghouse, we'd still get to see people. – Mel Elfin, Bureau Chief, Newsweek.
Question. Is there a "liberal" bias in the Washington press corps and does it affect what correspondents write?
Answer. The press's performance in explaining what's going on is, unfortunately, tarnished by this obsession with the negative, and with a preconditioned, left-of-center political point of view ... (The liberal bias) has affected coverage of President Nixon very considerably. It has affected what has been reported, and how it's been reported. The Washington press corps tends to give the impression that if the Administration would only follow what is the liberal solution, then the problems would be easily solved. Well, that's a distortion of both the problem and the possible answer. – James Keogh, Author of President Nixon and the Press.
This has to do with the insecurities of the President and those closest around him. They are the one who came to town ... with their bias packed in their suitcase, and they still have it to a very large degree. The reporters' biases, when they existed, were far less than the biases of, let us say, (H. R.) Haldeman, (John) Ehrlichman and certainly (Pat) Buchanan. – Dan Rather, CBS News.
(It's the) people around Nixon who are doctrinaire. They came to Washington without the experience of dealing with a press that is knowledgeable and skeptical. Suddenly, they find that there are people who don't take at face value anything that a public official says ... (and) who will call them on changes of policy or contradictory things that are said ... (And) they have a very simplistic view of American society and what it ought to be. They really believe in the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover picture of America, and they are offended by all of the complexities of urban life. As a matter of policy, they will tell you privately that they have given up on the inner city. They talk about the real America being west of the Appalachians where people still believe in the homilies, meaning, I guess, the Ten Commandments. That's a very simplistic view of modern life, and the Washington press has a number of people who simply know better. – Ben Bagdikian, Media Critic.
What may be regarded by some people as a liberal bias in the press is a reflection of a current generation of reporters ... It's the old story: today's liberalism becomes tomorrow's conservatism. Things change. If your mind's closed to change, we'd all be in trouble. – William Theis, Bureau Chief, Hearst Newspapers.
Most reporters do tend to be liberal, in the loose definition of that word . They're more marinated in the problems of this society. But what difference does that make? When they cease being professional about their work, they ought to quit or be fired ... I know some of the most prejudiced people in this town who are straight, honest, objective reporters ... I know people who hate given government officials, and write very straight accounts about them ... All of these charges simply ignore the fact that there is a high degree of professionalism in the press corps. – Peter Lisagor, Chicago Daily News.
I just think (the liberal bias) happens to be a matter of fact, and it's one that you live with. There is in the leading press of Washington a liberal bias ... and the facts are interpreted with that bias in mind ... The President went out to Portland, Oregon, about a year and a half ago. The Seattle and Portland newspaper stories had a sort of 'gee whiz' flavor to them. The Washington and New York papers had a 'well here we go again' flavor to them. There's a lot of difference between the two. I think the average person is very impressed with the President of the United States, and very interested in his activities down to the slightest detail. And I think the papers in Seattle and Portland in that case did a much better job of reporting those activities than did those in Washington and New York. – DeVan Shumay, Public Affairs Director of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.
This (liberal bias charge) is the biggest canard. The American press, generally, is right wing. There are 1,200 papers in this country, and I would guess that 1,100 must be Republican ... The majority of the columnists have been on (Nixon's) team, that's for sure ... The White House press corps is, I think, pro-Nixon ... The bias always is with authority – Martin Nolan, Boston Globe.
I think ... this business of us being a bunch of parlor pinks, limousine liberals and Harvard- educated pink-tea types who look down our noses at anybody who was born west of the Hudson River ... is a lot of baloney ... There are certainly plenty of very respectable, very conservative ... reporters in this town ... This business that we're all a bunch of Spock generation liberals is a lot of baloney. – James Deakin, White House Correspondent, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Question. Was press coverage basically favorable or unfavorable to President Nixon in his first administration?
Answer. I think there's basic sympathy for the man in the White House. There is a respect for the office and the institution ... If you added it up, I think you'd come out (with the fact that) ... a majority of the reporting – and of the whole press approach – was favorable to Nixon. – Hugh Sidey, Time.
Despite all the bitching going on around here, by and large, the Nixon Administration has gotten a pretty good press, (and) I think that some people within the Nixon Administration would agree to that. – Peter Lisagor, Chicago Daily News.
Reporters were much more forgiving and much more generous, and much less critical with the Kennedy Administration than they have been with the Nixon Administration. And I think the reason is, by and large, President Kennedy was extremely popular with the press corps and President Nixon is not. – James Keogh, Author, President Nixon and the Press.
Probably in the initial stages (reporters) suddenly discovered a Nixon they didn't understand. He was better than they thought. So you probably had more favorable coverage in these initial stages. It ebbs and flows. You can look at a time when they feel there ought to be more press conferences, and they become more critical. Or you can look at a time when they're deeply impressed with the President for what he's done in China or the Soviet Union, and you probably have an underlying factor that's more favorable. – Herbert Klein, Director of Communications for the Executive Branch.
Overwhelmingly favorable. Pick up papers from around the country and you saw overwhelmingly what the President and other officials have said, and nothing else. That's one reason that (the Administration) hates The Washington Post and The New York Times so much. The Post and the Times have contrary voices in their stories for background and interpretation ... And even in the Post and Times, most of the stories are pretty much straightaway. – Ben Bagdikian, Media Critic.
Any administration is going to have to suffer some critics . But in terms of what actually gets in the paper – what's on the front page and the editorial page – Mr. Nixon has done exceedingly well. – Courtney Sheldon, Bureau Chief, Christian Science Monitor.
The President pursued the image of a man who addresses problems and does things dramatically . How can you look at the election result and not feel that the President ultimately came across to the country more or less as he wanted to be portrayed. – Max Frankel, New York Times.
CHAPTER 3
THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION CRITIQUES THE NEWS MEDIA
Journalists and public officials throughout our history have cast themselves in the role of chief protector of the public's right to know what government is doing. And each frequently has rushed to paint the other as playing fast and loose with the public's interest by grasping for power, manipulating information and arrogantly refusing to admit their errors.
This time the setting for the charges was not the muckraking and yellow journalism period of the early 1900s, but the interpretative reporting age of the 1970s. It was the Vice President of the United States, joined by a cadre of high officials, who abruptly challenged the news media's entire approach to the reporting of government, and set forth what came to be seen by many as the Nixon Administration's official line of media criticism.
At no time in memory had the press as a whole been attacked from the White House with such startling directness and persistence. The first two speeches in November,1969, were to be followed by at least nine others by the Vice President during the first term that were devoted substantially to analyzing the media. Agnew's first media speech apparently was prompted by the Administration's pique at commentary by the networks following a televised address to the nation on Vietnam by President Nixon. Speaking before a meeting of the Midwest Republican conference in Des Moines, the Vice President accused the media of rampant parochialism and of
distorting the news. The President's address, Agnew said, had been subjected to "instant analysis and querulous criticism" by a "small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed, in one way or another, their hostility to what he had to say."
The television commentators and producers were "a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government," Agnew said. Further, they were unrepresentative of the country as a whole: "To a man [they] live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines which Agnew said "bask in their own provincialism." He also charged that the networks were preoccupied with bad news and dissent. "The upshot of all this controversy is that a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news," he said.
A week later, the Vice President broadened his attack to cover The Washington Post and The New York Times. He pointed out that the Washington Post Co. controlled not only the Post, but also one of the city's four major television stations, an all-news radio station and Newsweek magazine. He claimed that these four outlets were "all grinding out the same editorial line." The Times, he said, had failed to report that 300 congressmen and 59 senators recently had signed a letter endorsing the Nixon policy in Vietnam (in fact, the Times had carried the story in other editions, but not the one the Vice President read in Washington). New York, now a three- newspaper city, was just one example of the "growing monopolization of the voices of public opinion," Agnew said.
The President, himself a bitter battler with the press in the past, for the most part remained above the fray. But it became clear that Agnew was speaking for more than just himself, as a phalanx of presidential assistants (H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Patrick Buchanan, Charles Colson, William Safire, Clay Whitehead, etc.) and other Administration figures (Robert Dole, John Connally, L. Patrick Gray III, Helen Bentley) made public statements over the next three years echoing these criticisms.
The themes were the same: the networks had assumed unchecked power over public opinion; much of the national reporting was tainted by an Eastern, liberal bias; and a kind of journalistic Gresham's law prevailed, as bad news drove out the good, and the media emphasized the negative in American society and, especially, in the Nixon Administration.
Thoughtful critics conceded that the Agnew speeches had raised legitimate questions about the role and performance of the media – notably, the issue of growing monopoly control of newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets. But many questioned whether the Vice President really intended to stir a reasoned debate of the press's role by such cannonades from the highest office in the land.
If he wanted to raise questions about monopoly, critics asked, why did he select his examples only from media concentrations in New York and Washington? The attack against the Post and Times, for example, was delivered in Montgomery, Ala., which had its own closed media situation – representative of many other, more conservative monopolies around the country. Quite obviously, the main Agnew target was those news outlets which were best equipped to keep officials under close scrutiny, and considered least friendly to the Administration.
In broadcasting, people saw the Vice President's remarks as a thinly-veiled threat of tougher oversight of the government-regulated industry, or even censorship. Even ABC's Howard K. Smith, generally regarded as the most conservative of the network anchormen-commentators, detected "a tone of intimidation."
Some correspondents found particularly disturbing the Administration suggestion that the news media somehow must be "made more responsive to the views of the nation." The Times's Tom Wicker wrote that "no institutional or professional formula" could enable the press corps to cope with "this age of transformation." "'Let a hundred flowers bloom' is the only recommendation anyone can make," Wicker said. CBS's Eric Sevareid told an interviewer: "I'm not about to adjust the work I do according to the waves of popular feeling that may come over the country. No responsible person can do that. They ought to be out of this business if they do."
Some of Agnew's specific charges would not bear scrutiny. The "instant" analysis of the Nixon Vietnam speech, for example, had hardly been instant, since the networks had received in advance a text of the President's remarks, and reporters were given an official briefing by Henry Kissinger before the speech was delivered. The Washington Post, Newsweek, WTOP-TV and WTOP radio did not in fact "grind out" the same line, and they had differed editorially on some major issues, including the war.
News people argued that, far from contributing to an understanding of the press's role and problems, the Nixon Administration was trying to make the media a scapegoat. Life magazine chided the Vice President and others who "at a time of extraordinary ... contentiousness in U.S. public life" foster the idea that the "medium is the menace." John S. Knight, editorial chairman of Knight Newspapers, wrote a column entitled, "If the World's in a Mess, Don't Blame the Press." To the charge that the media exercised vast, unchecked power, Sevareid retorted that it was the power of government, not of the press, that had mushroomed in recent years, "and within government, the power of the presidency."
Two former White House aides tried to add a semi-scholarly patina to the criticisms. Former White House domestic affairs adviser Daniel P. Moynihan wrote in Commentary magazine that:
Journalism is becoming more and more dominated by a liberal, Eastern, Ivy League elite, heavily "influenced by attitudes generally hostile to American society;"
The Washington press corps relies heavily on information leaks which are often "antagonistic to presidential interests; "
The news profession lacks a tradition of self-criticism and self-correction.
And in a book entitled President Nixon and the Press, James Keogh, onetime chief of the White House research and writing staff (and later to become USIA director), said that the combination of an anti-Nixon liberal "orthodoxy" in the major media plus the press's "frantic reach for the negative" precluded any possibility of balanced news coverage of the Administration. Top presidential aide Haldeman said flatly that many news people had "an interest in the unsuccess" of the Nixon policies.
Agnew had stated the obvious: that journalists are human and inevitably have points of view. But he had failed to suggest any reasonable ideas for dealing with that age old problem, wrote Vermont Royster of The Wall Street Journal. Few responsible observers in or outside of the media denied that the profession could profit by more criticism – reasoned criticism. But neither could they see in the partisan complaints of Agnew and other White House spokesmen much besides a petulant appeal to "tell it like the Nixon Administration sees it."
CHAPTER 4
THE PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE
Richard Nixon, December 1969:
"I try to have a press conference when I think there is a public interest – not just a press interest or my interest. ... If I considered that the press and the public need more information than I am giving through press conferences, I will have more. I welcome the opportunity to have them. I am not afraid of them – just as the press is not afraid of me."
Richard Nixon may truly have "welcomed" the opportunity for press conferences when he spoke these words, but he ultimately was to hold fewer of them than any President since Herbert Hoover, prompting correspondents to charge that he had undermined the traditional exchange between the public and their President.
Each of the last five Presidents averaged more than twice as many press conferences a year, and some gave many more. Nixon held 34 (through June 1, 1973), an average of about 7 a year. John Kennedy averaged 21 a year, Dwight Eisenhower 24, Lyndon Johnson 25 and Harry Truman 40 a year. Franklin Roosevelt held an average of 83 press conferences a year – or close to two every week – compared to fewer than one a month by Nixon.
The presidential press conference is a uniquely American institution. It is not the only route to a healthy public dialogue with government, but the Washington press corps rightfully sets great store by it. The press conference remains the only forum in which the immensely powerful head of one of the world's major governments can be cross-questioned about his policies and intentions between elections. An American President, unlike some other national leaders, need not answer to the political opposition directly. But he is expected to meet with the press on a reasonably regular basis, and to submit to their on-the-record questioning on most any topic. Many Americans may even consider that the White House press conference is an integral part of government.
The Nixon era has marked a sharp downgrading of this institution. While he maintains that he relishes encounters with reporters, Nixon in fact has avoided their questioning. In addition, the White House has belittled a process that the preceding five Presidents had made an important part of government communication with the public. Despite the President's deference to the "public interest" in press conferences, during his first term he and associates tried to foster the impression that these sessions were largely of interest to correspondents. They had less importance in the President's eyes, said aide John Ehrlichman, because he winds up getting "a lot of flabby and fairly dumb questions" from the national press corps.
Nixon also seemed to attach less importance to the live, televised news conference, which was first made popular by President Kennedy. As of this writing, he had not held one for 10 months (since June 29, 1972), and he had held only two in nearly two years.
At first, the President seemed to favor these full dress sessions in the East Room of the White House which the public could watch on television. Eight out of the 9 news conferences he held in his first year in office were in that format. But, by the last year of his first term, he clearly had opted for a different approach. Five of the seven news conferences in 1972 were held in his White House Oval Office, and live television cameras were not permitted. The limits continued this year as Nixon held only three news conferences in the first three and a half months – all of them in the White House press briefing room, with cameras present only for taping.
All in all, the press conference is the President's own vehicle. As experienced politicians, most chief executives can hold their own in them and appear to advantage. The intangibles of the occasion work in their favor. The President has the aura of high office. The reporters are there as his guests: they rise as he enters the room. Aggressive news people who might challenge a lesser figure generally feel more constrained in his presence. He recognizes whomever he chooses.
He can answer questions as briefly or as fully as he likes. Presidential replies can range from a terse "no comment" to a lengthy ramble that may use up a considerable part of the customary 30 minute session. A President often can escape with having to answer only one or two queries on a sensitive issue, and he is only confronted with a small sampling of the many issues his administration has to deal with. Followup questions usually are only possible in the smaller briefings. If he wants to look statesmanlike, or to avoid certain subjects, he can brush aside whole areas of inquiry, such as diplomatic negotiations, administration appointments, partisan politics or hypothetical, "iffy" questions.
Each type of conference has its own usefulness to the President. The live, televised conference in the White House's capacious East Room is political theater. The President is talking directly to the public, selling himself and his policies as he makes it seem that he is "glad you asked me that" – pleased that the correspondents have given him the opportunity to discuss his thinking on knotty issues. Viewers often react most to impressions rather than substance: the President looks responsive, he's in command, he's on top of things, he has an answer for everything – though he also runs the risk of fumbling a response, as happened this year when his press secretary had to admit that Nixon had "misspoken" in a press conference statement.
The conference in the Oval Office removes him from direct public view. Should he "misspeak," he can correct it right away. Reporters usually have only one to three hours advance notice, so they have less time to hone their questions, and only about 30 to 50 usually attend (compared to 300 to 400 for full scale conferences). The absence of live television and more advance notice generally means that these questions are dominated by news people who cover the White House regularly and, especially, by the "pencil press." For their part, correspondents can bore in more with follow-up questions and search out the issues more deeply than is possible with the East Room smorgasbord.
When conferences are held in the press briefing room, as has been the case this year, about 100 to 150 reporters attend.
Though these sessions are less intimate than those held in the Oval Office, news people still can crowd around the President, and their exchanges are more conversational than in East Room sessions. But the format militates against specialized writers and other reporters who don't cover the White House regularly, and there is still little time for preparation. Some White House regulars prefer this variation, however, because it gives a good number of correspondents a chance to be present, retains an air of informality and also enables the public to see the President later through television tapings.
While the press vents its frustration at not being able to establish a regular dialogue with President Nixon through press conferences, he has turned to alternative means of getting his message across to the public. In 1972 he delivered a total of 23 radio or television addresses to the nation. In this format he is not, of course, subject to press questioning, though the networks have attempted to put television speeches in context afterwards, at the price of Vice President Agnew's celebrated polemic against 'instant analysis.'
The President also has conducted television interviews with TV correspondents and anchormen. But many press corps members feel that these sessions, though valuable, cannot match the long range value of regular news conferences with a wide-ranging format.
Indeed, most correspondents feel that there can be no substitute for regular White House press conferences. Our politics is more freewheeling than that of most democracies. But once a man is in the White House, he has great control over his contacts with the people and, for all its shortcomings, the press conference provides the only ongoing record of a President's reaction to the flow of events, giving press and public a chance to appraise his views and gauge changes in his mood and outlook. It is virtually the only time in the four years between elections that people can remind him directly of previous positions he has held and pledges he has made.
Press conferences seem to take on even greater importance with a President who has been relatively isolated from public exchanges as this one has. He almost never sees reporters on an informal or background basis, and his associates have emulated this buttoned-up style. The public is left with little choice. Neither they nor the press can compel a President to conduct more news conferences. He will make himself available only when he wants to be available. He can choose the frequency, timing and format of meetings with the press. He controls the process completely.
It is important, nonetheless, that the public recognize when an American President is not submitting himself to such questioning in accord with traditions that have been firmly established by his predecessors. And it is important to understand that, ultimately, when the President does not meet with the press, it is not the press corps itself that suffers. The main casualty is the American people and their confidence in the openness of their government.
CHAPTER 5
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION IN THE FIRST NIXON YEARS
Herbert G. Klein, Director of Communications, May 1969: "Truth will become the hallmark of the Nixon Administration. I'm charged directly by the President to emphasize to every department of government that more facts should be made available. With this kind of emphasis, we feel that we will be able to eliminate any possibility of a credibility gap in this Administration."
It has been a long, winding road from this early promise of open government and closed credibility gaps. While some information has been opened up in the last four years – often with Herb Klein's help – it is doubtful that history will recall Richard Nixon as the promised champion of truth in government during his first administration.
There was every hope in the glow of a new inaugural that the public's right to know would be honored as never before. The President installed Klein, a respected editor and close personal friend, as government's first director of communications. To break through the walls of the bureaucracy, he had in hand the Freedom of Information Act which had been in effect for 18 months, but was seldom invoked in the waning months of the Johnson Administration.
But, in the view of Congress, information experts, scholars, lobbyists and the press, the cause of public access to reports, records and other materials in the federal government's vast tangle of agencies was advanced little, and was sometimes actively hindered, during the four years of the first Nixon Administration. In 1972, after 41 days of hearings with 142 government and private witnesses, the House Foreign Operations and Government Information Subcommittee, which created the Freedom of information law, characterized its administration as "five years of bureaucratic foot-dragging"and three and one-half of those were Nixon years.
In some cases, Herb Klein, using his White House powers, was able to convince the bureaucracy to honor the FOI Act and release data that news people sought:
The Agriculture Department had to identify those hotdog makers who used so much fat in their product that they did not make both ends meat;
The Office of Emergency Planning finally named the man who had been selected to head an Office of Censorship in the event of a national emergency;
The Housing and Urban Development Department was made to disclose the salaries of government employees at an experimental housing site in Indiana;
The Labor Department reluctantly released an evaluation of a federal job training program in Arizona.
But, generally secrecy-minded bureaucrats still held tight control of public records, and they usually had the backing of the Department of Justice:
The previously buried Defense Department record of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War came into the press's hands only because of the pursuit of the publication of the "top secret" Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg;
Most of the records of the 1968 My Lai massacre and the military investigation of it still were hidden at the end of the first Nixon term in spite of repeated prodding by investigative reporters.
Parts of a report on the Interior Department's publicity program remained censored even though it commented largely on the photogenic qualities of the Secretary of the Interior;
THE COURTS AND FOI
But these specific cases of government secrecy merely illustrate the continuing restrictions on access to information caused by the efforts of many federal agencies to dodge the spirit and intent of the FOI Act. According to the congressional report, prolonged delays in responding to requests for public records, and exorbitant fees charged for searching and copying them, have undermined the Act.
The House committee also pointed out that the Justice Department went to court in more than 40 cases during the first Nixon Administration to help prevent disclosure of sought-after government information. A pattern of favorable court interpretation of the public's right-to-know under the law seems to be emerging, nevertheless. An analysis by the Library of Congress of the first four years in which cases were decided under the FOI Act showed that the courts consistently rejected the government's most often used argument that information came under the section of the law allowing exceptions for "privileged or confidential" information.
The courts also rejected the government's argument in 60 per cent of the cases where it was claimed that public records could be withheld because they were "inter-agency memoranda." But they unanimously upheld the government in cases where it contended that the data involved "investigatory files compiled for law enforcement purposes."
In every case, except those involving national defense and foreign policy matters, the courts rejected government arguments that judges should not look at the documents in question. The courts did not always come down on the side of disclosure after they had looked at the documents that the government wanted to withhold. But judges at least provided a separate judgement on the material as a third party, free of other obligation.
The most celebrated court decision on concealed information in the first Nixon term was, of course, the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling against the Administration's virtually unprecedented effort to restrain two newspapers – The New York Times and The Washington Post – from publishing the Pentagon Papers.
But, even as they acted to uphold the First Amendment, the justices on the whole did not extend their opinions into a strong stance for opening up such classified information. Moreover, Nixon Administration lawyers went on to pursue prosecution of Ellsberg, and they did nothing to foreclose the possibility that they might also bring charges against some or all of the newspapers that printed the documents that Ellsberg had single-handedly declassified.
DECLASSIFICATION ORDER
The first Nixon Administration did, however, compel the military bureaucracy to change its system for classifying and controlling government information in the name of national security. In June, 1972, Richard Nixon became the third U.S. President to completely revamp the classification system.
Shortly after World War II, Harry Truman issued an executive order setting up the first government wide classification system. The first major revision in system was ordered by Dwight Eisenhower 10 months after he took office.
President Nixon's Executive Order 11652 retains the top secret, secret and confidential categories and makes few changes in the definition of documents which qualify for the three stamps. But it does make other changes. For the first time, the order sets up an appeal procedure which might give the press and public a tool to ferret out documents that military and foreign service officers would rather keep hidden.
The Nixon order sets as 10 years the period during which many documents can be kept classified "top secret," and made eight years the limit for keeping material "secret" and six for "confidential" data. Many documents will be declassified automatically at those times, though the order also has a provision for bypassing this process if a top official specifies the reason for the exception in writing.
It turns out, too, that the Nixon order for the control of national security information still leaves untouched other mechanisms that the bureaucracy can use to keep information from being declassified and publicized. In addition, many of the same bureaucrats who have always been administering the secrecy system still hold the reins over information.
In the first tests that news people made of the new Nixon security system, they discovered that bureaucrats did not even have to use the most obvious loophole built into the Nixon order – the provision that the automatic declassification procedure need not be applied if there is a written statement that the document being sought falls within certain broad categories. Instead, the bureaucrats used the standard tactics of delay and obfuscation.
Soon after the Nixon classification order was issued, The New York Times requested 31 documents which appeared to fall under the automatic declassification section of the new order, and the Associated Press requested eight items.
At first, the State Department security experts handling the two requests were unable to identify the papers sought. Then, after pressure from the White House, they identified the material, but estimated that it would cost the news organizations some $7,000 to search out and copy it. When the Times zeroed in on three documents, the records were provided for $195 and, upon declassification, turned out to contain no information that had not already been published officially.
While the new Nixon order fails to prevent bureaucratic foot-dragging in the name of national security, it does make an attempt to reduce the number of controllers. It reduces from 37 to 25 the number of government agencies which have authority to use the confidential, secret and top secret stamps, and requires that officials who have the power to classify documents be designated in writing by the head of the agency. These new restrictions have reduced the number of stamp wielders in government by 63 per cent in the major departments – from 43,586 to 16,238.
By the end of his first term, Richard Nixon had achieved considerable control over the government's whole information apparatus, and so entered his second administration with even more direct power over how much information government will disclose to the press and public.
All of the top-level publicists in government agencies are his appointees, and many of the middle-level officials have been appointed or promoted since January, 1969. A survey of government agencies covering the first two years of the Nixon Administration showed that at that time 51 per cent of all information directors and their deputies had achieved their positions in the first term, and that figure has risen as vacancies have been filled.
After its hearings last year, the House information subcommittee urged that administration of the Freedom of Information Act be taken out of the hands of lawyers or program operators, and turned over to the government information experts. The subcommittee concluded that this action would not only improve administration of the Act, but it would also recognize the role of public information officers as "the bridge between faceless government and its citizens."
There was some movement during the first Nixon Administration in the direction of giving more force to the role of the government information officer. Two public affairs experts were added at the assistant secretary level, thus making a total of four agency appointees with enough clout to argue for the public's right to know at the policymaking level. And there was hope that more top level information experts would be recruited.
But whether such moves will lead to more information being made public by government, or to self-serving propaganda, depends largely upon whether the second Nixon Administration pursues the ideals expressed by former newsman Klein in the early Nixon days in Washington, or follows instead the manipulative information policies prompted by advertising and public relations men who held top posts in the White House as the second term began.
CHAPTER 6
THE PRESIDENT'S PRESS SECRETARY
For 10 months White House correspondents listened to adamant and caustic denials that anyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was involved in the activities surrounding the Watergate affair. The White House press secretary called it nothing but a "third-rate burglary" and he and other Nixon Administration officials derided the press for its stubborn refusal to take their word as fact.
Then, suddenly, on April 17, 1973, press secretary Ronald Ziegler put an "inoperative" stamp on all that he had said before in this respect. Ziegler had not coined the word, but he quickly seized upon it as just the phrase he was looking for – and the 'inoperative' briefing seemed destined to live for years as a symbol to correspondents of the problems they face when they try to search beyond official statements to explore the activities and thinking of the President and his staff.
The President's chief spokesman had suddenly found himself in a situation no press secretary in memory had faced. Ziegler's personal integrity, as well as the credibility of the news his office dispenses, was publicly challenged. He had to apologize to the Washington Post for once accusing that newspaper of "shabby journalism" in pursuing the Watergate case. Calls for his resignation were heard, and some observers felt that it might take months or, perhaps, years for the reputation of the news secretary to recover from such an arrant disregard for truth from the highest office in the land.
Every press secretary inevitably puts the President's view of information first and foremost. "He is not there to tell as much as possible, but as little. He is not supposed to be effusive, merely quick. And these rules, while unwritten, are very clear because he is not the press's secretary but the President's," wrote New York Times correspondent James M. Naughton in a Times Magazine article about the Nixon press aide in 1971.
Yet, when he came to the White House, Ziegler – like his predecessors – had to decide not simply how he would promote the President's image and reflect his attitude toward the press, but also how forthrightly he would deal with the press and the public's need for information. Some press secretaries have attempted to nurse along both objectives, trying to give the press more than just minimal guidance on policy questions and even having the President endorse their suggestions for improving press relations and access to information.
Ziegler turned out to be more the loyal foot-soldier than the battlefield innovator. Ironically, it was President Nixon himself who pointed up this fact when he told a White House Correspondents Association dinner this year how he had kept an eye on Ziegler's daily briefings of the press, and felt that his spokesman had been "loyal" to both of his masters, the press as well as the President. "I must say you have really worked him over, however," Nixon went on to say. "This morning he came into the office a little early, and I said, 'What time is it, Ron?' and he said, 'Could I put that on background?'"
That was more like the Ziegler that correspondents had known for more than four years. Though this super-fealty is built into his role, leaders among the correspondents who regularly cover the White House still feel that Ziegler has been especially single minded in his devotion to shielding the President from the press, and has shown little "loyalty" to the press or public's need for more information about presidential activities and decision-making. They feel that he has given reporters an almost continuous diet of evasions on important matters – with little sign of the helpfulness shown by those past press secretaries who have tried to recognize a journalist's need for fuller explanation.
Questions which try to draw more out of Ziegler invariably cause him to resort to an endless assortment of euphemisms for 'no comment,' at times pushing him to the point where he says, "I have said all I am prepared to say on the subject." White House press regulars say that in the few instances when Ziegler does put something 'on background' for their guidance, it often involves superficial information, such as when the President's plane will depart for Key Biscayne or San Clemente.
Despite his tight-lipped approach, the Nixon press secretary himself has said that he makes it a point to keep informed on matters that he might be questioned about. "I think I know as well as anyone else what is happening in the White House," he told the New York Times' Naughton.
Every morning Ziegler talks with key people on the President's staff about the news and what they think should or should not be publicized, often asking them (as one such official recalls) to "just tell me the main point" of some issue that be might be asked about. It apparently was this approach that led to Ziegler's many months of tossing off Watergate queries, and to his subsequent public embarrassment when it turned out that the very officials who were giving him 'the main point' were involved in the scandal.
The convolutions that Ziegler will go through in order to avoid answering reporters' inquiries – and the consequent cost to enlightenment of the public – is illustrated by one exchange that occurred early in the Watergate affair when the allegations of Republican political espionage by Donald Segretti suddenly broke into public view before the 1972 election.
News accounts reported that Segretti had had frequent phone conversations with Dwight Chapin, a White House aide who worked for H. R. Haldeman, then Nixon chief of staff. Asked about this, Ziegler said that the stories were not fundamentally accurate. Could Chapin then come out and explain for himself? reporters asked. No, replied Ziegler. Could the press secretary at least tell them if the White House had records of phone calls between Chapin and Segretti? Ziegler demurred. Would the White House switchboard personnel answer questions if reporters asked them directly? "I would hope not," Ziegler replied with a smile. And there the matter ended.
Some White House reporters feel that Ziegler and those who advise him at times have gone to absurd lengths in their zeal to portray the President as always being fully informed, decisive and right.
When the President said in a press conference early in his second term that North Vietnam had the right to replace forces in South Vietnam, correspondent Courtney Sheldon of the Christian Science Monitor immediately asked lower echelon members of Ziegler's staff if the President had made a mistake. They quickly checked it out, and one of them said that "the President misspoke himself." The next day, however, no amount of questioning at the daily briefing could elicit any such admission from Ziegler himself.
Despite the problems, the White House's daily briefings are still well-attended. Correspondents pick up presidential messages, hear Administration officials explain background details on policy announcements, and press endlessly for small scraps of information. They also attend the briefings to be certain that they are there in case the President should call a press conference.
During most of the first three and a half years of the Nixon Administration, there were two briefings daily. But this has been cut back to one a day, with a "posting" scheduled for the afternoons in which statements or releases are handed out and Ziegler or his deputy are usually available to answer questions about them.
In many ways, Ziegler's performance has been no different from that of predecessors, who were also in the business of protecting their boss and rationing information. He did lack the press secretary's customary training in the news media itself. But as a onetime account executive for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, he soon was able to acquire the shadow language of his new trade, and learned how to remain unruffled even when the terriers of the White House press contingent were snapping at his heels.
He also learned the games that press secretaries play with correspondents and their news organizations to give presidential nods to those who provide friendly coverage, and show iciness to frequent Nixon critics. Several leading correspondents feel that the snubs have been particularly heavy-handed in this Administration. There have been many reports of officials' refusals to take, or return, telephone calls, of correspondents being kept waiting unnecessarily for interviews, and of people who offend the Administration – or their news outlet – being barred from representation among the pool reporters who travel closest to the President.
Soon after Nixon was reelected, Dorothy McCardle, a longtime social affairs writer for the Administration's nemesis, the Washington Post, was suddenly closed out of White House events. Garnett Hornet, correspondent for the Star-News, a Post competitor, was blessed with an exclusive interview with the President, and his newspaper was given some scoops on Administration plans – moves that many correspondents construed as another slap at the Watergate-probing Post.
Similarly, five news organizations who had covered the White House regularly – the Boston Globe, Newsday, RKO General Radio, the Buffalo Evening News and Golden West Broadcasting – were not allowed to make the trip with the President to China and were supplanted by individuals or organizations which did not cover the President nearly as much.
If Ziegler's briefings sometimes deteriorate into bitter exchanges with the press or games in one-upmanship, there are also times – particularly after the Watergate exposures – when the press secretary has been more self-effacing. It is not all open warfare, as the good-humored, boyish-looking, 34-year-old press secretary will banter a good deal with press corps veterans, and is not heedless of their demands.
The White House Correspondents Association has taken up with him matters such as pool arrangements, and they feel that a better understanding of their problems has resulted, even if the concords do not always last. Ziegler also moved to eliminate the restrictions on naming the source of briefings by national security adviser Henry Kissinger after some correspondents who had felt coopted broke unwritten press corps vows of silence over the source of such high-level briefings.
Ziegler's deputy is Gerald Warren, a former newsman from San Diego. Warren often takes calls from reporters who may be working on deadline and cannot get through to Ziegler himself. Some White House reporters feel that while Warren's approach to their inquiries is restrained and cautious, he gives a credibility to the press operation by checking out everything that he is allowed to pursue.
Personnel under Ziegler and Warren has turned over several times, but hard-working secretaries smoothly dispense the official statements and other materials that pour out of the White House printing machines each day, and correspondents generally feel that the Ziegler office is an efficiently-run operation – not always the case with some past press secretaries. The comforts of the always fussy correspondents also have been looked after, with the improvement of working space in the White House and the booking of the best hotels whenever they travel with the President.
There is a general feeling that Ziegler's durability so far stems from the fact that he has served well as the right spokesman for a President like Nixon who has preferred to remain more aloof from exchanges with the press and public.
"Not programed to interpret or explain presidential policy," Newsweek wrote after the Watergate exposures, "Ziegler has harnessed himself so closely to the man he serves that his personal credibility is wholly a reflection of the President's." Adding to this impression of Ziegler is the fact that while he reportedly meets frequently with the President, he has not developed anything like the stature of President Eisenhower's James Hagerty or President Johnson's Bill Moyers, who reputedly had an independent impact on news and other policy. Nixon appeared to upgrade Ziegler's role early in June when he made him an assistant to the President.
There probably never will be an ideal press secretary from the standpoint of the news media. It seems unrealistic to expect that anyone in the post can be "loyal" to both the President and the press, as President Nixon has suggested.
But most correspondents still hope for the kind of presidential press secretary whose loyalty to the President is conditioned by a professional awareness of the need for the chief executive to know what the press and public is asking about his programs and policies, and the necessity to offer some substantial response – not simply adroit sidesteps – to the questions that are on people's mind.
CHAPTER 7
THE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS FOR THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH
American Presidents have always sought to manipulate the mass media, since their roles as chief policymaker and opinion leader for the nation are so closely intertwined. To put across his programs, the President "must persuade, bargain, exhort and, on occasion, bribe," writes Elmer Cornwell in Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion. Above all, he must "win and channel public support."
Like his predecessors, Richard Nixon was determined to use the media in his own way. In the process, he altered the traditional White House relationship with the press by creating a new press/public relations apparatus that put the most emphasis on appealing directly to the public and to the press outside of Washington, downplaying the role of the press corps. To the correspondents, this attempted bypassing of their scrutiny was one more sign that the Administration did not intend to be truly "open" about government.
In 1968, while candidate Nixon was cris-crossing the country, a smooth public relations and news operation developed to "sell" the future President through various media. Herbert Klein, newspaper editor and longtime Nixon friend, who had served as press adviser in each of his campaigns since 1948, helped plan news strategy in the campaign, while Ronald Ziegler, a former advertising executive, buffered Nixon from a restive traveling press corps.
When Nixon came to the White House, Klein was named to the post of Director of Communications for the Executive Branch. It was a new wrinkle in presidential staffing. While Ziegler would deal with the people who cover the White House regularly, as press spokesman, Klein would coordinate all Administration information operations and try to make the federal bureaucracy more accessible to the entire press corps. Klein promised that this was to be no ministry of propaganda but an effort to "get more information" out to the press. He said that
it would "lead to a more open Administration."
Klein was to win the thanks of many Washington news people for the help he gave in opening up the bureaucracy and arranging interviews with policymakers, especially at the outset of the Administration. Peter Lisagor, bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, recalls that at one point correspondents were having trouble getting through to people in the justice Department. "They tried to structure it so that matters had to go through the press office. An assistant attorney general in the civil division or criminal division was loath to speak unless it was cleared. Herb worked that out. He saw that it created bad will in town." Cabinet officers also were more available for interviews and press conferences early on. And Klein helped to work out information for frustrated reporters in some cases under the Freedom of Information Act.
But some correspondents felt that the new "openness" did not extend to unearthing matters of substance about policy. And they became wary about the Klein office's principal purpose as its other activities emerged. An important aspect of the new Nixon press policy, it turned out, was to make "a clearly visible end run around the national news corps," as former White House aide James Keogh put it in his book, President Nixon and the Press.
Klein began his 'end run' by mailing to publishers, broadcast executives, editors and editorial writers outside of Washington thousands of copies of presidential statements and speeches, and news articles favorable to the Administration.
The mailings weren't a new idea, but the size and organization of the Nixon effort was. Former press secretary Bill Moyers says that in the Johnson Administration "when the President made an important statement on Vietnam, for example, we'd send it over to the State Department and they would mail it out." But he feels that this was quite different from the setup in this administration where Nixon staffers "want everything to be controlled and centralized. Our relations with the press outside of Washington were erratic and unorganized." Andrew Hatcher, associate press secretary to President Kennedy, says the same about their press operation. The Kennedy White House would mail out press releases on request, he said, but there was no "mass," indiscriminate mailing.
Under the new Nixon operation, on the other hand, while the President was delivering his State of the Union address in 1971, for example, Klein was busy sending to 3,827 news people a six-page list of questions and answers about the message. Presidential speeches against campus protest were mailed to 8,000 editors of weekly newspapers. And, early this year, 1,500 editors, editorial writers and station officials were to receive copies of the President's statements on the economy and his veto messages.
The information/propaganda campaign reached beyond the press, too. John Pierson wrote in The Wall Street Journal that during Nixon's first term "special interest groups ranging from 131 Negro insurance executives to 77,000 blue collar workers" were sent Administration materials through the mail.
Klein insists that the mailings help to keep the entire press more informed, and he chides the press corps for having a parochial view of what is "openness" in government: "One of the big things we have done is to open the government more to newsmen outside the confines of the District of Columbia.”
Correspondent Jules Witcover says that the main point of the Klein operation is to put the Administration view across to thousands of radio stations and small papers who aren't represented in Washington – "without having it filtered through the Washington press corps" which usually is more knowledgeable about issues and more skeptical of Administration political rhetoric.
There is some duplication in the Klein operation. Veteran correspondent Sarah McClendon, who reports for newspapers and broadcast outlets in several states, feels that "the main activity of Herb Klein's office is to send your editor – and occasionally to you – copies of speeches with notes that imply that maybe you overlooked this item, or maybe you ought to give it more space."
Another White House device for 'opening' government was to deliver the Administration to editors, broadcast executives and reporters in the form of regional press briefings. In 1969, Klein had arranged a briefing for Washington reporters on the new U.S. postal service, and then struck upon the idea of sending the government briefers out to editors and news directors around the country, according to Witcover. "The approach worked so well that Klein was soon forming briefing teams on other major Administration proposals and dispatching them to the hinterlands," he says.
In July 1971, for example, the communications director accompanied the President, two of his aides, and then HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson to a Kansas City, Missouri, briefing for 141 news people from nine midwestern states. The President also made visits to selected newspapers for editorial meetings at various times. Another example of such briefings were week-long tours that White House consumer adviser Virginia Knauer made across several states to brief news people on Nixon's consumer protection legislation.
Klein says that journalists around the country "have had more opportunity to question Administration officials than in all previous administrations put together." Don Larrabee, whose Washington bureau serves more than 30 papers in various states, feels that the briefings are "a good device for Mr. Nixon to sell his policies" to local news people. Larrabee thinks that many of the people who attend the briefings don't feel that they've learned much that they had not already read from Washington. But it still is "intriguing for the local editors to see the President in action, and they invariably write a story about it," he says.
How successful was this President overall with his reliance on a new press/public relations apparatus?
A majority of the people interviewed for the study felt that Nixon had a 'good press' in his first term. They acknowledged the skill with which Klein and others in the White House had manipulated the media to try to put the Nixon message across to the public. CBS's Dan Rather even commented at one point during the 1972 campaign that Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman "thinks he knows as much or more about my business than I do, and I'm inclined to think he's correct."
Klein announced that he would be leaving early in the second term. Some said he had lost ground in an internal struggle with White House advertising and public relations interests. Press secretary Ziegler was put in charge of all press operations and, while the new communications office continued, it was expected to play a subordinate role.
In any event, in his first administration, Nixon and his staff were to find, as many Presidents had, that there are limits to how much you can control the flow of government information, contain a maverick press corps or shape the image of your administration. As correspondent Lisagor put it, this administration was to discover "as all administrations discover, that government is an untidy business. It is operated, even in its news policies, on an ad hoc basis. You can't compress your news setup into a table of organization."
CHAPTER 8
THE OFFICE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY, AND TELEVISION NEWS
A new White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OPT) was established during the First Nixon Administration, adding a powerful new government voice to decisions about the role and content of broadcasting in this country. OTC's pronouncements in news and public affairs programming in particular suggested the possibility that an American President could acquire greater influence over what people see or hear about government and public issues on television.
Despite a politician's natural urge to want to control broadcast news, U.S. high officials – unlike those in some other democracies – usually have drawn back from actions that might give even the appearance of government censorship. Indeed, the director of OTP, Clay T. Whitehead, himself insists that his pronouncements in this area have been misread, and that the White House has "no intent or desire to influence in any way the grants or denials of licenses by the FCC.
But the furor raised by statements by Whitehead and other officials is evidence that mere suggestions about television programming from the President's own staff inevitably carry great weight with the federally-regulated broadcasting industry, and their impact could carry over into the news media's reporting of government.
OTP was set up in 1970 by Richard Nixon to fulfill a need for a central policymaking body on communications matters that had been foreseen in recommendations made by a Johnson Administration task force. Under Whitehead, the office soon became spokesman for major policy guidelines on commercial and public television, cable television and satellite communications.
Advocates of the public's interest in broadcasting themselves long have argued that somebody must keep a closer watch over the burgeoning channels of mass communication in this country if they are to be allocated fairly and be used for civic purposes, not simply to reap excessive profits or political power for special interests.
But, to many, OTP's statements on the role of the news media were seen not so much as a watchdog effort to protect the public's interest in open communication, but rather as a move to put seemingly unfriendly news organizations on the defensive. Critics saw this as one more sign of the Nixon Administration's love-hate affair with television. The White House sees TV as a powerful means to inform the public of its policies and gain acceptance of them. But it is very unhappy whenever network news people pursue deeper analysis of Administration policy pronouncements as good journalists should.
The most dramatic OTP move came in December, 1972, scarcely a month after Richard Nixon had achieved one of the largest election mandates of any American President.
Telecommunications director Whitehead announced that the Administration would propose broadcast license renewal legislation making clear that "station managers or network officials who fail to act to correct imbalance or consistent bias in the networks – or who acquiesce by silence – can only be considered willing participants to be held fully accountable ... at license renewal time. .. "
He said that local broadcasters should not automatically accept network standards of "taste, violence and decency," and that they should make stronger effort to curb what he termed "ideological plugola" and "elitist gossip" in the news broadcasts of networks with which they are affiliated.
Even as he raised the hackles of the networks and individual broadcasters, Whitehead also proposed giving station owners more immunity from license challenges. He called for a five-year period between renewals instead of the current three years, and also suggested setting up rules that would make it mere difficult for citizen groups and others to challenge a station's license.
Whitehead, in effect, seemed to be telling network affiliates: Be more "responsible" in judging network news and other programming; but don't worry too much about those in the community who might disagree with your definition of civic responsibility.
The storm broke immediately. Renegade FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson, himself a longtime critic of network practices, said the Administration was attempting to work a "deal" with broadcasters, giving them longer periods between license renewals in exchange for a "crackdown on the news and public stairs ... from the networks, especially if it came from CBS."
"Ideological plugola" was simply "Nixonese for anything unfavorable to the Nixon Administration," Johnson said.
Rep. Torbert Macdonald (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Communications subcommittee that later would pass on the legislation, called the proposal part of "Nixon network neurosis." The Administration was saying "stop the criticism or we'll stop you," Macdonald told a meeting of California broadcasters.
As broadcasting and other journalistic groups issued a barrage of denunciations, Whitehead said that he had been misunderstood. His proposals simply were intended "to remind licensees of their responsibilities to correct faults in the broadcasting system" instead of passing that responsibility on to the networks. He insisted to the Senate communications subcommittee that the proposed legislation would give broadcasters no obligations for programming that they did not already have.
When it was finally introduced, the Nixon bill called for stations to respond to community needs and interests, and to emphasize "localism" in programming. In addition to providing for five-year renewals, the measure would restrict the FCC from requiring reports on news and public affairs programming, and from using percentage standards for different categories of programming in judging a station's performance for license renewal. Whitehead's strong rhetoric of December, not unexpectedly, was not repeated in the bill or the accompanying explanation, and he maintained that, contrary to earlier fears, their bill "would remove the government from the sensitive area of making value judgments on the content of broadcast programming.
But news people did not feel reassured. Skeptics in Congress were not likely to leave unexplored the OTP director's allusions to "imbalance" in the news or other suggestions for more "responsive" broadcast reporting of government news that have been advocated by a host of Administration officials. Leading Senate constitutionalist Sam Ervin of North Carolina said that the White House approach inescapably would bring government into the process of judging the news, and he called Whitehead's words "a thinly veiled attempt to create government censorship over broadcast journalism."
Government in this country usually has been circumspect about passing official judgement on radio-TV programming. The traditionally conservative Federal Communications Commission has kept to a general "public interest" standard in evaluating station performance at renewal time and, though it recently has set up its own guidelines for license renewals, the commission invariably has been reluctant to be too specific about program content. Congress, too, has been very wary about looking like a censor. Even the much-publicized hearings by the Senate subcommittee on communication into violence on television resulted in an admonishment to the networks, but no legislation of standards.
If the White House had not necessarily gotten involved directly in news censorship with Whitehead's pronouncements, it had at least ventured further than before into the twilight zone of government's judging what might be balance or objectivity in news. What a Whitehead might brush off as being "ideological plugola" or "elitist gossip" might seem to a correspondent to provide precisely the kind of interpretation the public should have to underhand federal actions.
It was not hard to see how such government guidance could set a legion of license-conscious station executives to fussing over network interpretative reporting, tempting them to try to screen out unpleasant issues in the name of 'balance.' 'Localism' in the news could lead to parochialism and for any who doubt its cost, media scholars note that the civil rights movement might not have moved the nation's conscience as it did if the TV networks had not for the first time provided Southern blacks with unfiltered national news about race relations.
PUBLIC TELEVISION
The Nixon Administration similarly began to scrutinize the content of public television programs. Its concerns were twofold: the White House wanted to shift programming decisions away from what Whitehead and others viewed as an Eastern "liberal" bias in the production of public TV programs; and they also questioned whether federal funds should be used to finance what they saw as politically sensitive news and public affairs programs which they felt could better be left to the commercial networks.
In 1972, the President vetoed a $165 million, two-year funding bill for public television. He called for a measure that, again, stressed "localism" in program development, and urged a one-year, $45 million authorization. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which administers government funds for public television, kept operating under a continuing appropriation. Senate Democrats went on to introduce legislation in 1973 that called for $140 million for CPB over the next two fiscal years, but Whitehead kept to the Administration's call for a one- year, $45 million budget.
By that time the plot had thickened as CPB, which holds the purse-strings, decided to take much of the power over program selection and scheduling out of the hands of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and to cut back funding for several national public affairs programs which the White House also had disapproved. The reaction in the trade was bitter. After months of negotiations, CPB finally agreed to return basic control of the network to PBS, which is run by 234 public television station managers. The corporation did retain a say for itself in programming and schedules, however, and established a mechanism to work out CPB and PBS differences.
During this period, the new CPB board chairman, former Congressman Thomas Curtis of Missouri, suddenly resigned, claiming White House pressure against an earlier compromise.
Whitehead denied that he had pressured people, and the Washington Post later reported that the board of the supposedly semi-autonomous CPB had tried to keep its distance from White House "orders," especially as the Watergate manipulations came to light.
Some analysts nevertheless saw this dispute as a warning that there should be a fresh look at the entire question of how public broadcasting is to be financed and kept insulated from political manipulation. Former Johnson press secretary Bill Moyers (whose TV program had been among those dropped) argued that "What is emerging is not public television, but government television shaped by politically-conscious appointees whose desire to avoid controversy could turn CPB into the Corporation for Public Blandness."
The White House in the Nixon years thus has put itself squarely into the area of television news and other broadcasting issues. The government-dictated "newsspeak" of George Orwell's 1984 was not necessarily upon us. But OTP well might be another bureaucracy in the making – this time in the sensitive area of the mass media, with the power of the presidency behind it. It seems clear that both the President and the news media need to be watchful that this office does not become just the voice of special interests, and that no one turns it into a 1984-ish voice for deciding what is proper news of government and how it should be reported.
THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION AND JOURNALISTS' PROTECTION OF SOURCES
Courts seeking information from journalists is not a new phenomenon; in fact, 1974 will mark the centennial of the first such recorded case in America.
Through the 99 years since, prosecutors, politicians and others have found that news people's probings and confidences that they glean are a tempting source of legal material. In many cases reporters, seeing themselves as good citizens, have supplied such information. But at other times journalists have claimed a right – indeed, a responsibility – not to reveal the source of sensitive social and political stories, basing their stand on the First Amendment's guarantee of the press's independence.
In June, 1972, the Supreme Court sent reporters looking elsewhere for protection. In deciding the cases of New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell and two other newsmen who would not yield such material to grand juries, the high court ruled 5 to 4 that the First Amendment does not give journalists the right to refuse to disclose sources or other data under subpoena by grand juries.
But the Supreme Court also suggested that Congress should be the final arbiter of this issue. Some senators and congressmen moved quickly for legislation to help journalists to 'shield' their sources just as lawyers, doctors and clergy can protect confidences, triggering a lively debate in Congress and in the profession.
The Nixon Administration argued that reporters are covered adequately by means short of federal legislation. It has opposed bills that would provide absolute protection for news people and their sources, and has been lukewarm about those that would provide protection with certain exceptions. Asst. Atty. Gen. Roger C. Cramton told a House subcommittee in September, 1972, that absolute privilege would "unduly subordinate to the interests of the press the vital national interest in vigorous law enforcement." Cramton said that the Justice Department was not opposed, in principal at least, to some protection for news sources, but felt that legislation was "unnecessary" because guidelines for subpoenaing that the attorney general had set up in 1970 would provide sufficient protection.
Some news people think that Nixon Administration law officials could have done more initially to discourage the subpoenaing of reporters before the practice mushroomed. Courts, lawyers and legislators all over the country suddenly have been calling upon reporters to provide eyewitness reports, notes and tapes in various cases – sometimes because the material could not be obtained elsewhere, but often on legal fishing expeditions. CBS and NBC and stations they owned, for example, were served 122 times by groups and individuals in one recent two-and-a-half year period, according to congressional testimony. In time, four reporters from various news organizations – Peter Bridge, William Farr, Harry Thornton and Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief John Lawrence – have gone to jail rather than disclose their sources, though none is still there at this writing.
The Nixon Administration guidelines, issued in August, 1970, by the then Atty. Gen. John Mitchell said that a journalist could be compelled to testify in a federal case if he is thought to have information that could prove or disprove someone's guilt – information that cannot be obtained from any other source. Federal officials first must negotiate with the journalist, and the attorney general himself must finally approve a subpoena.
Thirteen subpoenas have been issued by the Justice Department since August, 1970, but only two of the 13 were the result of a complete rebuff to the Administration by the organization being subpoenaed. In the past, news organizations often readily provided the government with information. Now, they still may be willing to cooperate, but request the formality of a subpoena so that they do not seem to be just a surveillance arm of the government. For instance, the government had to issue a subpoena to obtain film footage of the assassination attempts on Alabama Governor George Wallace.
Some witnesses before Congress have been less sanguine than the Administration about the guidelines. Attorneys general change, critics feel, and so, too, does their interpretation of the standards. The rules could be withdrawn at any time and, even if they remain in force, they still provide for subpoenas that "do not conform to these guidelines" in emergencies, and "other unusual situations."
In February of this year. Assistant Attorney General Cramton quoted to congressmen a letter from President Nixon to Robert Fichenberg, chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), in which the President said he would reconsider the Administration's position on shield laws "'should it ever become apparent that the federal guidelines fail to maintain a proper balance between the newsmen's privileges and his responsibilities of citizenship ... '"
In Congress, much debate centered on whether a federal law should give absolute protection to news people and their sources or include certain qualifiers, and whether the federal legislation should apply also to the states.
One of the principal bills, introduced by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), calls for such blanket coverage. Early in 1973, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.), who probably will decide the fate of such legislation in the Senate, surprised many people by introducing a bill that also would apply to the states, and make an exception to protection of information if the reporters has actually witnessed, or has personal knowledge of, a crime. A bill introduced by Rep. Charles Whalen Jr. (R-Ohio) would apply at the federal level only, and would not protect the reporter if he has information about a crime that is not available elsewhere in a case involving a "compelling and overriding national interest.
The Administration opposes federal legislation that would apply to the states. White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler and communications director Herbert Klein told media groups this year that, beyond the attorney general's guidelines, they would leave the matter of protection to state shield laws. Some prominent news executives also have expressed doubts about the wisdom of federal legislation in this area. At a meeting of the ASNE in May there was strong sentiment that a federal law had its own perils and might create new complications in news gathering.
Twenty-two states have shield laws and more are considering them. But some reporters contend that these laws cannot provide adequate, uniform protection. They point out that the main battle over the protection of sources is being fought out in state and local courts, and that reporters
have lost out even in states where there already are shield laws because the courts have interpreted such laws narrowly.
Two national correspondents, Fred Graham of CBS and Jack Landau of Newhouse News Service – both members of the Washington-based Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press – have argued that anything short of an all-encompassing, federal-state law would not be adequate from a reporter's point of view.
Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, they note that the federal government is only one among many legal jurisdictions that include the 50 states and some 3,000 county court districts. They feel this means that, whatever the political difficulties, "it is absolutely essential that ... the shield law protect every news reporter in the nation – not just those who, by happenstance, are involved in federal proceedings."
Many reporters have come to feel that protection will only be secured when media owners and publishers themselves join in court suits. Most news organizations have provided legal counsel for subpoenaed reporters. But some news people think that court fights would carry much greater weight if a few publishers and station owners forced the issue. They were encouraged by the fact that New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger recently claimed ownership of the notes and records of an employee in one case, thus making himself liable to court action.
Graham and Landau feel that ownership also could be helpful in the fight in Congress. They point to publishers' successful lobbying for the Newspaper Preservation Act that gave newspapers special privileges when it came to anti-trust action. "The conclusion is quite simple: what the media owners want from Congress, the media owners get from Congress," they say.
"The only question that remains is whether the First Amendment is of as much concern to the media owners as was exemption from the anti-trust laws."
For the reporters, then, there still is no assurance that they will secure from Congress or state legislatures the protection of information that the courts, from the Supreme Court on down, have denied them and their sources in most cases. Nor has the Nixon Administration given any indication to date that it would help forestall further jailings of news people.
Thus, until there is legislation, or a breakthrough in the courts, the individual reporter apparently will have to learn to live with the inability to assure sources that he can protect them from public exposure which might prove embarrassing or hazardous for them. More reporters, and possibly editors and publishers, may go to jail, and the uncertainty will persist as government, the media and public wrestle with the question: How free should a free press be?
CHAPTER 10
POLITICIANS, REPORTERS AND BACKGROUNDERS
India and Pakistan were at war late in 1971 and the United States wanted the Soviet Union to help exert a restraining influence – so much so, that an unidentified source told a pool of five reporters in a `background' briefing that President Nixon might be forced to reconsider plans for a 1972 summit talk in Moscow if the Russians did not act.
The comment was made, of course, by Nixon's national security affairs adviser Henry Kissinger. He was immediately named as such in a story by The Washington Post, a paper which had not had anyone in the reporters' pool. The Post said it had "learned Kissinger's identity independently," and it did not feel bound by the Washington rule that reporters present at background briefings cannot identify sources or quote them by name.
In this case, Kissinger's identity was meant to be kept even more hush-hush since the announcement was made on a "deep background" (or Lindley Rule, for its originator Ernest K. Lindley) basis, meaning no attribution of any kind – with reporters left to resort to such spongy allusions as "it was learned" or "it was understood" in reference to the source of the story.
In the end, India and Pakistan went their ways, the President went to Moscow and the backgrounders went on. But for a time this peculiar media event had made a few headlines. Administration officials, the Post and the press corps became embroiled in one of those Washington insiders' debates which, while it might have left the general public yawning, nevertheless did have some bearing on the depth of news about policymaking that the press reports.
Backgrounders came into vogue early in World War II as a device for officials to brief reporters without being identified. In the 30 years since, they have become a Washington institution as little bands of correspondents also sprang up to invite officials in for not-for-attribution tete-a- tetes over bacon and eggs or London broil in private dining rooms of posh Washington hotels and restaurants.
The guest usually is a public figure who has been much in the news at that moment. Sometimes, a group will extend a standing invitation to a well-known official to which he responds when he has something he wants to talk about. Or it may be that a hitherto press-shy official decides to surface at least part way. But the backgrounders initiated by reporters are far outnumbered by the official background briefings, such as the Kissinger session, which are called by the White House and other government agencies to tell news people about new legislation, discuss an important address or send messages to Moscow.
The question at stake is whether the information derived from the backgrounder is worth the compromises it entails on the part of the press. After the Post-Kissinger incident, officials of the White House Correspondents Assn. said that backgrounders are "a fact of life" in Washington, and contended that government officials often will "speak more frankly and provide more information on a 'background' basis than when they are to be identified."
If officials did, indeed, uncover the policymaking process to reporters, and both parties jawed about the problems of getting more information out to the public, backgrounders well might be educational for both politicians and journalists. But such deeper exchanges are hardly the rule.
Few officials trust themselves enough in a group of news people to really let down their hair, and few correspondents can forsake the quest for a 'good' story that will make headlines overnight. It is very hard to resist turning that confidence from a nameless "high source" into an 'inside' story that may impress your editor, if not necessarily a public that's not in on the game. This is the case even though correspondents know that these 'confidences' soon may become a matter of public record – or ought to be.
On the other hand, all correspondents find that in the normal course of their reporting, there are instances where they feel bound to publish important government information and news tips, and must mask their sources to protect them. "Without the use of secrets, there could be no adequate diplomatic, military and political reporting of the kind (Americans) take for granted," says Max Frankel, Sunday editor of the New York Times. "A lot of skulduggery in government and in Congress would never come to light if everything had to be attributed," says Julius Frankness, retired Washington bureau chief for United Press International.
Backgrounders also have been used to alert correspondents to news that they might have overlooked, soothe the fears of the public about certain events, or to explain government policy which, for legitimate reasons, had only been discussed by officials in vague terms.
But many news people feel that officials more and more have violated the spirit of backgrounders by using them simply to ladle out self-serving information and official versions of the news, or float trial balloons to test public sentiment for proposed actions. The Time's Frankel feels that "backgrounders sometimes serve the public interest, but most usually serve only the government's interest." And Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee argues that "in backgrounders, a reporter doesn't get his story, he gets their story, the press gets used, and the public gets short-changed."
The potential harm done by the loose news practices that can grow up around the backgrounder was never so dramatically evident as with the information being fed to the press corps about Vietnam. "The Vietnam War was initiated, escalated and waged to the orchestration of official backgrounders," says Erwin Knoll, Washington editor of The Progressive. Richard Harwood, national editor of the Post, has spelled out the process:
"Various factions in the (Johnson) Administration were deliberately and consciously leaking top- secret plans and recommendations in order to build support for further U.S. action (in Vietnam) and it seems, in retrospect, that both the Administration and the newspapers were deluding themselves in assuming that leaks were an adequate substitute for the kind of awakening and education that arises from vigorous public debate by officials."
The Kissinger incident seems to be another prime example of how the press was used, in this case to float a trial balloon on a policy – the threatened freeze toward Moscow – that never materialized.
Caught by surprise by the Post's blowing of Kissinger's cover, the White House sniffed that the action was an "unacceptable" breach of press protocol. Post editor Bradlee shot back that the Post would set up guidelines to get the paper out of the business of "distributing" the official government line without identification. But the Post also drew the wrath of some colleagues for breaching agreed-upon rules. One of the five Kissinger pool reporters, David Kraslow, who was then Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, called it "cheap journalism," and said that everyone traveling with the President was bound by the pool arrangement. Officers of the White House Correspondents Assn. agreed.
Did the public airing reduce the trafficking in 'background' goods? Cosigners briefings now are on the record. Reporters feel that some departments also were more straightforward than they had been, at least right after the affair. The White House even said that President Nixon wouldn't mind scrapping backgrounders completely, if the press wanted that.
But press critic James Aronson feels the arrangement won't change because news people don't want to alter "an extremely comfortable private relationship between government and the press." Former Johnson press secretary Bill Moyers says that backgrounders permit the press and government "to sleep together, even procreate, without having to accept the responsibility for the offspring." And members of the press corps have been "consenting adults" in the practice, says Moyers.
Some correspondents think that the only way to end the ambiguities surrounding backgrounders is for people to boycott them and force all information on the record. But that is not easily done. Even the new policies instituted by the Post and the Times after the Kissinger incident, while restrictive, do not totally exclude attendance at backgrounders or the use of unnamed
sources. On the other hand, Alan Otten, bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, suggests that there may be another way to dispel many of the problems over unattributed information:
"An administration that reveals most of its discussions and actions as it goes along obviously will have fewer secrets to worry about leaking out later, and government officials, lawmakers and the press would be far readier to accept its judgment on the need to keep other matters in confidence."
CHAPTER 11
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS BY THE PROFESSIONAL RELATIONS COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
The following statement of conclusions and recommendations was approved by the Professional Relations Committee of the National Press Club on June 12, 1973:
It is a coincidence that work on this study paralleled in time the gradual unfolding of the Watergate scandals; the study had broader, independent origins. Yet, those scandals serve unexpectedly, and with dramatic intensity, to focus the diverse issues in the Nixon Administration's relationship with the press.
The Watergate scandals grew and flourished in an unhealthy atmosphere of secrecy, official lies, and attempted manipulation of newspapers, radio and television. Moreover, only an administration so insulated from the press and so contemptuous of its reporting function could have ignored the press's disclosures of scandal over the last year and attempted the complex cover-up which is now breaking down.
The Professional Relations Committee of the National Press Club on the basis of the facts set forth in this study, which are corroborated by our own daily experience as journalists, concludes that President Nixon has not only fallen short of his publicly stated goal of achieving an "open administration," but has actually moved in the opposite direction. The Nixon Administration is the most "closed" administration in recent decades.
We find evidence of numerous and persistent attempts by the Administration to restrict the flow of legitimate public information necessary to the effective functioning of a responsible government in a self-governing society.
At the highest level, President Nixon has failed to hold regular and frequent press conferences, and has thereby deprived the press of the only forum in which it can question the President, and deprived the public of vital access to presidential thinking on public issues. By holding fewer news conferences in the last four years than any of his predecessors in the previous 36 years, Mr. Nixon has seriously weakened a well-established and essential American institution. To renew a regular and continuing dialogue with the public, we recommend that the President hold once-a-week press conferences announced in advance.
The White House press secretary has been reduced to a totally-programmed spokesman without independent authority or comprehensive background knowledge of Administration policies. Rather than opening a window to the White House, the press secretary closes doors. Information about public business is supplied on a selective, self-serving basis. Legitimate questions about public affairs are not answered on a day-to-day basis; even worse, such questions are often not seriously considered.
Ronald Ziegler as White House press secretary, particularly during the Watergate disclosures of the past year, has misled the public and affronted the professional standards of the Washington press corps.
We believe there is need for a better public understanding concerning the function of a White House press secretary, or any other government information officer. They hold public offices paid for by public funds. The only justification for such an office is to improve the flow of information from the government to the public. There is no need, for example, for a White House press secretary in the name of "improved coordination" to control the access of working reporters to responsible Administration officials. Such contacts ought to be on a person-to-person basis.
Officials entrusted with the conduct of important government business can be expected to be mature enough to manage their own relations with the press without arbitrary outside control. Ideally, the White House press secretary would intervene in these relations only to open up access for reporters with officials who proved unresponsive to press queries. If the post of White House press secretary is to serve a function for the press and public, it should be occupied by an individual – not necessarily with news experience – but of stature and broad background.
The Office of the Director of Communications has operated as a propaganda ministry. There is no place in our society for this kind of operation.
We commend the Administration for adopting a policy of on-the-record news conferences for Henry Kissinger, the President's national security adviser. As against that gain, however, we have to set the fact that Administration officials seriously abused the Washington institution of the "backgrounder" which, notwithstanding its inherent difficulties, has served a useful purpose. If abuses have been less frequent in the last two years, that is because the number of backgrounders has dwindled.
Despite Administration claims to the contrary, we conclude that the cause of freedom of information – public access to government reports and records – made no net progress in the first Nixon term, and was sometimes actively hindered. Many federal agencies dodged the spirit and intent of the Freedom of Information Act.
We note specific dangers in the Nixon Administration's aggressive attitude toward public and commercial television. It has sought to influence the news, commentary and documentary programs of public broadcasting stations. We strongly recommend that the institutional structure of public broadcasting be strengthened and its financing arranged in ways that will guarantee that the content of its programs is completely and unquestionably insulated from direct control by the White House or Congress.
The Office of Telecommunications Policy has raised the specter of government censorship of commercial television more seriously than at any time in history. The Administration appears to want a role in deciding what news should be reported about its own activities and how it should be reported. Nothing could be further from the spirit of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Threats to the freedom of the press in the last four years have come from the courts as well as from the Administration, but in several cases the Administration has been behind these threats.
Four reporters have gone to jail for protecting sources and the prospect is that more will go in the future, perhaps joined by editors and publishers. Although this issue spans Congress and the courts as well as the executive branch, it has to be noted that the record of the Justice Department under the Nixon Administration has been particularly hostile to adequate legal protection for newsmen in the practice of their profession.
In this context, the nation's press is not wholly without blame for the unfavorable drift of public policy. We deplore the failure of many publishers, network officials, radio and television station owners, and editorial page editors to protest vigorously the Administration's incursions into press rights, the concealment of information, and the narrowing of news channels.
In summary, we conclude that the Nixon Administration has engaged in an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information to which the public is entitled, and has conducted for its own political purposes a concerted campaign to discredit the press. The Administration appears unwilling to accept the traditional role of an independent press in a free society. It is to be hoped that this Administration attitude will change, but we see no strong likelihood of such change. We urge the nation's press to muster all of the resources at its command to resist any and all forms of intimidation and control, and to assert its legal rights and the proud traditions of its profession.