Press power and responsibility
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington While the noble lunar howl of the Dog Lovers Party would not be corked in contemporary America — save perhaps by illiberal Sleep Lovers — more and more journalists are finding that a few days, weeks and even occasionally months in jail are becoming unavoidable.
In the United States editors are never punished for what appears in their publications, both because we seem to defer to status and position in a way the dear, classridden English people don't and because most of our rows concern a demand by a court that a reporter reveal the source on which a story was based. The most recent of many celebrated cases concerned a New York Times reporter whose stories about the death some years ago of several New Jersey hospital patients resulted in a doctor being tried for murder.
The defence claimed the reporter had acted as much as an agent of the prosecution as a journalist and, since the law stipulates the defence may set all the cards in the prosecution's hand, the reporter ought to turn over his notes and tape recordings. New Jersey has what is called a 'shield law' that is supposed to give immunity to journalists against just such demands. The courts, however, ruled that a constitutional right to a fair trial takes precendence over any protection of this sort and the reporter went to jail for many weeks.
While a number of states have shield laws, the Federal government doesn't although Federal courts do try to follow, whenever possible, the rules of judicial procedure of the state they happen to be located in. Thus, in theory, reporters have a fair amount of protection against being made to welsh on their sources. In practice, the media's best protection is its power to make political trouble for a defiant judge.
There are a growing number of these, for editorialists, print and broadcast, are wailing that the courts are not only taking large bites out of the First Amendment guarantee of a free press, but are also chipping away at 'the people's right to know', a more recently discovered right (circa 1965) which is defined as anything a paper chooses to print.
Not only have the courts been lethargic in translating the people's right to know into decrees, they have issued several important decisions which the industry is generally calling 'anti-press'. The first of these was a Supreme Court decision a few months ago denying the mass media's claim to exemption from search warrants. The question was whether or not the police could obtain a search warrant to go through a newspaper office if they had reason to believe it might contain evidence of a crime. A great noise was raised against the ruling, although people outside the industry evinced little understanding of why a newspaper should want to withhold evidence that might convict a murderer or a rapist.
More jarring yet is the CBS case. Some years ago CBS did a television programme about a highly-decorated army officer who had written a book charging the American armed forces in Vietnam with war crimes. The programme made the officer look like a liar and so he sued for millions of dollars, claiming he had been libelled.
Until the CBS case, 'a public figure', as the major had made himself by writing his book, had no chance of winning such an action. The offended party had to show not only that things said about him were untrue, but that they were published by people who knew they were untrue and that it was done with malicious intent — something impossible to prove unless you could subpoena all the information collected in preparing a story and also, perhaps, question the reporters and editors about what they might have been thinking when they did the deed. To everyone's surprise, the Supreme Court has ruled that such subpoenas may be issued and reporters and editors may be put under oath and asked about their intent.
More screams, but mostly from people in the news industry. For the rest of the country, CBS looks less and less like a tribune of the people than a very large corporation whose sales last year exceeded 3,241 million dollars. It's not easy to identify with a multi-billion-dollar institution and, whether consciously or not, the judges are discovering that when a corporation like Time Inc. (more than a billion and a half dollars in sales last year) talks about freedom of the press, the non-stockholder citizen shrugs his shoulders.
In 20th-century American folk lore, the crusading reporter is a broke, down-at-heel stiff with nothing in his pockets but ideas. That is how Woodward and Bernstein were depicted in the film All The President's Men, but it has been widely reported that they made a million from Watergate. The gossip magazines never tire of making reference to the huge salaries paid to television news 'personalities', as they are not infrequently referred to. Thus, while the reporter retains the halo of the social avenger, there is another view superimposed — that of the high-status, highly-paid corporate employee, of the movie star no less.
It was in the frame of these controversies and opinions that David Halberstam's book, The Powers That Be, was released a few weeks ago. Halberstam, a former New York Times reporter who had scored a great success with a book on the chief Vietnam war policy-makers called The Best and The Brightest, had spent seven years researching his 771-page biography of Time Inc., CBS, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The writing leans toward the dray horse school, the editing is non-existent, but for all that he has given us a unique history of how the proprietor-editor-news publisher of the past became the CEO (Harvard Business School jargon for Chief Executive Officer, i.e. the boss) of an enormous media conglomerate and what some of its connections are to the political process. (Of the four, onlY the Washington Post grossed less than a billion dollars last year.) What irked the reviewers were the obsequiously flattering adjectives used to describe the CEOs and their immediate families. It is a bit like scratching dry skin to read how handsome and gifted Los Angeles Times CEO Otis Chandler is. But HalberS' tam also describes the same Chandler s involvement with an oil swindler who was sentenced to jail. Charges against Chandler were dropped, although not, Halberstani tells us, before he had had to spend the better part of a million dollars in legal fees. In the same schizo way, Halberstain pours adulatory syrup over CBS's CEO, William Paley, as he describes the McCar' thyite blacklisting at the giant network. yet more interesting is the description of the relations between Paley and Edward R. Murrow, American Broadcasting's martyr and patron saint of Truth. Murrow's rad°, broadcast from London during the secona world war made him famous and did much for home front morale, but after 1946 PaleY begrudged Murrow air time for current events when he could instead sell it to SAP companies for! Love Lucy shows. Halbers tam narrates how Murrow was eased out and how Paley and his associates decided to find a docile character to replace him. The book also helps to explain why the mega-corporate media conglomerates turned against Nixon and supplied the propaganda to chuck him out. The reasons had nothing to do with any alleged Eastern liberalism. Instead, a man like HedleY Donovan, one of Time Inc.'s top-ranking executives, was 'hearing from his friends in the business world about the kind of pres sures that Maurice Stans and Herbert Kalmbach had applied during the successfid fund-raising for the Committee to Re-elee. t the President. Little of that had surfaced in the public prints, but in the world of toP businessmen there was a back-channeAl knowledge that it was smutty and dirty an that the smell was very foul.' No other book gives such a good accoull! of how institutional mechanics and inforinal social process work to give the world's nriost powerful nation a one-party press, which o.11 occasion takes on the monochromatic sameness of the Eastern European Mass media.
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