The Whole Truth?

What is truth in the news? Many a newsman puts his answer in a handy formula : stick to the facts of speech, happening or pressagent's handout, let the reader supply his own background information on the story (if he has any) and call it "objective journalism." This week in the Atlantic Monthly, ABC Network Commentator Elmer Davis, wartime boss of the OWI and a first-rate newshand himself, takes the formula apart. "Truth has three dimensions," says Davis, yet the "practices of the American news business--practices adopted in a praiseworthy ambition to be objective--too often give us only one-dimensional news, factually accurate as far as it goes, but very far indeed from the whole truth."

Part of the trouble, says Davis, longtime (ten years) political reporter and editorial writer on the New York Times, comes from an "overemphasis on speed" --the rush to be first with the news. But a more basic reason is that U.S. newspapers, pursuing the ideal of "objectivity," "lean over backward so far that it makes the news business merely a transmission belt for pretentious phonies." Most newspapers, says Davis, still cling to the rule that news columns must print only as many sides or facts of an issue as a reporter has found. Interpretation must be kept on the editorial page. But printing the news that way does not help most readers to arrive at the truth. "How many readers have enough personal knowledge to distinguish fact from fiction, ignorance from knowledge, interest from impartiality" without their paper's help?

One Big Buildup. Even the most competent newspaper editor, says Davis, is often so convinced of the need to be objective that when he spots a "downright misstatment of facts" in a speech, he never follows it with a bracketed insert to the effect that "This simply is not so." If the Honorable John P. Hoozis is an important person, "you [may still] see him quoted at length in newspapers on almost any subject, with no indication that he knew nothing at all about it ... To do that would be editorializing, interpreting the news, failing in objectivity. You can do it to Stalin; you could do it to Hitler in his day; but tradition forbids doing it to one of our fellow citizens . . . Failure to make such a correction may salve a man's conscience about his loyalty to objectivity. But how about his loyalty to the reader?"

On the propaganda battle of the cold war, objectivity often plays right into the Russians' hands. For example, Davis noted that I.N.S. Correspondent Kingsbury Smith had a worldwide beat when he got answers to a list of questions he had sent to Stalin. "It has been reported--and, so far as I know not denied, that Kingsbury Smith had been tipped off that Stalin would answer those questions and presumably no others." Stalin's reply was "exactly [what] he would have written to get his propaganda arguments before the world . . . yet American newsmen keep asking Stalin the kind of questions he likes to answer." Even though some papers analyzed Stalin's replies in their editorials, "those editorials were read by far fewer people than saw the statement under big headlines on the front page."

Two Great Gulfs. Davis recognizes the danger that newsmen, in supplying adequate background to their news report, might easily fall into the trap of spreading their own prejudices all over the paper and "one Chicago Tribune is enough." Nevertheless, newsmen must do more interpreting. "The good newspaper, the good news broadcaster, must walk a tightrope between two great gulfs--on one side the false objectivity that takes everything at face value and lets the public be imposed on by a charlatan with the most brazen front, on the other the 'interpretive' reporting which fails to draw the line between objective and subjective, between responsible and well-established fact and what the reporter or editor wishes were the fact . . . No wonder that too many fall back on the incontrovertible objective fact that the Honorable John P. Hoozis said, colon, quote--and never mind whether he was lying or not."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.