The Pencil v. the Lens

Down front at Illinois State Treasurer Joseph Lohman's press conference, the television cameras and flood lamps were already in place, and TV technicians and newsmen had grabbed off many of the choice center seats. Making his way past them, the old reporter from a Chicago daily turned a baleful eye on the electronic newsmen. "Gentlemen," he said scornfully. "Technicians. Mechanics. Overpaid jerks!''

This scene last week gave clear evidence that the decade-old civil war between pencil and TV newsmen is still being fought. Indeed, new broadsides have erupted from California to New York over a new issue: segregation, or separate-but-equal press conferences.

"No Right to Do This." The fresh skirmishing dates roughly from last November, when New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, then still a presidential hopeful, arrived in Los Angeles and called a press conference. As was his policy, said Rockefeller, he would hold two sessions, one for newspapermen and one for the TV cameras. But Los Angeles TV men would have none of that. Vainly protesting Rockefeller's segregation policy, they sat grumpily in on the newspaper conference, and then, when their turn came, walked out en masse, taking their cameras with them.

This month, hostilities broke out anew around California's Governor Edmund G. Brown, who also holds separate conferences. Forced to sit by while the pencil reporters got first crack, Los Angeles TV newsmen staged another walkout--to "Pat" Brown's speakable anguish. "You people have absolutely no right to do this," he cried. "I am the Governor of the state of California, and I have things to say to the people of California." In Massachusetts, Governor Foster Furcolo once carried segregation so far as to answer the same question four times--first for the pencil newsmen and then for each of Boston's three commercial TV stations.

Nothing for Background. The pencil newsmen tend to regard their TV colleagues as upstarts who know little more about journalism than how to plug a cable into a socket. The newspapermen resent being forced to feed their best questions to the TV competition, and they feel strongly that the camera's presence spoils the essential informality of press conferences. How can a news source say, "Now, if I may explain for your background," when mikes are open and cameras are grinding?

On their side, the TV men, many of them able newsmen, claim equal right to first crack at the news, and charge that dual press conferences may be separate but they can never be equal. Said Coy Watson, news director for Sacramento's KCRA-TV: "News is only news once." Fortnight ago all three major TV networks--NBC, CBS and ABC--announced that their men would no longer appear at separate conferences scheduled for TV by the Governors of New York and California, but they would send pencil reporters to the press conferences and leave the cameras at home.

Just a Performance. Paradoxically, the battle forces get along best where the provocation is greatest--in Washington, where press conferences come as thick as Congressmen. President Eisenhower established his own pattern early in his presidency by inviting all accredited comers, TV and pencil newsmen alike, to his news conferences. On the other hand,

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn will not let TV men cover House hearings, and bars them from his own press conferences. For space reasons, Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty keeps TV cameras out of regular briefings in his crowded office, but when he has a visitor he wants to "sponsor"--as the White House press corps puts it--he sets up a special show for TV. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson grants TV newsmen only a brief audience after his regular press conference, insists that they submit their questions in advance and explodes if they try to ring in an ad-libbed query. The complaisant Capitol press corps, long used to the ways of Washington procedure, accepts all these arrangements without fuss.

Washington has at least faced the fact of life: the TV camera is here to stay. But accepting that fact is not easy for old pencil men. Says Louis Lyons, curator of the Nieman Foundation, a onetime newspaperman and now a TV man: "With TV cameras, it becomes a performance, not a real press conference."

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