New Cop on the Beat

American journalism does not possess any agency to guard its standards and supervise its practitioners. A newspaper publisher can give criminal advice, lie to the public, poison its intelligence without being held accountable for his conduct.

Political Scientist Leo C. Rosten's comments in his 1937 book. The Washington Correspondents, are as applicable today as they were 25 years ago. Few policemen patrol the U.S. journalism beat. Last week in Manhattan, journalism's undermanned police force got a new recruit.

Its name: the Columbia Journalism Review, a quarterly devoted exclusively to criticism of the nation's press, and promising to "deal forthrightly with what it finds to be deficient or irresponsible and to salute what it finds to be responsible, fair and professional." The newcomer sounds off in various voices, on a scale ranging from James Thurber's dry comment on newspapers' tendency to merge ("One day there is going to be just one newspaper and the whole front page will have to be devoted to the name") to an exhaustive reprise of the recent press row over Merriam-Webster's new dictionary (which gives respectability to such vulgarisms as "ain't").

Though too large a share of Review's contents is either borrowed or dusty, it is livened by some fresh studies of the journalistic scene. A quarter-century after Rosten, William L. Rivers, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas, takes another look at the Washington press corps, finds its members better paid, better educated--and better equipped to resist the narrow mandates of their editors: "Of all the changes, none is more significant than a new sense of freedom from the prejudices of the home office." Strangely, the Review itself seems unwilling to be unequivocal in its critical columns. After examining Dow-Jones's disappointing new weekly newspaper, the National Observer, the Review ticks off numerous flaws ("unbelievably prolix . . .cluttered . . . fillers of trifling import"), then warmly salutes the new paper: "Deserving of congratulations all around." In the same spirit of charity, it finds the San Francisco Chronicle "the big-city newspaper of the future," then adds: "It just doesn't print much news."

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