The Not-So-Free Press

The Washington press corps likes to picture itself battling heroically for the news against a secretive enemy -- the U.S. Government. Writing in this month's Harper's, Washington Correspondent Joseph Kraft finds that picture highly flawed. "For the usual reasons of self-esteem," says Kraft, "the news community clings to the conventional notion of a 'free and independent press' arduously 'digging out' information 'without fear or favor' over the enraged shrieks of a monolithic Government. In support of that myth, prizes are awarded every year to the diminishing handful of journalists, usually from small towns, who do happen to dig up new information, usually of no consequence.

"The myth is fostered by grave talk of the public's 'right to know,' and the need for 'great debates on great issues.' It is further enhanced by slogans: The truth shall make ye free,' for example, which supposes that there is a truth in public affairs and that journalists have access to it; or 'All the news that's fit to print,' which imagines that news, in stead of being something shaped and put out for the eye of the beholder, is something that really exists -- solid, tan -gible, visible."

Back of the myth, says Kraft, lies the reality: reporters competing feverishly to put across their highly selective ver sion of the news, shaped, inevitably, to their own prejudices and predilections. It is when the Government objects to their version that reporters raise the banner of the free press, elevating what is merely a political squabble into a "generalized and historic clash based on universal principles."

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