Fear of Poisoned Wells

Nothing in recent memory has quite so disturbed and transfixed the U.S. press as the street battles during the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Mayor Daley and reporters have turned the confrontation into a sort of Punch and Judy morality show, and last week they were still pummeling away.

The Los Angeles Times' political editor, Carl Greenberg, intoned that "when newsmen are slugged, clubbed, arrested and generally harassed in the performances of their duties, we are approaching the end of freedom." Daley swung back with a so-called "white paper" (see THE NATION). There would have been no trouble at all, he insisted, if reporters and TV cameras had not been on hand to provide the demonstrators with an audience. As for newspaper coverage, Daley said, it was biased.

Losing Relevance. Of course, some of it was biased. Since there was no question that the police were singling out reporters and photographers for rough treatment, it was hardly surprising that some of them felt more sympathy for the attacked than the attackers. And, in a way, Daley was right about the presence of TV cameras having an effect on what happened. As New York Magazine Writer Sophy Burnham pointed out last week, the presence of TV cameras and lights changes the mood and attitude of people before them, much as "a girl undressing is quite aware of the man watching her and removes her clothes accordingly." So it went, Daley whitewashing and the press protesting, until it almost seemed that the two were trapped in a hypnotic dance of horrors from which neither could escape.

It all had a certain fascination. The only trouble was that after it had been gone over and over, time and again, it began to lose meaning and, more important, relevance. It was not enough to endlessly call the demonstrators "Communists" and endlessly to denounce "police brutality." The crucial question about the riots, now three weeks past, is no longer merely who did what, with what, to whom. More important is why the melee occurred, and what it meant. So far, the press has failed sufficiently to plumb those questions.

Central Casting. There is much that needs to be explained and understood. The Chicago riots were entirely different from uprisings in the ghettos. Those were spontaneous, disorganized, racial. Chicago, in fact, was a formal, prearranged confrontation between the Old and New Politics. Central Casting could have produced no better field marshal for the Old Politics army. Like some 18th century European general, Mayor Daley chose the place of battle, formed his battalions, set his lines of defense, and established his criteria for defeat or victory: there would be no disturbances in the streets of Chicago. The leftist youth leaders--Tom Hayden, David Dillinger, Jerry Rubin--drew up their counterstrategy and took the field, determined to prove that Daley's boast was hollow. On those terms, victory clearly went to the rebels.

But what did the victory mean, and what will it bring? Will it inspire advocates of the New Politics--young, rebellious and impatient for change--to greater battles and more broken heads? Will it solidify the silent masses of settled, older Americans into rigid and angry resistance? Mayor Daley's mail count, despite press objections to his tactics, is running 20 to 1 in his favor.

The press may never get to the bottom of the confrontation. Columnist Joseph Kraft feels that the press has lost touch with "the great mass of ordinary Americans"--the white-and blue-collar workers who earn from $6,000 to $10,000 a year and are fed up with inflation, higher taxes, civil rights protests and "crime in the streets." Their frustrations are becoming acute enough to "foreshadow a coming wave of folk malevolence," Kraft warns, and yet they are largely ignored. In return, the people in what he calls "Middle America" have come to distrust columnists and re porters as sanctimonious and unrealistic. Their alienation is more than matched by that of the rising New Left, which sees the press as a tool of the Establishment that it has vowed to overcome.

New York Post Columnist Max Lerner has been pondering the problem. "Mostly our sins are lack of analysis in depth, and lack of venturesomeness in the realm of ideas, and lack of historical background, and a tendency to treat every isolated event as equal to every other event in a kind of democracy of news. But these are very different sins from those that Wallace and Daley charge against the media today. For the paranoid projects his own fears on others, makes his own conspiratorial imaginings into conspiracies against him, generalizes his mistrust of himself into a mistrust of everyone. If you feel that the wells are poisoned, and that nothing you read can be trusted, then there is a vacuum of fellow-feeling for anyone, and into that vacuum some silly and destructive ideas can move."

Some editors and reporters feel that the challenge facing the press is to put aside the feud with Mayor Daley and fill the vacuum with thought and solid analysis. "There's a Pulitzer waiting here for any newspaper that will get off its haunches," says Reporter Dorothy Storck of Chicago's American, "but I don't see any paper doing that."

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