President and Press: A Debate

While he was a Presidential Counsellor to Richard Nixon, easygoing and accessible Daniel Patrick Moynihan was widely popular with the press. He was the friend of many reporters, including Max Frankel, Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Times. Now Moynihan is back to university teaching and provocative writing. In a recent Commentary article titled "The Presidency & the Press," he decries a shift in power away from the White House to the press that he claims might, if it continues, seriously weaken effective Government. Frankel subsequently wrote a 15-page, single-spaced "Dear Pat" reply. Moynihan's five-point attack, and Frankel's rebuttal:

The tradition of muckraking, Moynihan says, has fallen into the hands of an unlikely new breed of Washington journalists: not only professionally elite, but "one of the most important and enduring social elites of the city." Even worse, those who have what Moynihan calls an "Ivy League" outlook bring to their work "attitudes genuinely hostile to American society and American government." Frankel's reply: "We are, of course, guilty of having switched, over the last generation, to a more educated corps of reporters, if only to keep up with the credentials and footwork of the holders of public office." It is, he adds, "one of the more enduring attractions of our business that any bright lad of proletarian or other origin can rid himself of the social and hierarchical pressures of our society to participate, as a journalist, in the political process of our country." (Frankel himself is a German-born naturalized citizen who was graduated from Columbia in 1952.)

Coincidental with the rising power of the press, Moynihan charges, the nation has developed a concept of "near-omnipotence" in the office of the presidency, which is largely the result of Franklin D. Roosevelt's strongman tenure. The press, particularly such "presidential newspapers" as the Times and the Washington Post, sets so high a standard for the performance of any President that he is doomed to perpetual failure on their pages. Frankel argues that criticism is not the result of unrealistic expectations "but the habit of regular deception in our politics and Administration . . . the damnable tendency toward manipulation that forces us so often into the posture of apparent adversaries." Naive credulity on the part of the Washington press corps, Frankel adds, was shot down with the U-2 over the Soviet Union in 1960, and he prefers the "informed skepticism" that has replaced it.

Moynihan questions press use of material leaked by lower-level bureaucrats who are often motivated by personal or parochial departmental interests and actually antagonistic to the policies of the President they serve. "What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked," Moynihan contends. Frankel insists that "deliberate disclosure of information for the purpose of injuring the President is relatively rare" and asks: "Even if the deliberate 'leaking' were as harmful as you suggest, is it your contention that the press should ignore such information and pretend it was never received?"

Self-Correction. Point four in Moynihan's indictment is one that journalists have posed for themselves ever since the days of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy: How, in the pursuit of objectivity and fairness, can they avoid inflating a man and inflaming an issue? Editors often err, Moynihan says, in judging "whether an event really is news, or simply a happening, a non-event staged for the purpose of getting into the papers." He, too, cites McCarthy, as well as a more recent focus of news and controversy, the Students for a Democratic Society. "If the S.D.S. stages a confrontation over a trumped-up issue, why oblige it by taking the whole episode at face value?" Frankel does not really contest the point but directs his rejoinder elsewhere. "Yes, we are sometimes taken in, and our readers are sometimes taken for a ride. But the culprit, far more often, is the Government, the President, if you will, than the random extremist."

The most serious failure Moynihan finds in the press is the lack of a professional corrective for failure itself. He rejects the traditional letters-to-the-editor columns as inadequate and finds a press council, like Great Britain's, unsuitable for the U.S. He applauds the Post's recent appointment of a veteran reporter, Richard Harwood, as the paper's internal ombudsman; it is, he hopes, a "profoundly important beginning" toward a self-monitoring press. Moynihan's concern is also the preoccupation of many newspaper editors, and a few newspapers use variants of the Harwood function to check their accuracy. Frankel's reply to the issue of self-correction is not a response to the specific point, but an attack on the entire Moynihan thesis. He writes: "Such opportunity for correction is rarely denied the White House ... If our Presidents are seriously concerned about 'protracted conflict' with a large enough segment of our population and genuinely believe, with you, that they are steadily losing that conflict, they had better look Well beyond the bearers of the bad news and certainly well beyond the morning paper. They might even look in a mirror."

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