Monday, Apr. 12, 1976

Journalism is "an exciting way to do good," maintains Thomas Griffith, the man behind our new press feature, "Newswatch." But after 40 years in journalism, including a starting stint as a police reporter with the Seattle Times in his native Washington State, Griffith is quick to qualify that idealism: "I'm much more skeptical," he adds dryly, "than when I started out." In fact, it was his well-developed skepticism that prompted Griffith to write his 1974 book How True (subtitle: A Skeptic's Guide to Believing the News). Its object: to provide readers with an inside view of print and broadcast journalism in order to help them evaluate the news. "It is absolutely necessary to be a skeptical reader," argues Griffith. "The more that boundaries are blurred between straight reporting, editorials and impressionistic reporting, the more the reader needs to judge for himself the reliability of what he is reading."

Now, with "Newswatch," which is scheduled to appear once every two or three weeks, Griffith will be something of a one-man monitoring board. He plans to continue what he did in How True: "Talk about what is right and wrong about the press." His intention is not to turn out a "trade column" but to write for the concerned layman and to focus on issues that the public finds "pertinent and fascinating"--such as whether the press should print everything it knows. "Some journalists feel that because of the First Amendment they couldn't possibly be accountable to anyone," says Griffith. "That position is nice to hold, but an awful lot of people are very critical of the press and want it to feel more responsible for what it does. This intersection of debate is fundamentally what I'll be writing about."

A familiar figure around Time Inc. since 1943, Griffith used to be a writer, senior editor and assistant managing editor at TIME. In 1959, he wrote The Waist-High Culture, an analysis of such ills of American society as materialism and the decline of excellence. Later he became senior staff editor for all Time Inc. publications and editor of LIFE. Now, in addition to writing "Newswatch" and TIME Essays, he contributes frequently to FORTUNE and the Atlantic Monthly.

"Some columns of 'Newswatch,' I expect, will be angry at particular press performances," says Griffith. "Other pieces will examine why the press had to do what it did." Whatever the approach, Griffith hopes that the result for his readers will be an enlivened interest in the ways of the newsgathering world. As Martin Arnold, who was then covering the press for the New York Times, noted in his review of How True, Griffith "succeeds admirably in making the reader think about journalism."

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