Getting Your Man

By Thomas Griffith

Bert Lance is back in Georgia and no longer a threat to the republic, so it should be possible to discuss more coolly how the press treated him. The press has already delivered its own verdict, conceding only that maybe there were a few excesses on its part (TIME, Sept. 19). But since Lance turned out to be guilty of shoddy banking practices, newshounds were not barking up the wrong tree, were they? Jimmy Carter, who hopes to live in wary peace with the press, has resisted all invitations at news conferences to accuse reporters of having driven Lance out of Washington. So all's well that--for the press--ended well? Not exactly. An NBC poll last week reported that 59% of the public thought Lance should have quit, yet by 45% to 42% they concluded that Lance was indeed harassed from office by the press. There is still something to be said about the means that were used.

The end did not justify the New York Times, which, having been slow out of the starting gate on Watergate, gave the front-page spotlight to Lance even on days when there was no story about him that deserved such treatment. There is a difference between pursuing the facts and going after a man. The end also did not ennoble William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter turned columnist who seeks to establish--with the repetitious use of labels like Lancegate --that all politicians are as shabby as Nixon. Cheap-shot comparisons are an old and dubious journalistic device: as if two people who share one trait can be said to share them all. New York magazine got in a worse cheap shot by egregiously referring to Lance as Carter's Bebe Rebozo.

Yet one has to hand it to Safire, who often sportingly supplies the antidote to his own poison. On a trip to London he reported that "the average Briton" was horrified by the Lance affair: "Once again the American press seems to be engaged in 'breaking' a President... So I tell my British friends that the real stability of American government is in our public sense of constitutional morality, and that the press is doing the Carter presidency a favor," etc. Safire, however, then prints the reply of an English friend: "I would be more inclined to believe you if you chaps didn't seem to relish it so."

One of the journalistic inflations of the story was the frequent and foolish assertion that Lance held the "second most important post in government." If this be so, does anyone believe that one American in 20 could name the previous occupant?

Television coverage too had much to answer for. It only bore witness to, it did not instigate, Senator Percy's nasty innuendoes about tax evasion by Lance, and Percy's subsequent smarmy retraction. Moreover, TV's steady eye on the hearings produced what no amount of print reporting could do: a dramatic switch of public sympathy to Lance, who, despite the damaging admissions he had to make, carried himself more impressively under relentless scrutiny than any other congressional witness within memory.

In its own reporting, however, television was guilty of cruel but not unusual punishment. Scenting the kill, TV camera crews laid daily siege to Lance as he left his home in the morning or his office at night. A small army of pushy reporters thrust long microphone rods into his face and asked the most impertinent questions, hoping to elicit an off-guard response. This is a drumhead trial, and few of those who are subjected to such a process escape unscathed. A print reporter who finds a rumor to be unfounded usually does not refer to it in print; but a television reporter's unverified insinuation, heard on-camera, lingers in the audience's ear. The scene recalls the notorious "ratissage," or rat hunt, of the French army in Algeria, in which captured guerrillas had to run a gauntlet of soldiers wielding rifle butts.

But television's treatment of Lance even more closely resembled those familiar scenes on local news shows where a rape or murder suspect is brought to police headquarters, ducking his way through a mob of hectoring reporters. Those nightly scenes illustrate television's show-biz fascination with action, drama and sadism.

By putting Bert Lance through the twice-daily gauntlet of shoving reporters, the press might say in its own defense that each newsman was only responding to competitive pressures for a new picture, a new quote. Nothing personal, you understand: we do it to everybody who gets in a jam. But this tumultuous, superficial "reporting," which is about all the public ever sees of reporting, gives all journalism a bad name. And these are matters to keep in mind, even though Lance was right to quit, Carter was wrong in defending him, and it was Lance's own failure to justify his past conduct, and not harassment by the press, that really brought him down.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.