Turning Off the News Spigot

By Thomas Griffith

For the past ten or twelve weeks, news has been coming out of the spigots in full force--a steady flow of news about Iran, Afghanistan, the Olympics, Iowa and New Hampshire. What happens when one of the spigots gets turned off?

Last month Iran expelled about 90 U.S. reporters, photographers and technicians. An Iranian official thought the action might quiet American tempers and "help the situation as a whole." Certainly it's some relief to be spared the nightly sight of camera-conscious Tehran mobs who seem to have nothing else to do but shake their fists on cue and rant against America. In a sense, what is missing is not news but staged photo opportunities. Early in the Iranian crisis, John Chancellor of NBC had worried about getting those demonstrators off TV, fearing a "possible wave of jingoism" in this country, but it never surfaced. Now that Iranian demonstrators have no cameras to show off in front of, New York Times Reporter Bernard Weinraub concludes that Americans still seem concerned about the hostages. But, as he quotes Bill Leonard, president of CBS News: "There's a softening of interest, people are emotionally less involved."

Yet ABC's late-night news program on Iran still gets high ratings. And Walter Cronkite has taken to signing off on the CBS Evening News: "And that's the way it is, the 86th [or 96th] day of captivity for those 50 American hostages in Iran." Cronkite's gesture is well meant, but network anchormen don't usually, and shouldn't, inject patriotic reminders into news coverage. In fact, when John Connally argued in a 1977 speech in Houston that the press has a duty to express "a candid bias" for the preservation of the free enterprise system, Cronkite sharply set him straight: "It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts." That's still good doctrine. Cronkite concedes that his new sign-off, which he thought up himself, is "a special case," because as Iran ceased to be the day's biggest story, "I thought we ought to have a daily reminder."

Not so over at NBC. "I don't think we're social engineers," says Chancellor.

"We shouldn't get involved in it." But then, NBC has had an Iranian advantage it doesn't brag about. When other American journalists were expelled, NBC's enterprising John Cochran was allowed to stay on. Publicizing a privilege might end it. But perhaps NBC also fears what the other two networks would say about favoritism. After all, only NBC, in the common eagerness to broadcast an interview with a U.S. hostage, was willing back in December to grant that Iranian woman student six minutes of prime-time propaganda.

Cochran's advantage soon may not matter. Iran's newly elected President Abolhassan Banisadr has expressed his willingness to readmit American journalists. He also made an interesting, though perhaps unintended admission: "Their presence is better here even if they tell lies than if they write something about Iran from abroad or if they write nothing at all."

The news spigots have been turned off in Afghanistan too, or at least diminished to a drip. As the Soviet Union takes hold and expels Western correspondents and cameramen, expect to see fewer of those distant grainy films of Soviet transports landing, and Soviet tanks lumbering up the road, giving visual confirmation to the anchorman's words. Chancellor feels "frustrated as hell."

To editorial writers on newspapers, "Afghanistanism" has long had a special insider's meaning that is suddenly out of date. It meant ducking hot issues. Robert U. Brown, editor of the trade weekly Editor and Publisher, remembers when Tulsa Editor Jenkin Lloyd Jones first used it in a 1948 speech to a convention of editorial writers. "Many an editorial writer can't hit a short-range target," Jones said. "It takes guts to dig up the dirt on the sheriff, or to expose a utility racket, or to tangle with the Governor. They all bite back, and you had better know your stuff. But you can pontificate about the situation in Afghanistan in perfect safety. You have no fanatic Afghans among your readers. Nobody knows more about the subject than you do, and nobody gives a damn."

As more papers become chain-owned, with their absentee owners not much interested in making waves in the local community, there has been a sharp jump in Afghanistanism on the nation's editorial pages, but it now needs a new name. An editorial writer seeking an innocuous topic that won't roil any readers might be advised to consider economic troubles in Ouagadougou.

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