Going Eyeball to Eyeball--and Blinking

By Thomas Griffith

After dispensing opinions on the economy and President Reagan's foreign policy, the Washington columnists on Martin Agronsky's television show turned animatedly to a subject closer to heart. George F. Will was the most intense about it: "The presence of a gossip column on a great paper, which the Post is, is inconsistent with the mission and dignity of the Washington Post." Printing gossip, he went on, is "pandering to the voyeurism of a celebrity-struck public. When you then combine [this] with the doctrine that says we are not responsible for the factual nature of the rumor at all, only for the fact that it is a rumor, then you have given your gossip columnist a license to disseminate lies."

Once again, the Washington Post was finding itself widely criticized throughout journalism, but the Agronsky show was a special embarrassment. Agronsky polled his four television panelists: Would they have passed along the rumor, as the Post had, that Blair House was bugged while the Reagans were staying there before the Inauguration? A chorus of nos. What made the poll piquant was that aside from TIME's Hugh Sidey, all of the panelists (James J. Kilpatrick, Carl Rowan, George Will) are columnists in the Post, and the Agronsky show itself is owned and produced by the Washington Post Co. Such mumbling in the ranks might comfort those who worry that the Post's journalistic monopoly in Washington might stifle dissent, but little else was comforting about the Post's latest difficulties.

Widely regarded as one of the two or three best newspapers in the country, the Post got its reputation while inviting controversy. Watergate gave it a success it has since labored to match and an arrogance when challenged that compounds its difficulties. Back in 1978 Alistair Cooke defined the malady: "The Post is suffering from radiation, or smartass, sickness after overlong exposure to Nixon & Co." The result has been some notable missteps, such as a leering and erroneous account of Zbigniew Brzezinski's sexual behavior and a Pulitzer-prizewinning story that proved to be a phony. So when the Carters challenged the bugging item and demanded a retraction, Executive Editor Ben Bradlee characteristically asked: "How do you make a public apology--run up and down Pennsylvania Avenue bare-bottom, shouting 'I'm sorry'?" He hasn't yet--but last week the Post looked a little bare-bottomed as it made a front-page apology to the Carters, who then dropped plans to sue. The Post admitted publishing what "we later find to be untrue." How did it get itself into such a box?

The Post is a schizoid newspaper--solid in its reporting of national and international affairs, flashy in feature sections where writers are encouraged to stretch their imaginations. The two irreconcilable sides of the paper become one in the head of its debonair and aggressive editor Ben Bradlee. Like John McEnroe on a tennis court, Bradlee loses his playing edge when he can't stir things up.

The flashy side of the paper produced the bugging item.

The serious side squirmed and printed a lame editorial claiming the right to publish a rumor that it found "utterly impossible to believe." Many readers assumed that lawyers had cobbled together this apologetic phrase, hoping to mitigate libel damages. Not so, says Publisher Donald Graham, 36. The responsibility was his. Defending the editorial soon became more awkward than defending the gossip item. It infuriated the paper's national desk. As for Bradlee, he disclaimed any part in the editorial and seemed to be reliving the days of Deep Throat; he had been "eyeball to eyeball" with the gossip columnist's source, who got it from "two members of the Carter family--the personal family." Let them sue; the Post's countersubpoenas would fly. After the retraction, a chastened but unrepentant Bradlee insisted that, alas, "my source changed his number on me, from bugged to taped"; the item couldn't be defended.

Could gossip itself be defended?

"I've been hearing from the highest-principled people in the world," Bradlee says sarcastically. "They raise the question: Is a gossip column fit for human consumption in Washington, D.C.? Gossip is the biggest industry in town! I don't want to edit the dullest, stuffiest, intellectualist paper around."

The Post, with its 730,000 circulation, has to appeal not only to its most intelligent readers but to "quite different people--the old mass- vs.-class editor's problem." But mass vs. class makes a poor defense in the case of the Post's gossip column called the "Ear," which ran in the Washington Star until that paper folded last August. It is so full of innuendo, knowledgeable references to a lot of people who are not household names and condescending intimacy toward the well-known that the masses would need a decoder to follow it.

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger makes a much better case for gossip. To him, Washington social life is a brutal place, "geared substantially to power, its exercise and its decline ... the topic of who is 'up' and who is 'down' is all consuming." People in Government meet formally by day but get to know one another only at night: "It is at their dinner parties and receptions that the relationships are created without which the machinery of Government would soon stalemate itself." This suggests that gossip is too important to be left to gossip writers, who occupy a rather lowly place in journalistic hierarchies. Gossip writing requires snoopy eavesdropping, a delight in malice and a readiness to go into print with one side, or one piece of a story. A double standard exists for gossip: it doesn't have to be as thoroughly documented as a news story. One question Bradlee has difficulty answering is why, if he believed the Carter bugging story to be true (and he had personally cleared it before publication), had he not assigned a reporter to develop it into a front-page story, instead of settling for a smirky little gossip item? From his experience, Publisher Graham has concluded that reportorially "there can be only one standard for the entire paper."

In making his retraction, Graham restated the paper's position: "Our policy is to print news that is accurate from sources we believe to be reliable." This may be, as Bradlee says, a motherhood declaration, but it's a better ground to stand on than where the paper last stood.

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