"Drumbeat of Criticism"

By Thomas Griffith

The most meaningless and banal question in White House news coverage is when does the President's honeymoon end. If it is a honeymoon between President and press, the marriage never existed.

Tentative judgments about a new President are not the same thing: public and press want to give every new man a chance (there have been too many failed presidencies of late); it also takes the press a while to size up how a President and his new appointees respond to situations. Honeymoons are customarily proclaimed to be at an end when a frustrated President takes to blaming the press for his failing popularity. By this and other signs, Reagan's honeymoon is over, but there are some twists to the familiar plot.

For one thing, when Reagan criticizes the press, he often disarmingly takes it right back ("a little momentary frustration or misunderstanding, but that's all it is"). As his popularity has fallen--it is the lowest at this point in his term of any President since Truman--Republicans have urged him to mount a diversionary attack on the press and find a Spiro Agnew to do the dirty work. That is not Reagan style. Besides, he likes to describe himself as "a former reporter, columnist and commentator myself " and thus knows the tricks of the trade. To Voice of America employees not long ago, he did a fast-delivery imitation of how, as a young radio sports announcer in Iowa with only minimal telegraphed clues, he embroidered on a game he could not see ("The shortstop is going over after the ball and makes a wild stab, picks it up, turns and gets him out just in time"). This showed, he said, how the basic truth can be "attractively packaged." But that is closer to a pitchman's attitude toward facts than a reporter's.

At his latest press conference, Reagan made fewer errors than usual. He glanced at notes (a crutch that must have bothered an actor good at remembering his lines). But as he says himself: "I have never claimed to be a whiz kid, a robot, a bionic adding machine or a walking encyclopedia."

Perhaps such feints, bobs and weaves, which leave the impression that no confrontation is taking place, are what prompted Columnist Anthony Lewis last February to ask, "Why are editors still treating Mr. Reagan so gingerly?" He concluded that some editors and reporters are "frightened by what they see . . . a man who acts without real information." They find it "too upsetting" to acknowledge that the country's leadership "is in such hands." In April, Lewis' charge that press criticism is too muted could hardly be repeated.

Consider some examples. The cover line on the New Republic: IS REAGAN A BLOCKHEAD? Columnist William Safire, conservative and Republican, fears that a Reagan "in his 73rd year and too vain to wear a hearing aid" gives the impression of a man out of touch. Newsweek, on its April 5 cover, pictured a wan child and in big type ran this surprisingly loaded headline: REAGAN'S AMERICA: AND THE POOR GET POORER. George F. Will, perhaps Reagan's favorite columnist, after admiring Kissinger's use of detente, says, "Reagan's policy is detente without intellect." Columnist Joseph Kraft: "The noise you hear coming out of Washington these days is the Reagan Administration starting to come apart." David S. Broder, the Washington Post's veteran political reporter: "I have never seen a time when more thoughtful men and women in both parties were more concerned about the country's future . . . He is risking more than he seems to understand." The vehemence is what is remarkable.

Worried about a "drumbeat of criticism," Reagan pleads that everyone wait and see how his programs work out. A few columnists and commentators are prudently willing to do so. They don't really much praise Reagan currently in matters either domestic or foreign. But they do remember how a year ago he skillfully manipulated Congress. It will be harder this time, but Reagan might yet get more of his program through by his stubborn and risky resistance to compromise. Washington commentators seem divided into two groups about Reagan: worried and critical vs. worried but reserving condemnation.

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