Defaming with Questions

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

It may not matter to the New York Times whether its reporter gets in a question at a presidential press'conference, but each network wants to display its White House correspondent posing a question--and avoid showing questioners from the other networks. Roone Arledge, president of ABC News, is amused when the competition feels obliged to show the President answering ABC'S Sam Donaldson, and does so with "sound bites" of incomplete sentences, so that the viewer doesn't hear Ronald Reagan familiarly addressing "Sam." Donaldson knows how to ask the burr-edged question that can't be ignored.

As Reagan once said, "It's O.K., we all know Sam's irrepressible." He may be the toughest on-the-air questioner now that the defending champions, Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters, have eased up a little. Walters can still hurl a sugar-tipped dart, but has taken to asking Nancy Reagan what kind of tree she would be, if she were a tree.

Donaldson is also to be seen, well prepared, on This Week with David Brinkley, where he and George F. Will work over Prime Ministers, Congressmen and Cabinet members. This is no good-guy, bad-guy team. Will throws out questions from deep rightfield. Donaldson simply goes straight for the jugular. The effect can be unfair, informative and intimidating. The exchange must be fast. Any guest who wants time to reflect risks not being asked back. If he filibusters, he will be interrupted (it takes equal brass, as with Senator Edward Kennedy, to insist, "Excuse me, if I can finish--").

Into this lion's den came the Christian, the Rev. Billy Graham, newly back from the Soviet Union and impressed by the religious freedom there. A fellow evangelical, the Rev. Edmund Robb, was also on the program, assuring Graham, "I love you, I believe in you" but insisting that Graham had been "very naive." Will and Donaldson felt no need to establish whether or not they love Billy Graham.

Graham himself does not always turn the other cheek. When, a few days later, he was told Bill Moyers' remark that it "was not easy to sup with power and get up without spots," Graham replied: "Bill would certainly know about that ... He's supped with power quite a lot." On the Brinkley show, however, Graham was, like most guests, a consenting victim.

Since Graham had been out of the country for a while, Brinkley crisply summed up the American reaction to Graham's trip: "That you have been royally entertained, taken around Moscow in a limousine, fed caviar three times a day, and have been 'taken in.' What is your response to that?" Graham: "David, I was not taken in." The evidence seems to be that he was, but what is of interest is the way Graham was questioned--the technique of the unbuttressed accusation disguised as a question. In television interviewing, this dubious tactic is now acceptable shorthand.

Will: "Dr. Graham, you've changed your tone about the Soviet Union amazingly in the last 30 years, and just this spring, as the peace movement has become hot politically, you have appeared at the head of it. Is there an element of opportunism in this?" A tough question, but fair: the implied accusation is Will's own. Donaldson: "There are a lot of people, Dr. Graham, who are saying that you are not testifying for God, but you are testifying only for the ego of Billy Graham. How do you respond to that?" Note the lack of any named source, just "a lot of people." Later: "Dr. Graham, why not preach here at home? Aren't there people in the United States who need your ministry?" Graham: "That's where I spend 90% of my time--" Donaldson: "Yes, but I asked you the question because your critics, or some of them, say that you have this belief that your ego requires a worldwide Christian ministry on your part."

Donaldson gets a lot of mail saying, "You're rude, you're crude, " and feared an avalanche of letters from the offended churchly. So, he concedes, he got across his own unsympathetic feelings by attributing them to unnamed critics.

As they say, and the "they" in this case are those who produce programs like this, "it makes good television."

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