The Danger of Hobnobbery Journalism

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch / Thomas Griffith

It is not yet clear whether the Carter briefing papers are a molehill waiting to be made into a mountain or a mountain trying to pass itself off as a molehill. Although the story has so far claimed no victims in the Reagan Administration, it has dealt a glancing blow to a bright star of the Washington press corps, George F. Will, the conservative columnist, and raised anew the question of how cozy journalists should be with politicians.

In a Washington Journalism Review poll last month, Will was voted the journalist most admired by Senators, Congressmen and their staffs. His column appears in more than 400 papers. He has never really been a reporter, but on ABC's This Week with David Brinkley, he has proved to be a cool, intense, intimidating interviewer. A private person, he was never one to dine out on the fact that President-elect Reagan and Nancy came to dinner at his house, or that the President asked him to draft a speech to give before the British Parliament.

At first Will didn't understand what all the fuss was about when word got out that he had known from the beginning that the Reagan people had Carter's briefing book, and that he had helped prepare Reagan for the Carter debate at a mock rehearsal (William Safire, similarly invited, declined). Once before, when Will's professional conduct had been criticized, he complained with baroque condescension that journalism is "now infested with persons who are little moral thermometers'. . . spreading a silly scrupulosity." That sort of putdown didn't work this time.

What most angered Will's colleagues was that Will, on ABC's Nightline after the debate, had acclaimed Reagan's "Thoroughbred performance." In awarding Reagan the victory, the New Republic commented, Will "posed as a referee without ever making it clear that he had been one of the seconds." The New York Daily News, calling this unethical behavior, dropped Will's column in such haste as to prompt the suspicion that he may have been too erudite for its tabloid readers all along.

On Martin Agronsky's roundtable TV program, Will heard his colleagues James J. Kilpatrick and Carl Rowan chide him. The following day, on the Brinkley broadcast, he had to take it again. (ABC was particularly anxious to clear its own skirts.) Will, a man of enormous self-confidence, appeared a bit chastened. He told Brinkley that the President, after watching the Agronsky show, had called Will to belittle the "peculiar" idea "that I need people like you to tell me how to go out in public and debate the basic issues of the day." Will's own defense is that as a commentator hired for his opinions, which are hardly a secret, he deserves to be judged differently from "the straight news reporter."

Will has a point, but not enough of one. To the public he is now a conspicuous member of the press, and no longer just a polemicist. In a long column in the Washington Post, Will said he was glad he had done what he had done, but would not do it again. The Post considered that a satisfactory apology, a word Will did not use.

The accepted "rules of hygiene" for the press in these matters were set down by Walter Lippmann, the most widely respected columnist of his day, in a 1964 television interview: "Newspapermen can't be the cronies of great men. There always has to be a certain distance between high public officials and newspapermen. I wouldn't say a wall or a fence, but an air space, that's very necessary." Of course, Lippmann never practiced what he preached. As the personal acquaintance of twelve Presidents, Lippmann was the leading exemplar of what Columnist Colgman McCarthy calls "hobnobbery journalism." But he had become disillusioned in his 70s when Lyndon Johnson, with flattery and lies, with private lunches and birthday gifts, had tried to bear-hug Lippmann into supporting the Viet Nam War. "Every time I pull my chair nearer that guy," L.B.J. complained, "he pulls his chair farther away."

Hobnobbery journalism was most widespread during the Kennedy Administration. In his elitist way, Kennedy preferred the company of journalists to politicians. Many journalists who enjoyed the intimacy knew they could be excluded at any moment by presidential whim or pique; they got insiders' confidences but at the price of being courtiers; they felt uneasy at the time, and many felt regretful later.

Ben Bradlee, now the executive editor of the Washington Post, had been a Georgetown neighbor and particular chum of Kennedy's. Working then for Newsweek, he would sometimes be asked by his editors to find out for competitive reasons whose face would be on the cover of TIME the following week. Bradlee would ask the President, who would find out and call back. Bradlee got one exclusive story about Kennedy's past personal life, involving a false report of an earlier J.F.K. marriage, when the President agreed to let Bradlee secretly examine for 24 hours all the FBI files in the case. But in return Newsweek had to give Kennedy final approval of the story that ran. To grant any news source such a veto over a story is bad policy, Bradlee would later acknowledge. It becomes a conspiracy against the public interest.

George Will is in a sense a victim of standards that have changed since Lippmann would write a speech for a public figure, then write a column praising the address. A number of Washington journalists decline to socialize after hours with those they report upon; others like Will consider the experience valuable and intend to go on doing so. But they are then under an obligation to be more forthcoming to the public about what they are doing. The line between journalistic detachment and participation may be wavery, but it is there, and George Will overstepped it. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.