Newswatch: Credibility At Stake

By Thomas Griffith

Libel suits are a clumsy, costly and inefficient way of getting at the truth. The defending press can be grateful not to have to pay out the millions of dollars demanded in the Westmoreland and Sharon cases (large awards were becoming fashionable), but it cannot be happy about the prolonged and critical examination of flaws in its newsgathering processes.

Nowadays it is hard to find a foundation that hasn't scheduled a seminar about press credibility or a talk show that isn't discussing it. The press has been on a binge of self-consciousness for some time. Since it regards itself as more reliable and more professional than it used to be, why does it get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield?

The change in public attitudes over the years can be traced in three popular films--the early Front Page, which sentimentally celebrated cynical and amoral Chicago newspapering; All the President's Men, which ennobled the journalism that brought down Nixon; and the more recent Absence of Malice, which examined the way an unfeeling reporter damages personal lives. Both the latter movies, unlike Front Page, argue that the press does matter; the first for the good it can do, the second for the harm. What caused the change in attitude? In his valedictory speech last year as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Creed Black, publisher of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, lamented: "We are blamed for the sins and shortcomings of what television, which is basically an entertainment medium, calls news."

Black's speech broke a long truce between newspapers and television, which find themselves unhappily linked in the public mind as "the media." They are at best wary colleagues: one gets all the glamour and pay, while the other does most of the grunt work. Last month the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., brought the two sides together to discuss press credibility. There were a few sharp words. Miffed at the cracks about TV entertainment, Don Hewitt, producer of CBS's 60 Minutes, wondered about "all that junk"--advice columns, features, horoscopes--in newspapers. Eugene Patterson, a veteran newspaper editor who is chairman of the institute, phrased the charge against the tube a little differently from Black: through television, "the public got a look at us and didn't like what it saw." Television feeds egos; in some, said Patterson, it produces "attack journalism--let the public see how big we are and how we can shove people around." To NBC's John Chancellor, "the main culprit is the televised press conference: the public suddenly saw people asking nasty questions of the President of the U.S." Since the visual impression matters so much on television, Chancellor also brought up "the Ronald Reagan cupped-ear gambit. The press is deliberately and systematically kept away from him. All you hear is a bunch of monkeys screaming at him when they could easily have been brought right up, and the President could have stood and talked in a conversational tone. That is killing us, and it's not hurting Ronald Reagan one bit, and they know it."

But, of course, all the participants agreed, there are other reasons for public animus toward the press, including such familiar problems as invasions of privacy and lack of fairness. Inevitably such confessional sessions begin to sound like those jock beer commercials: "More accuracy!" "Less arrogance!"

The news is that the press is at last beginning to shed its romantic image of itself as the lone public defender pure of heart, pursuing all those other rascals. To the public, the press is not David among Goliaths; it has become one of the Goliaths, Big Media, a combination of powerful television networks, large magazine groups and newspaper chains that are near monopolies. It often seems as unreachable as the Government or any big corporation. The public might agree that the press, while making money, often does good (though not always in a lovable manner). It peeks behind doors; it tries to get at the truth by exposing wrongdoing, detecting deception, piercing propaganda, deflating inflated reputations, questioning motive. Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.