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THE press reflects its country's political culture because it is very much a part of its political process, sometimes as an independent player shaping events, sometimes as an accomplice of power. The two books on the press in the United States and in Britain are most instructive. The American press rose to great heights in the 1970s in the era that saw Watergate and Vietnam. It plumbed to pitiable depths after 9/11, idolising a man like George W. Bush and condoning the crimes his government committed at home as well as abroad. Tony Blair's regime has been run by spin doctors and media manipulation. In both cases, nemesis followed hubris.
Donald A. Ritchie has been Associate Historian of the U.S. Senate for three decades. He has closely watched the press and its leading figures. His book Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents covers the first 130 years of the American press. The present work covers the last 70 years, which saw the centre shift from New York to Washington D.C. and power shift from the Congress to the President, once F.D. Roosevelt became President in 1932. He remains still the best performer - he held biweekly press conferences. Nicholas Jones was for many years BBC's political correspondent. His books include Sultans of Spin and Soundbites and Spin Doctors. Trading Information is as much about the press as about the state of British politics.
In India, one disturbing aspect of the situation in the media has received less attention than it deserves. The print media is pulled up once in a while by the Press Council, however rickety, incompetent and incomprehensible its ways may be. The electronic media, the private TV channels, accept no limits and, despite some splendid critiques - by Sevanti Ninan in The Hindu, for one - escape audit. But it is the TV channels, especially three of them, which seek to emerge as players in the political process and vie with one an other in fostering chauvinism and self-righteousness in the realm of foreign affairs and playing up crime stories and court cases with little regard for the rights of the suspect or the accused. The behaviour of some in the Afzal Guru case was despicable and is ably exposed in some essays published in 13 Dec: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament (Penguin; Rs.200).
The two books under review should prompt serious reflection on the relationship between the media and politics and between the journalist and the politician, especially the one in power, and above all, on the duties that the press owes to the public - to ferret out the truth, to impart accurate information and offer informed comment. Even in times of euphoria, upheaval or paranoia, the press owes a duty to be careful about accepting as true whatever version the regime of the day imparts.
Ritchie notes that the press corps in the U.S. capital has become "an unofficial fourth branch of government, with an irreplaceable role in the federal system of checks and balances". A conscious digression here is in order. Foreigners are not allowed in the first three estates - legislature, executive and judiciary. Is it sensible to permit them to play a role in the fourth estate and become participants in the political process? The citizen has an interest in the country's well-being. The foreigner's interest is in money alone. He will be either a stooge to power in order to retain a stake in the media - since only citizens enjoy the fundamental right to freedom of speech - or will manipulate by proxy. Read these books in the light of these realities.
The prestige of the American press dipped low even before it became an uncritical supporter of Bush. John F. Starks remarked in Scotty, a biography of James B. Reston, a truly all-time great, that "much of the press is now part of huge corporate enterprises. This often produces coverage that is either sycophantic to protect those corporations' relationship with the government or stupidly sensationalistic in order to pump readership and revenue" (emphasis added throughout). The italicised words are all too true of some TV channels in India.
Ritchie laments the decline of those who had once fought power. "These same organizations ended the twentieth century by trimming their Washington budgets and their news coverage of government and politics. By then, opinion polls showed reporters ranking lower than politicians in public standing, with three-quarters of American adults perceiving some form of media bias. The prevalent dissatisfaction with Washington press coverage prompted a range of conflicting theories. Some critics accused the press corps of having forged cozy alliances with the power elite, while others complained of an excessively negative, adversarial coverage of those in power. Critics with pronounced ideological leanings detected that reporters were slanting the news in the opposite direction. The left assailed the mainstream media as a `transmission belt for official opinion'. The right made the press corps' `liberal bias' an article of faith. Some blamed reporters for straying away from objective reporting and into news analysis. A movement alternatively known as public or civic journalism pinned the blame on objectivity itself for turning reporters into stenographers, and lamented that the media had `abdicated its duty to help the public think beyond instinctive reactions'."
Moral Dilemma
Journalism is, broadly, of two kinds - reportage and comment. There is the "professional" journalist, who claims to be neutral, and the one who belongs to the pamphleteering tradition. In both, facts must be held sacred. Emotions are aroused in crises when even judges shed objectivity. In 1963, Reston posted this notice at The New York Times' Washington bureau that he headed. "We are obviously going into a savage debate on civil rights, probably for the rest of the year. I urge everybody who writes on this subject in the news to be vigilant about seeing that both sides get a fair shake. We don't want to come to the end of this debate and have anybody say that we used the news columns to play up the Times' editorial policy, or that we used inflammatory language in our reporting of the events. The story is obviously going to be inflammatory enough."
The Vietnam war posed a moral dilemma. J. Robert Port, who headed an investigative team for Associated Press, put it neatly: "Bias has no place in good journalism, but neither does blind patriotism and I am not ashamed to acknowledge that I make moral judgments as an investigative reporter." The author holds that "if Washington reporters showed any persistent partiality, it was toward those who held power and who, therefore, held the information they sought".
The press has a formidable record of protecting its sources. One is less sure about its unwillingness to trade news for favours to the source. The leak can be a trial balloon or an attempt at sabotage of a move or a project. The player is generally a hostile colleague of the author of the move. The reporter prints the news; the source accomplishes his design. As in law, every judgment the professional makes has a moral aspect. Reporters seek sources, but sources also seek reporters. "The twentieth century was replete with attempts by those running the government to manipulate reporters by controlling and distorting the flow of information. But manipulation was not always necessary to make reporters receptive to the government's agenda. The press corps generally shared a similar worldview with those in power, and embraced the prevailing national consensus."
Baltimore's resident critic H.L. Mencken wrote of the Washington press corps: "A few clumsy overtures from the White House, and they are rattled and undone. They come in as newspapermen, trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tin-horn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the truth if they tried."
In Washington and in New York, The New York Times' main rival was the New York Herald Tribune, which folded up. Ritchie's history of the press, while fascinating in itself, is less relevant than those incidents and plays of personalities that are of universal relevance. Famous journalists revelled in cosying up to the Presidents. Almost never did the honeymoon last. Presidents demanded praise. The journalist would go only so far and no further. Criticism would earn the reproach Et tu, Brute. Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of the Times, and FDR were good friends. A time came when the President not only refused him access but asked the publisher to remove Krock from the capital. A born manipulator, Roosevelt simultaneously cultivated others. Harrison Salisbury recalled: "I knew Roosevelt's tricks. They were so obvious: dances for the press in the Blue Room, the little birthday notes, the Christmas parties; good fun but there had to be a bill."
How could a journalist, a reporter or a columnist retain detachment and objectivity after playing cards with the President or going swimming with him or dining at his table? FDR had no hesitation in imputing unworthy motives to his critics. "Special bureau chiefs down here write what the owner of the newspaper tells them to write." Krock was no exemplar of virtue, either. He shifted his loyalties to Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's father, lapped up his affluent hospitality but only to intrigue against Kennedy to regain FDR's favour. The pattern was set and successors conformed to it, notably, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Bush.
Ritchie's work does not neglect radio and TV, the wire services and the Internet. Websites and bloggers receive due attention in a chapter aptly entitled "Anyone with modem". As Matt Drudge relished his success exclaiming "The Internet's about independence", one-person news sites flourished. "Prominent Washington writers competed to replicate Matt Drudge's success by setting up their own web logs - or blogs - essentially self-syndicated columnists. Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of The New Republic, found it liberating to be rid of editors and advertisers - `all the things that can constrain you' - although doing a blog required `venting on a daily or hourly basis'. Further spurring the blogs were central websites that simplified access to the `online diary community' and turned the Internet into a vast soapbox."
Still and all, the print media retains its primacy. It is not nostalgia that prompts one to write that there is a clear decline in the quality of both reportage and comment. Time was when the U.S. boasted of reporters and columnists who were legends in their own lifetimes. Well before the surrender to Bush, the decline was palpable. "As news pages attempted to bury their partisanship, the columnists emerged as an elite within the profession, journalists licensed to express their own minds. From their prominent perches on the op-ed pages an assortment of Washington-based hawks, owls, eagles, and other harriers of power have exercised ample influence over policymaking, public opinion, and the rest of the press corps."
By the time Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency in 1963, the top Washington columnists - Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, Drew Pearson, David Lawrence and Arthur Krock - had each been writing syndicated columns for 30 years. Politicians came and went, but the columnists remained in place, seemingly as fixed as the city's marble monuments. They made America's mind up for it, a critic sneered.
The Prince
The prince among them, beyond a doubt, was Walter Lippmann to whom Ritchie is less than just. He was a flawed personality, personally and professionally. He lectured to Reston to be distant from men in power but himself enjoyed proximity to them. But his enduring greatness lies in his ability to rise above the immediate and look afar. His critique of George F. Kennan's doctrine of "containment" is relevant, still. It was propounded in an article published in July 1947 in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym `X'. It was entitled "The sources of Soviet Conduct". Lippmann replied to it in a series of articles in the New York Herald Tribune. They were published by Hamish Hamilton in a pamphlet entitled "The Cold War". It was refused permission to reprint the "X" article. Lippmann's articles repay study. Journalism has not seen such a thinker in its midst.
As Ritchie acknowledges, "During the Cold War, Lippmann warned that the United States could not police the entire world and he predicted that the policy of containment of communism would send American troops to fight in the remotest regions of the world to defend corrupt client states on the grounds that they were fighting communism. He called for a realistic foreign policy that would balance the nation's commitments and its resources."
He was received as a dignitary. On one of his European tours, Lippmann scheduled a coveted interview with the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. As he boarded the plane to fly to Europe, he was handed a message from Khrushchev asking him to postpone their meeting for a week. "Impossible," Lippmann replied. By the time the plane had landed, word came that the Soviet leader had rearranged his own plans in order to accommodate Lippmann.
Lyndon Johnson visited his home to seek his advice. They fell out on Vietnam, and Johnson retailed nasty gibes that he knew would reach Lippmann's ears. For reasons more than one, he left the capital and returned to Manhattan.
One has only to read Lippmann's interview with Khrushchev, interspersed with his comments, to realise the depths of his insights. It was published in The Hindu on April 21, 26 and 27, 1961. Earlier, from November 19, 1958, onwards, a series of four articles on foreign policy was published in The Hindu. One, on November 21, was entitled "West must underwrite India". The last argued that the Soviet Union was not a military threat to the West. Lippmann deserves a whole article analysing his public philosophy. He did not swim with the tide even during the worst days of the Cold War.
It was Henry Fairlie who coined the term the Establishment in a famous article in the London weekly The Spectator in 1955. Famous columnists were pillars of the American Establishment. They shared the same values, had the same lifestyle and dined at the exclusive, men-only Metropolitan Club.
Investigative reporting came into its own with Watergate. It "inverted the impulses of objective journalism... Objectivity forbids reporters from taking sides, while investigative reporting operated on the assumption that one side was in the wrong. Investigative reporters hungered to uncover whatever the authorities wanted to suppress." They set out to work on the assumption that something had gone wrong somewhere - and they were right in doing so.
Disenchantment
In 1962, President Kennedy's Pentagon spokesman Arthur Sylvester asserted that the government had an "inherent right" to lie to the press and the public in the national interest, which is why the leftist gadfly I.F. Stone believed that "every government is run by bias, and nothing they say should be believed".
It was during the Clinton era that the public became disenchanted with the press, especially with the way it played up the impeachment process. Mishandling of the 2000 election by TV channels undermined TV's credibility.
Worse followed the next year after 9/11. "In a wartime atmosphere, Washington reporters discarded some of their professional distance to rally around the flag and the President. The dean of the press corps, David Broder, whose seventy-second birthday had fallen on September 11, 2001, now perceived qualities of Lincoln in George W. Bush, whose public approval ratings shot up to the stratosphere. Neutrality was no longer an option. Reuters news service came under harsh criticism for declining to use the word terrorist, on the grounds that `one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'. The slightest hint of unfavourable reporting about the President brought angry protests...
"European correspondents puzzled over the deferential attitude that the Washington press was showing those in power. `In Europe, interviewers are adversarial', the BBC Washington correspondent Nick Bryant asserted. `Over here they try to end an interview on good terms'."
Ritchie is strangely silent on the media's support for the Iraq war, a ruinous war of aggression launched under a smokescreen of brazen lies on weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda connection. The criticism you find in the American press is not inspired by repentance but frustration in defeat. The New York Times still fights shy of calling a spade a spade. The exquisite phrase it coined for the Iraq aggression - "a needlessly hurried and unilateral invasion" - only betrays its moral insensitivity (October 25, 2006). Can an invasion be "bilateral" or "consensual"?
Nicholas Jones' documentation of the major leaks that rocked Britain in recent years makes his book a fine study of British politics as well as of the British press. Particularly useful is his expose of t he role of political advisers and their impact on the established civil service. This is his thesis: "However misguided it might seem to the authorities or the management, the driving force behind the leaking of sensitive or secret data is sometimes a desire to serve the common good. My aim in this book is to examine the power which resides with those whom I call the information traders, be they professional manipulators or the whistleblowers who put their jobs on the line. What made them realise that information can be traded to their advantage, to support a cause or perhaps expose an injustice? How did they acquire an acute understanding of the inner mechanics of the media? Why is it that journalists are sometimes eager to trade precious editorial space and airtime in return for what may be suspect material? Any casual reader, viewer or listener cannot help but get confused by the vast array of `leaks' on offer...
"Unfortunately journalists are not always prepared to come clean; is this leak the work of a genuine whistleblower or has the reporter accepted a plant from a publicist or spin doctor who is only too happy to see the information dressed up as an exclusive story in return for a favourable slant?"
As he documents, private groups, big corporations and some non-governmental organisations are also skilled in the sport. The citizen is unaware of the games they play. Only occasionally does he get the chance to identify and appreciate the hidden influence of the vast array of characters who give tip-offs or supply secret documents, be they genuine whistleblowers or political spin doctors. " But have we the journalists become corrupted and too dependent on these trade-offs? Indeed, have the information traders got the upper hand? I realise most journalists who benefit from the trade in confidential information will probably be irritated by my book... .. Nonetheless no journalist can ignore the fact that the calculated way in which information is being fed to the media on an unattributable and off-the-record basis has hastened a decline in editorial standards."
The book ends its survey of leaks and lies with a powerful plea for transparency in governance and a level playing field. In the final analysis, as in any other profession, especially the law and the judiciary, it is the personality of the performer that matters: his integrity, detachment and commitment to the truth.
A journalist will find no better guide than the poet Mirza Ghalib (1796-1869): Banaakar faqiron ka hum bheys Ghalib/Tamasha-e-ahle karam dekhtey hain (Putting on the garb of a fakir, Ghalib/I watch the theatre of the high and mighty).
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