In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

18 NOT THE SAME COUNTRY Most of my career has been spent in and around public policy and politics. But I began and am finishing as a journalist. I always have revered the profession as a place where independent, objective reporting and analysis could help protect our society from the excesses and mistakes of the powerful in both the private and public sectors. Recent surveys have shown the media to be falling steadily in public esteem, down around personal-injury-attorney territory. It is not without good reason. Just as politics has changed substantially since the mid-twentieth century , so have the media. From my time as editor of my junior-high-school newspaper, the Whatcom Next, in 1940s Bellingham, Washington, until the 1980s, daily newspapers, newsweekly magazines, and the three commercial broadcast networks dominated news coverage. The people running news in those organizations could have been interchangeable. NBC News’s Reuven Frank,for example,could just as easily have been editing the New YorkTimes, and NewYorkTimes editor Max Frankel could have been running NBC News. Peter Lisagor, the Washington, D.C., columnist for the Chicago Daily News, could have been editing a newsweekly or doing daily television commentary. Their values and outlooks were similar. All came to their work with the same print-journalism orientations. All had viewpoints but strove, above all, for fairness and objectivity. The Vietnam War and Watergate gave rise to a new generation of journalists more skeptical and scornful of establishmentarian institutions than their predecessors.By the 1980s the new generation gradually was taking over leadership of the media. Like other baby boomers, they often valued personal expression over a concept of objectivity many thought unattainable anyway . They presumed that leaders of major institutions were either corrupt, lying, or hiding something. So-called “gotcha journalism” became prevalent. Whereas earlier-generation White House correspondents and national columnists and commentators, for instance, knew that President Franklin Roosevelt could not walk on his own and had a mistress, and that President 267 Kennedy was a compulsive womanizer and in dubious health, they chose to avoid those subjects as not being relevant to their conduct of the public business . No such constraints bound the oncoming wave of boomer journalists. It was not,of course,as if earlier journalists all had operated without bias and according to strict rules of fairness and objectivity. President Roosevelt’s 1936 victory over his Republican opponent, Governor Alf Landon, came as somewhat of a surprise, as most major newspaper publishers—in that pretelevision era—had endorsed Landon and predicted his election. Roosevelt worked around the publishers with his radio “fireside chats” to the people and his informal sessions with favored White House reporters. When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, I soon learned that many media figures were anything but objective. President Kennedy was known to have several media pals, including the Washington Post/Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee and columnist Charles Bartlett, who received favored treatment. While working with the European Communities, I discovered that columnist Joseph Kraft had been paid by the EC to write a book favorable to the development of an Atlantic Partnership between the United States and Western Europe.Then, working for Hubert Humphrey, I learned that nominally objective journalists played favorites all the time. On one occasion, during Humphrey’s vice presidency, I drew up a long list of questions and answers for his use in preparation for a weekend broadcast interview. Afterward, he remarked that it was a shame that only one or two of the questions had been asked and the material would go to waste. I thereupon arranged with the bureau chief of a major national newspaper for the prepared questions and answers to run in his paper as“an exclusive interview.”There was,of course, no interview—only the questions and answers I had written beforehand. Whenopposingcandidateswerescheduledforbroadcastinterviews,Ioften would receive calls from interviewers friendly to our campaign,seeking embarrassing questions and information with which to challenge their guests.When I received no such calls, I often initiated them. I cannot recall a time during either the 1968 or 1972 presidential campaign, for example, when I did not talk in advance with and provide material to broadcast interviewers of President Richard Nixon or Vice President Spiro Agnew. I knew that the interviewers’ less friendly colleagues no doubt were conferring in advance of Humphrey or McGovern interviews with my counterparts on the Republican side. During the entire span of my national political involvement, there were...

Share