Self-Made Shudders

"What I have to say today," said the guest speaker, Robert H. Estabrook, 42, editorial page director of the Washington Post and Times Herald, "won't be quite so harmonious as the tunes from the massed Michigan bands." Thus forewarned, the assembled journalism students at the University of Michigan sat back to listen to some exceptionally frank criticism of the U.S. daily press.

The newspapers that smolder indignantly over the transgressions of others, said Estabrook, might well take a good look at their own: "Recently, the press became very exercised about morality when Charles Van Doren put on his show of contrition. But our indignation would be better founded, and more credible, if we also managed to muster a few olfactory shudders about the garbage in our own backyard. Better yet, we might even try to clean it up."

Some of Estabrook's shudder makers:

P: "We sometimes pretend, through use of the dateline, that stories actually composed in the office were written elsewhere."

P: "We stage photographs unabashedly. This is perhaps an innocent enough deception, but it is nevertheless deception."

P: "We ourselves manufacture news. We make a practice of 'rounding up' opinion on events, occasionally manufacture news about our own crusades by playing them far out of proportion to the news value."

P: "We make reference to 'high officials,' 'Administration circles' and the 'well-informed source.' Sometimes the 'well-informed source' is genuinely that, but occasionally it may be nothing more than a colleague at the press-club bar."

P: "Under our doctrine of 'objectivity.' what a man says is news whether or not it happens to be true. When Senator McCarthy made wild charges, we blew them up--even after we knew them to be untrue."

P: "We rigidly follow a formula of rewriting public speeches so as to emphasize what the reporter, sometimes with no knowledge of his own about the subject, thinks is the most important or sensational phrase."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.