New White House Blast

After his April 30 television address announcing the departures of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Richard Kleindienst and John Dean from his Administration, a chastened Richard Nixon paid a surprise visit to the White House briefing room. There he told startled reporters to "continue to give me hell every time you think I'm wrong." That truce flag fluttered only briefly, and now hostilities between the Administration and the press are more intense than ever. Nixon's Oct. 26 outburst at TV's "outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting" was quickly echoed last week by his staff, in-laws and friends.

White House Speechwriter Patrick Buchanan said that legislation is needed "to break the power of the networks." Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren chided CBS and NBC for their handling of the latest story on the ITT antitrust case. On NBC'S Today, Son-in-Law David Eisenhower said that the "irresponsibility" of news reporting "has been matched by the irresponsibility of the people they may quote."

In some respects, the choice of TV as a prime target was puzzling. TV news, for one thing, has lagged well behind newspapers and magazines in investigating Watergate. Also, after the initial assaults by Spiro Agnew, TV generally has backed away from expose documentaries. What the Administration may resent is the networks' ability to serve as a giant megaphone for unfavorable stories that originate in print.

In substantive terms, the Administration can cite precious few examples of what it sees as TV's "distorted reporting." Appearing on the Dick Cavett Show last week, Chicago Daily News Correspondent Peter Lisagor said: "We've been trying since that Friday night press conference to get a bill of particulars, specify what was distorted, what was hysterical, what was vicious. And about the only thing that we can come up with so far is that Walter Cronkite quoted Hanoi radio one time as saying the President was out of his senses."

Indeed, Cronkite figures prominently in the Administration's current offensive. While Nixon has declined to name names, the White House Communications Director, Ken Clawson, seemed to be speaking for the boss when he attacked Cronkite's interview with deposed Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on the Evening News. "It was the biggest softball interview I've ever heard," Clawson complained. "He lobbed the ball slowly down the middle of the plate, stood there with a half-smile on his mustachioed face while Cox knocked every one over the fence. It was a case of the interviewee being ten times more intelligent than the interviewer." Clawson also rapped the anchorman's selection of interview subjects: "Cronkite has done only three interviews this year--Archie Cox, John Dean and Daniel Ellsberg. Some balance, huh?" (The Ellsberg segment was actually aired on June 23, 1971; late last week Cronkite added new Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski to this year's tally.)

Cronkite blames this alleged imbalance squarely on the Administration. "We couldn't get anybody from the White House to come on our program," he said in an interview with TIME. "We made numerous requests to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, others, including the President himself. They could have sat there and hit my marshmallows as far as they liked." Cronkite added that he seeks no fight with his White House critics: "They've got a right to their opinions on our news judgments, no matter how erroneous, vindictive or personal those opinions are."

The controversy reflects the long-held White House conviction that the nation's airwaves are in enemy hands. One White House official even blamed television for the public outcry over the Cox firing: "All three networks kept putting on people saying, 'The public will detest this,' blatantly calling for the public to respond. It was manufactured fervor." Hadn't the Administration often manufactured its own fervor, arranging for bogus telegrams and letters of support to flood the White House? "That was different," the official replied. "That fervor was stirred up covertly; this effort was done on the tube, appealing directly to the people."

That distinction is astonishing on a number of counts. The networks could hardly be blamed for the dearth of responsible people eager to support the President on the Cox dismissal; even many Republicans were critical on that issue. And the notion that it was TV's reporting of the act, rather than the act itself, that caused the furor underscores a basic White House misconception about journalism's role.

Far Cry. Last week the White House did issue point-by-point refutations of two damaging stories; that was a far cry from the blanket bombast that characterized its responses to earlier Watergate disclosures. But how much Nixon personally knows about the real quality of the news coverage of him is uncertain. He is said to depend largely on a daily digest of print and TV stories prepared by Buchanan's office. (Judging by how often Nixon is offended by news items, his dependence on Buchanan's synopses may be a myth.) These summaries are kept private, but some do surface. Press Critic Ben Bagdikian recently checked one 1971 briefing against tapes and transcripts of that day's news. He reported last week that Buchanan's summary was curiously free of public anti-Nixon commentary and that the outline was riddled with factual errors.

Bagdikian concluded that the summary "is filled with error for which major news organizations would fire a reporter. Yet it is precisely the practitioners of this slovenly and misleading reporting who for five years have been lecturing the American press on accuracy, fairness and balance." As Bagdikian himself has often pointed out, journalism's record for fairness and accuracy is hardly perfect. Further, the networks do wield immense power. But the Nixon Administration has yet to make a case that it has been systematically abused by the press.

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