No profession finds self-analysis easy. This is particularly true of journalism, whose practitioners regularly evaluate the performance of others. We have been scrutinizing our colleagues--and sometimes ourselves--in our Press section since our first issue in 1923. This week in our cover story, we undertake the admittedly difficult task of examining the role of the press in the Watergate affair, a topic that arouses considerable passion among readers as well as journalists. In an accompanying Essay, we further consider the moral problems faced by the press, its future tasks and its role in the American system. It is a subject about which TIME, as a participant, can scarcely claim neutrality. But with the help of TIME correspondents across the U.S., who reported their own assessments as well as the views of editors, news executives and fellow reporters, we have attempted a serious and dispassionate accounting of both the shortcomings and the accomplishments of our craft.

The senior editor of the Press section, Laurence I. Barrett, put aside his editing pencil to write the cover story, his 26th since joining TIME in 1965. For him, it represents a return to his earliest professional concerns. After graduation from New York University and the Columbia School of Journalism, Barrett went to the New York Herald Tribune as a political reporter in 1958. He wrote a weekly column on New York's city hall (accumulating grist for his 1965 novel, The Mayor of New York), then moved to Washington to cover the Pentagon and national politics. When the Trib, with Barrett on the story, was among the few papers to expose the Billie Sol Estes scandal, President Kennedy angrily canceled his subscription. He felt that the Herald Tribune, a Republican paper, was giving undue coverage to a Democratic scandal. "Covering public affairs at all levels," recalls Barrett, "I saw myself as kind of an honest cop trying to keep public officials straight. Now I'm trying to do this with my own kind in the cover story, and it poses certain conceptual difficulties. You almost have to step outside yourself."

The story presented a different sort of problem for Gail Eisen, who spent several weeks sifting through mountains of Watergate reportage. She was especially interested in locating White House denials of specific Watergate stories and then ascertaining whether the stories or the denials had been correct. "It was often frustrating," she says, "but having begun digging on any one of them, I couldn't give up. It turned out that the press had committed precious few errors."

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