Opinionated Mush

Self-scrutiny by the press has grown in recent years, partly as a response to the Nixon Administration's efforts to discredit journalists. The monthly [More] is perhaps the most tendentious practitioner of the new criticism. Its circulation is modest (15,000), but it at tracts a number of salty, savvy contributors who regularly needle their colleagues in the trade for specific failings.

[More] articles are often amply documented. Once in a while, however, Editor Richard Pollak seems to suffer a total lapse of judgment.

Four months ago, Pollak published a broadside by Novelist Sol Yurick that blasted U.S. journalism for not accepting the Symbionese Liberation Army on its own terms. Yurick pursued the absurd argument that if the S.L.A. called a kidnaping an "arrest," the press should go along; otherwise, journalists were guilty of Establishment bias. For the current issue, Author Joseph Epstein (Divorced in America) has written an essay called "The Media as Villain." In dis cussing journalism's problems, he casually laid on some heavy indictments.

"The media," he said, "flourish under scandal, disaster, tumult in any form they can get it . . ." Further, U.S. journalism virtually alone caused the "death of the civil rights movement." Epstein rapped newsmen for the decline in the quality of presidential campaigns and objected to "those odious Exxon and Mobil ads" on TV.

Epstein raised some vexed questions, but reduced the answers to stereotypes. He cast "the media" as a monolith instead of the collection of diverse organizations and individuals that is American journalism. In hanging the civil rights movement's troubles on sensation-seeking press coverage, he ignored a host of political, social and economic factors. The piece was a paradigm of the opinionated mush that [More] attacks when it appears elsewhere. To cap the inconsistency, the same issue of [More] carried a full-page Mobil ad of the kind that Epstein deplored.

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