"Indegoddampendent" Is Fine

By Thomas Griffith

Now that there is a momentary lull in the outpouring of Watergate books, another legacy of the Nixon era needs closer scrutiny. This is the notion, propagated by Richard Nixon, that Government and the press have an adversary relationship. What Nixon meant by the phrase he made perfectly clear in a letter to Spiro Agnew during the 1968 campaign: "When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend--they are all enemies." But why the press should have seized upon the adversary description and proudly flaunted it ever since is harder to understand.

Of course, it does have a fine, swaggering, macho sound. It suggests fearless reporters, incorruptible, unseducible, bravely doing battle with the powerful or gamely wrestling with octopus-armed bureaucrats. And for many reporters, the Nixon attitude signaled the welcome end of a too-cozy courtship of the press in the Kennedy-Johnson era, when, for example, Ben Bradlee --Nixon's ferocious adversary all through Watergate--had been willing to quash a story because his friend Jack Kennedy urged him to. But the adversary phrase has a lot to do with certain self-satisfied post-Watergate attitudes in the press, including the arrogant defense of sleazy ways of getting stories.

Adversary relationship is a lawyer's phrase, but it's doubtful whether Nixon the lawyer ever really understood the moral philosophy behind it. In principle, justice is served and truth is most effectively discovered when two sides--one doing its best to attack, the other to defend--contend in open court. Even the rascal, the murderer, the rapist is "entitled to his day in court." In practice, the idea clears the consciences of expensive lawyers who get rich defending the worst of clients or the most dubious practices of their best clients. Since a trial is combat, nearly anything goes.

Some parallels to the relationship between Government and press are immediately apparent: officials trying to put their best foot forward; newsmen pressing to discover what they may be concealing. Yet the difference between the news process and courtroom procedure is profound. The judge is missing--that judge who forbids misleading tactics, freely admonishes both sides, determines which evidence is valid and finally instructs the jury on how it should weigh what it has heard. In the news-gathering process, the press is both prosecutor and sole judge of its own activities--answerable in advance of publication to no one (though it can be sued once the story is out), free to select or disregard evidence as it pleases, free to omit counterclaims, to minimize rebuttals. Such absence of prior restraint is essential to a free press, but the press at least should recognize that it enjoys more unchecked advantages than a courtroom adversary, and therefore incurs some obligations.

The flag of adversary relationship has flown over much valuable investigative reporting, but it also gives sanction to the increasingly truculent, bearbaiting questioning of officials and press spokesmen that has become one of Washington's major blood sports. A cynical posture in such reporting assumes all Government to be bad, all privacy to equal concealment and all explanations to amount to lies. The adversary relationship, most evident in rat-pack journalism, gives a false nobility to the second-rate and the lazy.

Why not return to the useful pre-Nixon term to characterize the proper relationship of press and Government: independent?This definition assumes that the press will not print handouts without questioning them and is free to investigate wherever it suspects wrongdoing. And it more correctly describes the actual day-to-day relationship with Government, much of which is the gathering of information and the reportorial pursuit of understanding. Private briefings by policymakers become the insider's wisdom for many Washington columnists. Many officials and politicians speak to the press in private candor, trusting reporters to honor confidences and in return winning trust themselves. In this way real explanations are heard which for diplomatic or other reasons cannot be publicly stated. The process is a wary one on both sides--who's using whom?--but it is often more collaborative, useful to both, than adversary.

The notion of an independent--or, as Joseph Pulitzer called it, "indegoddampendent"--press takes care of all that really needs taking care of. Dropping the adversary label might diminish the justified sense of unfair treatment felt by so many officials. It might even lessen the press's own complacent tolerance of so much of the jostling and hectoring behavior that, when seen on television, the public finds so objectionable.

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