Monday, Jul. 11, 1983

Going Too Easy on Reagan?

By Thomas Griffith

The press conference questioning last week of Ronald Reagan, polite but persistent, surprised even the journalists themselves. William Safire called it the "tensest" Reagan conference so far. The controversy over Jimmy Carter's briefing book may soon fade, but the sharper questioning suggests a changing attitude in the press. Antagonism between the President and the press corps has been at its lowest level in 20 years. The civility has been welcome, but has the public interest been served? Lou Cannon, White House correspondent of the Washington Post and author of a first-rate biography of Ronald Reagan, says, "I think he's getting a fairer press than he deserves. I think we should be more critical."

A number of Cannon's colleagues do not believe they are being charmed, disarmed or taken in, but they do think they are being outmaneuvered by Reagan's people and are frustrated. Some of these irritations were discussed recently on Hodding Carter's Inside Story on PBS. Jody Powell remembered how he worried, as Jimmy Carter's press secretary, about whether a bitter and cynical press corps had become "a permanent fixture in American politics." Under Reagan, Powell acknowledged, the hostility on both sides has ebbed: "Most reporters I talk to say they generally sort of like the guy." Nonetheless they feel used.

The White House puts Reagan before TV cameras in controlled settings where he looks good, but how about the reality? How much does the President actually know about the decisions he makes? Most reporters are kept at a distance, limited in their White House access. Working from Reagan's speeches or off-the-cuff remarks, they often find themselves having to correct his misstatements of fact. "The operative word is ignorant," Curtis Wilkie, a Washington correspondent for the Boston Globe, told Hodding Carter. "He's lazy. He's not stupid. He's shrewd. He's a smart politician." Sam Donaldson of ABC added: "You combine a very mechanized, ruthless ability to control the flow of news and Mr. Reagan's absence of a lot of depth . . . and you have a situation that just drives us up the wall."

William Greider, who wrote the famous David Stockman interview for the Atlantic, warned, "I think we'll be shocked in future years when we learn more about the decision making in this Administration." Helen Thomas, that dogged veteran reporter for United Press International, argued, "The people around Reagan have got him in a cocoon. They feed us just enough to keep us busy." Andrea Mitchell of NBC Nightly TNews added, "I schlepped all the way out to Billings, Mont., for a picture of Reagan in a stagecoach and was never given a chance to ask him a question. We're frustrated."

Cannon recently angered the White House with a Page One report that the President had been "rambling" and "confused" in briefing a handful of reporters. But Cannon insisted, "I care about him. I don't ever want to take a cheap shot at him." He thinks Reagan gets the benefit of the doubt on "marginal or close calls because of his genuineness." Reagan also gains, Cannon believes, from a new mood of "a Restoration, not of the Johnson and Nixon imperial presidencies, but of a larger-than-life presidency. Everyone wants our Presidents to be up on a pedestal a little." The problem, in covering Reagan, "requires showing a negative--what he doesn 't know--and that's hard to do inside our concept of objective journalism. But not covering Reagan as toughly as we should is doing everyone a disservice, including him."

Ronald Reagan has an enviable skill at winning on the "atmospherics" even when he loses in the fine print. At press conferences, reporters hesitate to appear too fractious at pinning him down, which has hitherto made for softer questioning. No one wants to return to the abrasiveness of the recent past. But the press defaults on its job when casual, inexact presidential explanations and televised staged events are not balanced by tougher-minded reporting. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.