The Press: Television & Newsmen

Even though many big news stories are telecast, publishers no longer fear TV as a threat to daily newspaper circulation. They have decided that TV, if it does anything for them, whets rather than dulls readers’ appetites for printed news. But for working newspapermen, TV is often an obstruction to good reporting. Last week, writing in the International Press Institute’s monthly Report, the New York Times’s able United Nations correspondent. A. M. Rosenthal. told why. The trouble, wrote Rosenthal, is that TV “is not interested primarily in news but in entertainment,” and it requires so much paraphernalia that it forces newspapermen to work in a “hectic, noisy, movie-set atmosphere.”

On the U.N. beat, Rosenthal and other reporters have often seen delegates gladly appear on a TV interview program after ducking newspaper reporters for weeks. “What do you expect?” asks one newspaperman. “[The delegate] knows that we’ll check up on him, go after other sources, dig around a little, maybe develop a story. But look at that [TV] program: no embarrassing questions; a chance to tell the world why he is heaven’s gift to diplomacy; a big audience; painless. He’s smart. What does he want to talk to newspapermen for?”

Worse still, TV leads to “superficiality and phoniness.” Rosenthal once heard a Congressman, preparing for a TV interview in the lobby of U.N., tell the TV crew, ” ‘All right, boys, keep those cameras high. Don’t want the audience to see this paper I’m reading from. Spontaneous stuff is what they like, you know.’ The boys kept those cameras high. The TV ‘reporter’ asked the question . . . and the answer was reeled off … It all went quite smoothly. It should have, because this was the fourth time that day that the [Congressman] had presented his ‘spontaneous’ reaction before a TV camera.”

Even more to be deplored, says Rosenthali, “is the influence of TV on … the press conference . . . Washington press conferences have been developed to the point where they often fulfill [a] function of the British parliamentary system: officials are confronted face to face with pointed and sometimes not too friendly questioning . . . With the beginning of the 1952 presidential campaign. TV insisted that … it had a right to be in on all press conferences . . . But . . . televising the press conference just about destroyed [it]. The official being questioned realized that he was talking not to news specialists but to an audience of millions, all voters. He shaped his answers to impress the millions, not to provide reporters with information.”

Concludes Rosenthal: “Most American newsmen have no objection at all to TV’s legitimate news coverage. But they do not feel that they are under any obligation to cripple their craft to help television put on a ‘show.’ “