Newspapers: Covering the Campaign

With but five weeks to go until the election, newspapers last week were treating the campaign coolly. On one day, for instance, the top story in both the Los Angeles Times and the Cleveland Press was a Northern California timber fire, while the Baltimore Sun, Milwaukee Journal and the Washington Post gave prominence to an averted national rail strike. The New York Daily News, fascinated by the nonpolitical conduct of its audience, made its Page One headline: HOLD PARENTS IN TEEN DRINKING. And with the issues generally being blurred, there was also less punditing and interpretive reporting.

No Participants. There was, perhaps, a suspicion that the press had been a little too interpretive too early in the campaign and was now making amends. After the Republican Convention, Wes Gallagher, general manager of the Associated Press, had circulated a memo to all his hands. “The Associated Press newsman,” it said, “is not and should not be a participant in the news—he is a recorder of it.” On many newspapers, notably the New York Times, similar injunctions went out to the staff.

The newsman’s right to evaluate events is incontestable, and it is not being contested this year. Many observers regard such interpretive reporting as well-nigh indispensable. “Newspapers are beaten in the reporting of the news by radio and television,” says Mortimer J. Adler, director of Chicago’s Institute for Philosophical Research. “Thus they have become, more and more, journals of opinion.”

But the line between interpretation and advocacy is a fine one. And there are critics who contend that this year the press has not always walked that line with sure-footed skill. Part of the reason, of course, was Barry Goldwater, whose conservative Republicanism could hardly have been expected to stir enthusiasm among predominantly liberal reporters. It is difficult to be neutral about Goldwater, and early off, the press was not neutral.

Until San Francisco, in fact, the majority of the press occupied itself less with measuring the growth of the Goldwater movement than with repeatedly discounting Goldwater as a serious political force. This negative consensus survived even Goldwater’s triumph in the California primary; the press interpreters counted the Arizona Senator out all over again when he voted against the civil rights bill. Almost to a man, journalists felt that Goldwater had isolated himself from his own party, which heavily supported the bill.

Goldwater’s ascendancy at San Francisco brought these press theorists up short; the man so widely dismissed as a possibility was now the Republican Party’s choice. But in the wake of the convention, the press defended its misjudgment with a spate of fresh anti-Goldwater comment. “Practically all of Goldwater’s votes and views,” said the Sacramento Bee, which had opposed Barry all along, “tend toward the enslavement of Americans.” Said the Denver Post, “The Republican Party had its eyes open when it nominated Senator Barry Goldwater. It took the step deliberately; it knew what it was doing, and it must be held accountable for the results.”

Much of the early editorial vehemence is now gone, perhaps out of a self-conscious attempt to achieve balance. But the editorial cartoonists show no enthusiasm for calm assessment. Goldwater has always been an enticing target and the cartoonists continue to slash away. The candidates themselves may have found few issues to debate, but to the artists of the editorial page the campaign has been a long excuse for caustic, black-and-white comment —a gallery of caricature in which the Republicans almost always come out second best (see cuts).

No Surrender. Publishers have also made their choice, if not with the same style, at least with alacrity. They are taking sides with unprecedented speed and in a pattern for which history provides no precedent. As of last week, in a press establishment that normally swings preponderantly behind the Republican presidential candidate, 243 papers, with a combined circulation of 12.6 million, had come out for Johnson. Goldwater’s tally: 250 papers, with a circulation of 5.3 million.

The quieter tone of current editorial comment on the campaign suggests that news analysis is being restored to its proper role as a valuable adjunct to, but not the main instrument of, good reporting. Not that the working newsman has surrendered his privilege of presenting the news within the light of his own convictions, but at the moment, there are few campaign issues for newsmen to have convictions about. The polls show Goldwater far behind; liberal reporters see little to bother them beyond reporting a clash of personalities.