Illustrated Daily; 6034; Press on Hard Times

Well, I think that the press does influence. It does influence our society. I think there is maybe some regulation that needs to be instituted perhaps in the lines of guiding, I guess, our country and what, I guess, what our moral issues are, I think, or perhaps our involvement in national items. The Illustrated Daily, Managing Editor How Roads. Good evening. Have the news media fall in in public esteem? If so, why?

And what if anything ought to be done about it? Certainly a disquieting number of opinion polls around the nation have come to indicate a growing public skepticism, if not outright distrust, of those organizations and those of us involved in the business of gathering and reporting the news. For those who value popular government and who believe a vigorous, free, and responsible press essential to an informed citizenry, it is a worrisome situation. And tonight we contemplate these and related issues with three individuals well-suited to that task. Max Glor, vice-president and general manager of K-O-A-T-T-V, whose news broadcast are the most widely viewed in the state of New Mexico. John Erlichman, whose entanglements, both with the news media and the law, are themselves interesting chapters in recent press history in the United States. Mr. Erlichman is the author of a new novel, China Card, and Robert Johnson, Associated Press Bureau Chief in New Mexico.

Mr. Johnson was Managing Editor of the Associated Press in New York City during Watergate. First, however, Louise Mathet has this background report. Recently, many news organizations nationwide have looked at their public image and found it wanting. Poles and surveys have uncovered a confidence gap, an attitude of public distrust of the media, an evidence that if the First Amendment guaranteeing a free press were up for a vote today, it would lose. Locally, the public seems wary, but unworryed. Do I have confidence in what I see in here and read? No, not really, but then I don't have confidence in what I hear and see read from the government either, so that it's a balancing, you have to consider the sources, whether it's the media, the government, or the private entity that's making a statement, then you have to consider what each one of those different sources has set and balance them for yourself. Sometimes, you get a biased opinion, but that happens everywhere, so basically, I think it's pretty unfair. I feel like there is a little bit of apprehension in that we are talking about most times.

It's planted from the opinion of that particularly reporter, or perhaps that particular media agency, as to what is presented it, both sides are not often presented equally. No, I think sometimes I hold things back, maybe as government imposed or something, but I think sometimes I do. Sometimes, yes, I do sometimes, I think I go too far, but I would accept them. I don't question them, because we didn't have freedom of the press, we would be pretty bad shape. Local journalists say, overzealous reporting may have led to much of the public mistrust of the media, but that misunderstanding of the purposes and practices of the press also contribute to public dissatisfaction. A lot of people want us to be everything. They want us to be judged, they want us to be jury, they want us to be reporter, they want us to be editorialist. What all we seek to do is to tell people what's going on. That's all we're trying to do, is tell people what's going on.

I think people have become skeptical at the least cynical at the worst, and I think a lot of people are cynical now, about our institutions' abilities to deal with these problems. They become that way it washes over to the media because it's the old, kill the messenger theory. People don't want to be cynical, they don't want to be skeptical. They'd like to believe, as we were brought up to believe, that by golly, we can just do anything if we set our minds to it. But the message that they keep getting from us is that, hey, this problem hasn't been solved. The crime rate's still going up. How come this guy's still polluting down here? How come we haven't been able to figure out how to provide better education for our children if we're able to do all these things? So they don't like this kind of message they keep getting from the media. I think it's our job to deliver that message. A lot of people felt that the press became only kind of immersed and totally obsessed with thirding out wrongdoing, even if they're making mountains out of molehills.

And they were. They were cases where we didn't make mountains out of molehills. I'm sure. The trouble is you don't always know if a mountain, if a molehill is going to become a mountain or a mountain is going to become a molehill until you get into it. And it takes a little judgment to decide whether or not this is worth pursuing or not. I think that there is some suspicion and distrust by the public of the media. I don't think it's an overwhelming problem. I think that the people who feel that way are certainly very vocal and usually pretty articulate and express their feelings pretty well. But I have not encountered a kind of a massive problem. I haven't run into people every time on the street who give me a hard time about this. I think they do trust us. Just as we all trust our own doctor, but we blast the medical community. We all have faith in our own lawyer, but we think all lawyers are crooks. I think our readers do trust us. But I think it's kind of an end thing to say all the media, blame it on the media.

And I don't think people are as harsh on us as some of our individual critics make it. I'm somewhat confused by the general public's reaction to what we do. They seem to feel that we have more power than we do. All we have is the power to be able to disseminate an idea. And if an idea is dangerous, then I suppose we're dangerous. So, some background to this matter of the news media indications of public skepticism. In Max Glor, you take great pride in properly so in your news organization. How seriously do you take these various polls indicating a decline in the credibility of the news media, evidence of public skepticism and criticism? Well, how I would question the polls, I haven't seen the polls. The polls that I've seen, and we do polls locally, quite a few of them. And I'm going to do some more after this broadcast to see if we're really declining.

But what I have seen is that the majority of the people will look at a newscast as a newscast and think that we're generally doing a good job of reporting the news. If you want to get into editorials or David Brinkley's show, which has a lot of people that have their own opinions or things like that, that's another matter. But as television news, I think generally the public majority of the public thinks the television newscasters are doing a good job. There is this group, there is a perception by a number of conservatives, naturally, that it's not conservative enough. The liberals don't think it's liberal enough, so you're never going to please everybody. There's a general consensus that the Eastern networks are leaning towards the left, and I would personally kind of agree with that just because of the makeup of the people on there. But whether that makes them not report all the news accurately, I think that the news, I think what makes the news as good as it is is one thing competition.

There is a tremendous amount of media competition. This is what causes the excellence in the news, but it's also what causes some of the problems because we're out to get the news, we want to get it first, we want to get it before the newspapers, we want to get it before the other stations, we want to get it to the public, we feel the public is very interested in knowing what happens as fast as they can get it. So that in itself causes problems because we may be pushy at times. But a lot of people like pushy reporters. The people that are getting pushed, people that are getting pushed by the reporters don't like. And then there's a number of people that are sympathetic, and they say that reporter is too pushy pushing this person around. I guess the survey that has been most widely and most recently publicized was the one executed by the Gennett Publishing Organization, which showed a general decline in credibility and sympathy for firstly all of major institutions in this country, government, church, law, and news media.

And the news media's decline was the most precipitous of all. Do you have any way to account for that? Well, I think Dick Niffing might have said that we're bringing a lot of bad news to the public. They may be getting tired of hearing it, but we're still out to report the news. So maybe they're just getting tired of hearing a lot about these things. We try to, one of the things any good news organization does is we tell our reporters over and over and over again, please be fair. Because if you're not fair, the public will perceive you're not fair, and they'll quit watching you. It's as simple as that. That's what gets back to competition. If the public perceives an organization to be too biased, they say, I'm not going to watch those people anymore. I just can't stand it. So you got to be fair. You're absolutely right. John Ehrlichman, I'm told that you are of the opinion. The principal problems of the news media today are if that is the way to put it. Are born of arrogance? One, is that an accurate reflection of your views on this matter? And if so, what kind of arrogance are we talking about?

Well, I'd like to pick up where you left off over here. I think the downtrend is accountable in part from the fact that the media have just been wrong. And they've been proved wrong. This aerial chiron case, they nailed Time Magazine cold. They simply printed something that wasn't true. We've had that instance at the Washington Post, where the reporter totally fictionalized a series. And it's been repeated. There's another story that I can't call the name of the reporter to mind right off hand that just came up the other day, Walter Jacobson, and Channel 2, and Chicago. Got nailed the other day for running a story that just wasn't correct. And you can't fool the people. You accumulate a bunch of those cases and folks are going to step back and they're going to say, what are we getting bad dope here? And that, I think, accounts for a lot of this. I think there is an element of arrogance. I think particularly in the city of Washington, the press has a sort of a self-image that they can do no wrong.

And that leads to some of this. They go with stories before the stories are checked. And it seems to me that comes back to management. There's a key question. Do we go with this story? Do we have enough to prove it? And a lot of times the management in the media are. They go with a story before it's been checked. And you just get bad dope. Your own period of entanglement as it were with the news media occurred at a time when the press probably enjoyed both his greatest success and his greatest credibility. Some people argue as well that it was also the point from which the decline was taken. Do you subscribe to that view? Well, I don't know if you can pin it to the early 70s or not. I put up with a Washington Press Corps, and they put up with me for about five years there from 69 to 73 and then the Great Trouble. But through that period of time, we

seem to remember the successes. And we forget the failures for every conspicuous victory that the press had in terms of a newsbeat. They printed something that just simply wasn't so. And later was proved not to be so. They were all competing and moving so fast and trying to get out ahead of each other. That they were running stuff that eventually proved out to be false. That was a period of the great breakthroughs and investigative journalism. And one of the things the Gennett survey unearthed, and I don't know what we make of it, is that people do not like investigative reporting unless it produces results in reforms. That is one that I'm not sure what, as a journalist, I'm supposed to do with. Well, I think that's sort of directed in Mike Wallace and kicking the door down kind of stuff. It seems to me that there's at least among the folks that I know, there's kind of a revulsion toward these people going out with their microphones and sticking them

in the faces of bereaved widows and the families of hostages and that kind of thing. Terrible insensitivity. I had that experience. I put up with a crowd of these folks camped on my front lawn, badgering my kids when they went to school every day and that kind of thing. Again, I think this is born partly of very bad management, insensitive management. And it's born partly out of this competition. If Channel 7 didn't have a guy in my lawn and Channel 13 did, why then, Mr. Sclar'd be criticized. Right. Bob Johnson, I'd like your reaction to what John Ehrlichman has just had to say about the problems of the news media today and the origins of those problems. All right. I think we need to recognize, first of all, that these problems are historic. They go back to the beginning of our country and beyond that. I think we also need to recognize that several administrations deliberately attacked the press. There are all kinds of self-interest groups

who want people to believe that the press is unreliable including the Nixon administration, which was not greatly unlike the Johnson administration in that sense. I think that the Watergate case was very carefully, very accurately. As a matter of fact, I think it's a mistake to give the press the entire credit for that. I think we need to remember Judge Siricca and some special protest prosecutors and others. But I do think that inspired some young journalists to want to be what we used to call Woodstein. Woodward and Bernstein. And I think that that did lead to some excesses. Almost as if the first, I had worked for a general manager at that time, he used to say the first amendment is not a hunting license.

It's a guarantee that people will be informed, but we shouldn't take that to mean that we should go after just everybody. I agreed with it. Since then, I'm not sure that there have been other cases. But John L. S. Lee raises the point. This interesting point, people do take offense at you know, badgering the family of hostages. Badgering his children on the way to school for whatever, or whatever his problems were if they were not his children. Have we in this in this pursuit of competition? Because we've got to be there. Have we gone too far? I think that's a much bigger problem for television. And it is for the news agencies or the newspapers because we're not so visible. The guy with a small tape recorder is not as visible as somebody shoving a microphone. And the TV coverage does show numbers of reporters swarming about the subject of a story.

And I think that is indeed a problem. 30 or 40 years ago, we had by every indication, a raging, screaming, holy partisan press in this country. Yet today, in many respects, for all the alleged problems we have, it often seems to me that reporting is tepid even dull at times in its pursuit of something called objectivity and fairness. Yet there are all of these anxieties. Is this just just another media event? Well, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that 30 or 40 years ago that press was holy partisan. I was a member of the press 30 or 40 years ago. And it wasn't so that the same goals of objectivity and fairness applied then as now. I think the press is better now, better educated, more sophisticated.

And I think there is a danger in overreacting to the kind of criticism that you've been discussing in making the press too bland. A marshmallow press is of no use to anybody. I mean, if all you want is people nagging me. What do we do make of the propositions, same can it, survey? First of all, it might have a hard time getting ratified today, a foot to a vote. You don't buy that. Absolutely not. I think you're underestimating the intelligence of the public. The public's more intelligent than you think they are. And if you put out the facts to the public as best as you can, I think they will accept. A person I happen to agree with you. It is, however, a startling finding. Yes, you wouldn't say that. I agree that some of the stations and the networks and whatnot have made some serious mistakes. But because the station in Chicago recently made a mistake, if anything, that might make its competitors look better

that they were more careful. All of the stations didn't make a mistake in Chicago. One guy made a mistake. Well, when you look at newspapers and television, we put on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories every week. So we're supposed to be 100% perfect. There is that. I mean, the newspapers, we tell our people, please check the facts. Believe me, any more are legal fees. Just checking with our lawyers and checking with other people. It takes so much time anymore that it's very difficult to get the news out. So there's a contrast. Many, many magazines in this country have what they call fact checkers. And before a story goes in the magazine, every fact in that story is meticulously checked. That's the way it should be. That is not what is done on newspapers. It's not done on news magazines. And as far as I know, it's not done in television news organizations. They go with a story if they think they've got the story. And that's where they get into trouble.

I think that you're exaggerating. Because I think the, I know that our people are very careful to check if there's any doubt in their minds. And they go into, they go into their news director. They come into me sometimes. And I'm trying to stay as far removed from the newsroom as I can. They, you know, they, and they're told to, to, to really be careful of the facts. Now, some of might get on to something. And I know many cases where we have not reported things. And we knew that the competition might be beating us. And we said, absolutely not, we're going to, we're not going to go on half-cocked. And I think that's one of the reasons we have as many viewers as we have. Because we've not promised more than we can deliver. If you promise more than you can deliver, you are in trouble. Did you want to get back in, Bob Jones? Yeah, and I obviously agree with Max, and I believe that John is exaggerating the problem. The fact that matter is time magazine does have fact checkers.

He cited time as a magazine that made, I guess he would characterize as an arrogant mistake, whether it was, is still open to question. I think what he's one thing that people tend to forget is that newspapers are published daily. And newscasts are broadcasts several times daily. And you don't, we're not writing a monthly magazine or a novel. We're trying to report the news as it happens. And we're trying desperately to do it as accurately and as impartially and as fairly as we can do it. And I believe that that pervades journalism more today than it ever has before. I think a significant thing that nobody has pointed out. Most of these polls that are being cited about credibility are poll sponsored by some group in the press

through self-concerned, self-criticism. There's another one that came out recently. I believe it was at the Ohio University, which said that it rated groups in low esteem. Six and a half percent of their respondents rated their repress low in ethics and fairness and so on. 11.2 rated doctors low. 11.9 rated policemen. And over 40% are politicians below ethical rating. Well, let's face it, no polls have been perfectly drafted. Whether or not it reflects our opinions, it's very difficult to be right. But why this general decline do you think in affection for our institutions, John Ehrlich?

Well, you can't fool the folks. And if it isn't working right, if it isn't delivering to them, they're going to say so. And I think that's what you're picking up. Government isn't working very well. It's not delivering. And the economy is in terrible shape. The educational institutions are not educating. And the media is not giving them the accurate facts. And they say so in the polls. And I don't mind. Or is it as dignifying his proposition that it's giving them too much by way of accurate things? No, it's not giving them enough. That's the problem. You get a squib about this long, about the budget deficit. When the budget deficit is an extremely complex story, the deserves a page and a half. You know, gentlemen, we're so lucky here at the Illustrated Daily, we have more time to deal with a subject like this. But once again, this is an hour program squeezed into a 30-minute time slot. I'm favorite out of time. Thank you all so very much coming by. That's it for tonight. Tomorrow, first at the Daily, as I go on location for an interview with an advocate of prostitution decriminalized.

Meanwhile, thank you for joining us. I'm Hal Rose. Good night.