Once Again … The Power of the Press

THE OPEN MIND
Host: Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Karl E. Meyer
Title: “Once Again…The Power of the Press”
VTR: 6/30/90

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on THE OPEN MIND, and I discovered recently a perfectly wonderful vehicle for examining here once again what without question is one of the most crucial – and perplexing – issues of our times: namely, the power of the press.

And this time the medium is truly the message: the new Oxford University Press Omnibus of American Newspaper Columns, Karl E. Meyer’s “Pundit, Poets and Wits”. Mr. Meyer, a Wisconsin-born, third generation journalist, and our guest today, is a member of The New York Times Editorial Board.

Now, my very dear old friend, the late cultural critic Gilbert Seldes, called the newspaper column the most sophisticated of the popular American arts. The jacket copy of “Pundits, Poets and Wits” adds that indeed the column ins “nothing less than the American voice fortissimo – often blunt, occasionally eloquent, always opinionated, inspiring, infuriating, delightful”. But the question we must still deal with is whether, though “always opinionated”, the column is also quite so much a vehicle for making opinion, public opinion, that is.

Even the great print pundit, Walter Lippmann, whose passing my guest writes “left an Olympian void that no successor has managed to occupy”, described the columnist as “a puzzled man making notes…drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away”.

So the question remains: What is the power of these “pundits, poets and wits”? Now, usually when they’re here at this table members of what Karl Meyer calls the “forthright estate”, say the equivalent of “There’s no one in here but us chickens”, denying and I think demeaning somewhat, the power of the press…perhaps, to avoid the institutionalized responsibilities that in our times seem elsewhere to go with great power.

Mr. Meyer, you write about the real power of these “pundits and poets and wits”. Why are there so many press people today who want to deny it and say the equivalent of “There’s no one in here but us chickens”?

Meyer: Well, I think there’s two reasons. There’s something operatic about the press, in that you have a lot of stars out front, the divas, but you also have a large cast back stage, and I think that the people back stage feel that they’re part of the show too. And they want to make sure…they want to cut down to size, sometimes, the people out front. That’s one reason.

Heffner: Yes, but you know, occasionally, it’s been the people out front…right on the stage…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …who come here and say, “Look, our power has been exaggerated…”

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …they want to limit us, they want us to do this, or not to do that, and after all, we’re just the messengers”. And you seem to say, tell me if I’m wrong, that the “pundits and the poets and the wits” are more than just messengers.

Meyer: Well, let’s make a careful distinction here. There’s the news side of the paper which gives the stories, the facts, and so on. Then there’s the opinion side, which is the editorial page, the Op-Ed page and the columnist. And I certainly think that if you don’t think you’re having any influence on public opinion, that you shouldn’t be an editorial writer or a columnist. On the other hand, I would take the other view as to the news side…the notion that the newspapers by how they cover the news have a decisive effect on public opinion I think is grossly exaggerated. And even on the opinion side, let’s put in a little qualification here…The New York Times has supported I think one winning Presidential candidate in the last six races. And I think that if you try to make approximation between editorial opinion and being either a forecaster or an influencer of events, you see that is a pretty mixed record. The kind of influence I’m talking about is different. The kind of influence is the ability to throw an idea, a phrase into the current of thought. I think that’s what part of the power of the press is. Then there’s a second aspect…that certain journalists become public personalities, so that what they say and how they say it and how they behave has a resonance beyond just what they write in the newspaper.

Heffner: Do you think that the…if you look back in time that you would say that the columnists…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …had more power at one time than they do now? Or less?

Meyer: Well, let’s make a distinction again…you know I’m not being captious with all these distinctions…

Heffner: No…that’s what we’re here for…to make distinctions.

Meyer: Right. The columnists of an earlier period didn’t have access to this medium that we’re on right now. And I think starting with radio…it was very interesting…you had the Winchell phenomenon, Drew Pearson, other print journalists who became part of the extended family in the living room through radio. Now you add on to that the, the extra magnification of the pundits…I’m thinking of George Will, or Tom Wicker or Ellen Goodman or others who appear on television, they have again an extra ride, and also it doesn’t hurt their lecture fees. That’s one, one aspect. On the question of looking backwards, I would say that there’s a great difference between the columnists today and the columnists then. The columnists of my father’s generation, my father for 15 years wrote a six day a week column…the columnists of the twenties and the thirties had a much stronger literary bent…that they engaged in politics, but it wasn’t their primary connection with their public. They wrote poetry they wrote parodies…they wrote sketches about their childhood. Starting in the 1930s you had the rise of the pundit, where politics became a principle part of, of the columnists’ theme every day. Now I think that the literary influence of the fellows in the past was immensely greater than the literary influence of the people writing today and vice versa on politics.

Heffner: What do you mean literary influence?

Meyer: Well, I mean quite literally “literary influence” because one of the interesting things that I found in writing this book is that the American language has been deeply influenced by journalist, and journalism has been deeply influenced by the columnists. Until the 1830s, just to give a little historical perspective, people in this country used to write the way the English spoke. In 1831 there was an editor up in Maine…Siba Smith, who for the first time got the idea of writing a column for the Portland Courier…was his paper…in which he would try to reproduce the way people actually spoke, a vernacular column. It was immediately a success, immediately imitated and out of this grew a whole stream of American literature of which the great expression was Mark Twain, of people who listened to the way Americans spoke and in Huckleberry Finn there’s a wonderful little bit in the front where he says that there are six different dialogues in this…in Huckleberry Finn and the people aren’t talking differently on purpose because they’re stupid, but because that’s my idea, to reproduce all of the Missouri and Mississippi basin dialogues. Well, that had a great liberating effect on American literature. That, that people…once they found that it was possible to get an audience for writing in a vernacular style, that became the great contribution that Americans made to the novels and the short story and to other things. So that’s one of the literary influences of the column. Then another kind of literary influence…is specific words and coinages. I was surprised to find how many things that are kind of common place of our speech are things that came into the language through newspapers and quite especially the column. To take just one example…you mentioned Walter Lippmann. Walter Lippmann wrote a series of columns for the old Herald Tribune in 1946 and he called it “The Cold War”. That’s where the whole phrase “the Cold War” came from. That any number of columnists by coming up with phrases have an immediate resonance…I’ll give you a good example. I was quite surprised a couple of years ago at how seriously the West Germans were taking one of my colleagues, Bill Safire. Bill Safire had written a column giving hell to the Federal Republic of the West German government because it had sold a plant to the Libyans that could be used for chemical purposes…chemical warfare. And Bill put in his column the phrase “There is a danger of Auschwitz in the sands”. The line “Auschwitz in the sands” was picked up by every German newspaper, and he caused a furor. I mean this is one of the…the real power that a good and gifted columnist has, the ability to come up with…a turn of phrase that will turn a debate. So that’s power.

Heffner: And the impact of that in Germany? What happened to Bill’s?

Meyer: Well, in Germany there was a very defensive impact in it, and I think in fact it had a salutary impact…to get into the specifics of that particular circumstance…the Federal Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had either been misinformed, or misspoke about certain aspects of this particular transaction…the procedures were changed to tighten up the licensing of German companies in selling to foreign customers chemical factories that could be used for malign purposes. So that in fact the debate that that column precipitated led to a change that I think was a beneficial change. That is if you think it’s a good idea that we make it harder to have germ warfare.

Heffner: Now…should I say “no”…

Meyer: No, no, but…

Heffner: Now, about Bill Safire…

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: Here’s a person who…oh, he comes on THE OPEN MIND once every few years…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …but you don’t see him that often on the tube.

Meyer: “Nightline”, he comes on on “Nightline”…he’s very good on “Nightline”.

Heffner: He’s terrific. He’s terrific. But he has not made a habit of bolstering his press image…

Meyer: I think he’s a look-a-like with Gerasimov, the press spokesman for the Soviet Union…

Heffner: You think maybe their changing roles?

Meyer: Yeah, well I’m never sure when I see one or the other who it really is, and maybe there’s a…something going on there.

Heffner: Who are the…who are today the truly influential columnists?

Meyer: Well, you’re putting me in a lot of trouble there.

Heffner: Sure, if you name only New York Times people, you’re in trouble.

Meyer: Sure…let’s, let’s put aside…it would be self-serving for me to talk about my own beloved newspaper. But let’s take, let’s say The Washington Post. One of my favorites is Mary McGrory…

Heffner: Now, wait a minute, wait a minute…I’m not asking about your favorites…

Meyer: No, no…I’m talking…I’m talking about…

Heffner: The power.

Meyer: That Mary gets under people’s skin, that she is an outspoken liberal, always has been and has a way of crystallizing in a crisp, 650-700 words a reaction to something that does get under the skin, the proof being the letters it provokes in that paper. I would add, talking also about The Washington Post, that George Will…George Will I find really an extraordinarily interesting figure…that he, though a conservative, is never a predictable conservative, and has been really tough on George Bush form the outset, from a conservative vantage, so that you’re never sure which way he’s going, and he is very much taken seriously in Washington, and I think rightly because he also has the gift of summing up in a, in a stinging sentence an adhesive phrase. Well, let’s go on just to, just to one other columnist on there…The Washington Post sticks in the comics – Jack Anderson. And though I think that over the years the Washington merry-go-round and Jack Anderson and his predecessor, Drew Pearson, had had a real influence on, on exposing politicians and sometimes in Jack Anderson’s case because he’s put in the comics, he isn’t taken as seriously as he should be. For example, he was the first one that got on to the whole Iran-Contra business. That was six moths before anyone else had written anything about, he did a column in The Washington Post which said what was going on, that there was a deal to sell missiles to the Ayatollah, etc….a few perfunctory checks were made, wasn’t followed up, people said, “Oh, it’s just another Jack Anderson thing”, and he was right.

Heffner: You know, you talk about the void that was left…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …when Lippmann…

Meyer: …by Lippmann, sure…

Heffner: …left the scene…what about this phrase “the sands of time…washed away in the sands of time”…I remember James Reston did a book of his pieces and that’s…was what he used.

Meyer: “Sketches in the Sand” was the title.

Heffner: And I remember reviewing that, I guess, for The Nation of all places…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: Ah, The Saturday Review, and thinking what a wonderful phrase that is.

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: You obviously think that that’s not quite so true; the sands are not washed away…

Meyer: Let me put it this way…they are sands, but cumulatively a lot of pebbles can make a big pile. And the columnist has one great advantage: He gets lots of chances to throw pebbles into the sea. In the case of Lippmann…Lippmann, I think, was, was…there were two Lippmanns…there was Lippmann the public figure, who was solemnly interviewed at the peak of his influence on CBS…

Heffner: Eric Severeid…

Meyer: By Eric Severeid and other correspondents…”What do you think about this, Walter?”, and what he said became an event. But there was also the other Lippmann who hammered at certain ideas day in and day out, and had a cumulative effect. Now what interests me about Lippmann is that during the Vietnam War, he got into a fearful row with President Johnson. Johnson, who took seriously the power of all the columnists, was outraged when Lippmann began criticizing his conduct of the war, and even asking the fundamental question “What enduring American interest is truly at stake in Southeast Asia?” I was re—reading some of those Lippmann columns just the other day, just to see how they stood up. They’re now commonplace…what Lippmann is saying then was that an exaggerated reaction which had more to do with domestic public opinion…the fear of seeming soft on Communism, the fear of yielding up hostages to domestic political enemies, helped distort American purposes and that started with John F. Kennedy. So that I think cumulatively what Lippmann did was outline a kind of a way of thinking which, at least, for my generation, I was a young journalist at the time, has been very influential in that we have at least striven to be more skeptical in considering the official claims made for this or that foreign adventure that the United States has been embarked on. Not always successfully, and not always to the extent we should, let me quickly add.

Heffner: You know, again, you’re talking about maybe just a few individuals…you’re talking about power. Usually in our country where there are focuses or locations of power…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …we also develop a means by which they are, if not regulated…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …then subject to certain rules, certain principles.

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: What are those rules? What are those principles? If there are any when it relates to these wielders of punditry power.

Meyer: Well, let’s make a distinction again between punditry and the rest of the newspaper. I think that the laws of libel and the damages that have been voted to people who’ve been aggrieved by newspaper coverage…fairly substantial sums…that’s one regulatory mechanism that…

Heffner: Does it work?

Meyer: …sometimes I think too well. I think that in some of these cases that the size of the settlements have discouraged other editors from getting into stories where they didn’t have all of the evidence that they…that might stand up in a court. But that’s, that’s on the facts side.

Heffner: Wait, wait a minute, let me…before we move from that let me ask you about that.

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: With the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting…

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: …there were always those who spoke about the chilling effect…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …of the Fairness Doctrine…the Fairness Doctrine isn’t with us any more…it may begin again…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …but it isn’t. I don’t think I ever experienced or saw, witnessed…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …or heard about, the “chilling effect” in reality of the Fairness Doctrine. The question I would put to you, since you were staying with the news side…

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: …have these suits, indeed, in fact, had a chilling effect, to your knowledge?

Meyer: Give me five minutes. (Laughter)

Heffner: Was it that…was it Eisenhower who said, when asked about what Nixon had done…

Meyer: (Laughter)

Heffner: …as Vice President, said “Give me two weeks and I’ll…”

Meyer: Now what are you…can I get a second go-round on the show if I come back with an absolutely…

Heffner: (Laughter)

Meyer: …dazzling response?

Heffner: (Laughter)

Meyer: You see I’m not…my, my problem, my embarrassment is that I don’t deal on the news side of the newspaper, so that I’m not up against the day to day decisions that would enable me to confidently give you…

Heffner: Oh, but you rub shoulders with the news department…right?

Meyer: We rub shoulders, but we don’t exchange confidences…

Heffner: Okay.

Meyer: …certainly I’m not told…we were chilled the other…boy were we chilled the other day… (Laughter)

Heffner: Let me ask you about the editorial…

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: …page, or the columnists, to your knowledge.

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: Chilled? At any point?

Meyer: I think that…that the problem with columnists is that none of them really…are really…are engaged in a game…I’m putting aside the gossip columnists…Jack Anderson or people that are writing expose columns, that exposes them to that kind of danger, to being chilled, that I think that it’s a little different. When you…when you talk about other…but let me throw in a thought, though. I think of one of the changes that’s com over journalism is that it used to by years ago that there were certain taboo subjects that you couldn’t deal with. That you couldn’t write about pregnancy, abortion, birth control…those things were not in a family newspaper.

Heffner: Presidential peccadilloes?

Meyer: Presidential private life…that was changed. But now we’ve got a different kind of problem in that there are certain areas where there’s a great public sensitivity about discussing something that may seem homophobic that may seem derisory to an ethnic group or so on. And we’ve had, in fact, some very noisy controversies…one involving Andy Rooney on television, another involving Jimmy Breslin in print, on this. And I think that certainly that the fear…let me put it, the power of the zeitgeist, the fear of saying something that’s going to outrage a very vocal and aggressive part of your readership may have a chilling effect that if you’re going to write about AIDS, and if you say something that might provoke part of your audience into thinking that you’re reflecting ill on sexual preference, of gays, you better be prepared to take the consequences of that. That’s a new problem we have in journalism. I don’t think we’ve quite figured out the right way to handle it.

Heffner: Well, let me ask you…

Meyer: Sure.

Heffner: …your opinion about this. Let me ask you whether you think there should be some responsibility making or taking mechanism…mechanism, that’s…that’s a…

Meyer: You mean as they have in England…they’ve got something called the British Press Counsel…

Heffner: Right.

Meyer: …where any aggrieved reader can go and get a response and a bunch of solemn looking people look at the complaint…they then go and hear the newspaper’s side, and then they make a finding and then if the newspaper’s judged wrong the newspaper has to run a little notice saying, “We apologize, we did wrong. The Press Counsel found us wrong”.

Heffner: Whether that or some other mechanism…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …that you may have up your sleeve. If you think there needs to be some connection between…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …what is written in the pages…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …of our press, and what is not libelous…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: …but what is perhaps…

Meyer: I’ll give you two…

Heffner: …regarded as destructive.

Meyer: …two mechanisms that have evolved and are still evolving. On is the correction…I’m not talking about the correction just for matters of fact…

Heffner: Right.

Meyer: …but in matters of fairness. My newspaper and other newspapers now run a little box saying “We wrote a story and actually we got this a little wrong. We weren’t as fair as we should be”. That’s one thing. Another…

Heffner: You said it right, though…a little box…

Meyer: Yeah. On this medium there’s not even a little box. I mean…

Heffner: Who’s defending this medium?

Meyer: Okay, alright. That’s one of the problems of this medium. The second thing is the ombudsman…the Washington…

Heffner: How’s that working?

Meyer: Well, I don’t know. I think that the problem with the ombudsman is…at the Washington Post they have one of their own guys…Dick Harwood is doing it. In previous incarnations I think they got outsiders to do it. I think it’s a little difficult for a colleague to take on their colleagues and say “Boy, did we blow that story and such and such an editor got it wrong”. But it’s an experiment…I think it’s an attempt to respond to what you are saying. A third I think is something I deal with in my book. That one of the outgrowths of monopoly journalism…by monopoly journalism I mean that in print journalism…that more and more you had one newspaper towns or one-ownership towns, where in years past you have five or six newspapers…afternoon, mornings, all competing with each other. And one of the things that’s happened as a result of that is that the surviving papers have felt under an imperative pressure, partly for reasons of self-interest to become fairer papers. That, to take an outstanding example…The Los Angeles Times, or another outstanding example, the Chicago Tribune, which were both deeply conservative papers in very tenacious ways very often….both of them have opened up Op-Ed pages where they present the diversity of views, not just the editorial opinion of the paper, but they make an active effort to see that contrary views are also expressed on a regular basis, either through columnists or special contributions. That’s one of the regulating things that you have that you now give on a regular basis. Readers and people who have something to say a chance to talk back in a pretty good showcase…the Op-Ed page.

Heffner: You see, I was innocent enough years ago to think that was what was meant by Op-Ed…

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: I thought it meant opposite the editorial opinion, as expressed.

Meyer: Yes.

Heffner: I was just so…happens that it seems to mean only it’s opposite the editorial page, and it may well be more of the same. Unfair?

Meyer: Well, the phrase has got an interesting history.

Heffner: In the one minute we have left.

Meyer: The one minute we have left…one of the really great editors, Herbert Bairds Hope, of The World, had a three-ring circus of columnists and critics and he said, “We’re wasting the page opposite the editorials on obits. Let’s throw the opinion in there”. That’s how it started. It’s now become an institution and I think in terms of the theme of the book that I’ve written, its helped along at least the lifespan, if not the influence of the columnists that we’re all reading.

Heffner: Karl Meyer, I really enjoyed having you here today, and Pundits, Poets and Wits is a, is a delightful opportunity…

Meyer: Well, thank you.

Heffner: …to dip into people we don’t read, we don’t see, we don’t hear about any more. Reading FPA was just, just great. Thank you very much for joining me today.

And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you’ll join us again next time. And if you care to share your thoughts about today’s program, please write to THE OPEN MIND, P.O. Box 7977, FDR Station, New York, NY 10150. For transcripts send $2.00 in check or money order. Meanwhile, as an old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck”

Continuing production of this series has generously been made possible by grants from: The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation; The M. Weiner Foundation of New Jersey; The Mediators and Richard and Gloria Manney; The Edythe and Dean Dowling Foundation; The New York Times Company Foundation; The Richard Lounsbery Foundation; and, from the corporate community, Mutual of America.