WHEN THE GOVERNMENT TELLS LIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504240002-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: March 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
March/April 1985
WHEN SHE GOVERNMENT
T111S. 111S
Official deceptions, half-truths, and outright lies
impose a heavy burden on the press. A veteran journalist
surveys the scope of the problem -
and suggests ways reporters can cope with it
by ANTHONY MARRO
NOVEMBER 25, 1957 - Dwight Eisenhower, sixty-seven
years old and recently recovered from both a heart attack
and abdominal surgery, is in his office. He tries to pick up
a document, and can't. He tries to read it, and fails. The
words, he later says, "seemed literally to run off the top
of the page." He tries to get up, and nearly falls down. He
tries to tell his secretary what is wrong. but she can't make
any sense of what he is saying. His physician realizes almost
immediately that Eisenhower has suffered some sort of a
stroke.
The president has developed "a chill," the press office
tells reporters. It is not until twenty-four hours later that
the nation is told that its president is seriously ill.
DECEMBER 7, 1971 - Henry Kissinger is briefing the
press on the government's position on the India-Pakistan
war. "First of all, let's get a number of things straight,"
he begins. "There have been some comments that the
administration is anti-Indian. This is totally inaccurate." A
briefing paper has been handed out at the start of the session.
The first sentence reads: "The policy of this administration
towards South Asia must be understood. It is neither anti-
Indian nor pro-Pakistan."
A month later, Jack Anderson publishes the transcript of
a meeting attended by Kissinger on December 3, just four
days before the briefing for the press. '7 am getting hell
even half-hour from the president that we are not being
tough enough on India...," Kissinger is quoted as saving.
"He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.''
spokesman, is talking with Jack Nelson, Washington bureau
chief for the Los Angeles Times. No military operation is
being planned to rescue the hostages in Iran. Powell tells
him. A blockade might he feasible, somewhere down the
road, but a rescue mission just wouldn't make any sense.
The newspapers with Nelson's stony, which says that the
Carter White House considers a rescue operation imprac-
tical, are still scattered around in living rooms all over Los
Angeles when the members of Delta Team board airplanes
for the raid on Teheran.
OCTOBER 24, 1983 - Larry Speakes, the White House
spokesman, is asked by reporters whether U.S. troops have
landed on Grenada. He checks with a member of President
Reagan's national security staff, and relays the response.
"Preposterous," he says. and goes on to deny that any
invasion is planned.
The landing takes place the next day.
or starters, Stephen Hess probably is right. The
Brookings Institution scholar, who has studied both
Washington reporters and government press oper-
ations, says that most government spokespersons
don't like to lie. For one thing, telling the truth is
official U.S. government policy. For another, they
prefer telling the truth. To lie, he says, is to "fail
to play fair with reporters and the public. to diminish their
self-esteem, and to complicate their work."
Anthony Marro, managing editor of Newsday. %vas a Washington
correspondent for ten years.
Continued
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White House
reporters wait for
news on Ike's health
(above), then run to
call in their stories.
'The president [Eisenhower] has developed "a
chill," the press office tells reporters.
Not until twenty-four hours later is the nation
told that its president is seriously ill'
But complications and crises are of the essence of gov-
ernment, and trying to put the best face on a sensitive sit-
uation also is part of the job. Political posturing, face-
saving, honest error. bad judgment, and legitimate national
security concerns also play a role, and so, to different de-
grees in different administrations, do arrogance, deceit, dis-
regard for the public, high-handedness, and attempts to
cover up stupidity and criminal conduct. The result is that
reporters have come to accept some level of deception as
part of the routine, and to expect. as Hess delicately phrases
it, "less than full candor" on the part of their government.
In fact, Washington reporters over the years have had to
deal with a steady barrage of deceptions. half-truths, and
outright lies - deceptions about national security operations
that were so sensitive that they probably wouldn't have
published the information even if they had been able to
obtain it. and deceits so petty that they wondered why any-
one would bother to lie in the first place.
There was the time in 1960 when Lincoln White tried to
explain away the crash of the U-2 airplane in the Soviet
Union. It had been on a weather mission and had just strayed
off course, the State Department's chief spokesman said.
"Now, our assumption is that the [pilot] blacked out. There
was absolutely no - N-0, no - deliberate attempt to
violate Soviet air space. There never has been." Within
days it became clear that the pilot, Francis Gary Powers,
was alive, that the Soviets had him, and that he was talking.
The principal attachment to the airplane was not a ther-
mometer but a camera, and its mission was not weather
reconnaissance but spying.
There was the time in 1966 that Lyndon Johnson claimed
that one of his great-great-grandfathers had died at the 4l-
anto (not true), and the time in 1971 that the White House
claimed that Tricia Nixon's wedding cake had been based
on an old family recipe tit apparently had been created by
a White House chef).
There was the time in 1975 when FBI Director Clarence
Kelley said that while there had been some warrantless
break-ins by FBI agents in the past. they had been confined
by and large to foreign espionage and counterintelligence
matters. and had been ended by J. Edgar Hoover in 1966.
In truth, there had been thousands, all of them illegal. most
of them against American citizens. many of them against
people never charged with any crime. and some as recently
as 1972. Kelley's aides were left to explain that the head
of the nation's most sophisticated police agency had been
misinformed.
There was the time in 1954 when Henry Cabot Lodge.
ambassador to the UN. described fighting H. Guatemala as
"a revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans," despite
the fact the uprising was being orchestrated. in large part,
by Frank Wisner, the deputy director for plans for the CIA.
There was the time in 1981 when the Reagan administration
released a white paper on Central America that attributed
authorship of key documents to several guerrilla leaders who
clearly had not written them. There was the time, during
the Bay of Pigs invasion. when the government lied in
saying that the bombings were being conducted by defectors
from Castro's own air force, and then, when reporters dis-
covered the lie, groused because the reporters did not create
lies of their own to help protect the government's lie.
There was the time in a televised debate last October
when President Reagan insisted that more people were re-
ceiving food stamps than ever before (actually the number
had dropped by about 400.000 since he had become pres-
ident), and when Walter Mondale claimed that Reagan had
sought to "terminate" a housing program for the elderly
(in fact, the Reagan administration had made major cuts in
the program, but hadn't tried to abolish it).
There was the time that John Mitchell. the former attorney
general, was indicted for lying about Watergate, the time
that Richard Helms, the former head of the CIA, was in-
dicted for lying about Chile. and the time that Rita Lave!
a former official with the Environmental Protection Agency,
was indicted for lying about the EPA's handling of toxic
waste.
There was the time that Ron Nessen, President Ford's
press secretary, began a response to a question by saving
"To tell you the truth ..." only to be overwhelmed by
sarcastic applause.
The manifold forms of deception
I. F. Stone has said that "Every government is run by liars,
and nothing they say should be believed."
James Deakin, who covered the White House for many
years for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pretty much agreed
with Stone, but worded it differently. "Every government
is run by people who seek to wield and retain power," he
wrote in Straight Sniff, his brilliantly witty book on Wash-
ington journalism. "To do this, they must convince the
public of certain things: That their policies are correct. That
their facts and explanations should be accepted. That they
are in control of events and situations. That sounds nicer
Continued
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2.
[than Stone]. And it comes out at the same place."
To achieve these things. it's necessary not only for gov-
ernments to deceive, but also to hype, slant, tilt, and gloss
over, trying at the same time to present a situation in its
most favorable light, while hiding, or hedging on. or de-
flecting reporters away from any information that might
conflict with its version. Indeed, Stephen Hess has written,
"It is hard to find a discussion of modern government's
relations with the press that does not include the words
'manage,' 'manipulate.' and 'control.' "
It probably is a fool's errand to try to measure degrees
of deception from one administration to the next. or to try
to show whether Democrats are more or less deceptive than
Republicans. Clearly, much misinformation was produced
by the Reagan administration during its first four years, on
such matters as the invasion of Grenada. revolution in Cen-
tral America. its concern for the handicapped, and its com-
mitment to civil rights. But there is no way of assessing
how it compares with, or whether it's even in the same
league with, the massive amounts of misinformation put out
by the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War, for
example, or by the Nixon administration during the Wa-
tergate years.
For one thing, it often takes years for deceptions to sur-
face. It took congressional hearings, criminal prosecutions,
and serious reporting by people like Nicholas Horrock and
John Crewdson, both then working for The New York Times,
to expose the degree to which the FBI had been staging
illegal break-ins against American citizens. And even in
1985, fifteen years after the fact, we were still learning in
the libel trial of General Westmoreland against CBS about
the degree to which key officials in the Johnson adminis-
tration knew that, despite their public statements to the
contrary, there wasn't any light at the end of the tunnel.
`Kelley said warrantless break-ins by FBI
agents had been largely confined to foreign
espionage. In truth, there had been
thousands, most against American citizens'
For another thing. there is the question of degree. and
the issue of whether, and at what point, numerous small
deceptions begin to equal major ones.
There was a time, early in the Reagan administration,
when the president's aides argued that it didn't matter
whether some of his stories were literally true - his nu-
merous misstatements of fact, his confusion about detail,
and his repeated anecdotes about supposed welfare cheats
that no one was ever able to confirm, for example - because
they contained a larger truth.
"We've been dealing with four years of an administration
that freely states - and stated early - that literal truth was
not a concern," says Bill Kovach. the Washington news
editor of The New York Times. "This is the first time I've
heard that literal truth is not important to the presidency."
To begin with, Reagan's administration hadn't actually
T here also is the matter of attitude. "This admin-
istration is much more arrogant with the press,"
says one career government official who has served
through several administrations. "The attitude is,
'Screw you, we don't need you. The Reagan
administration is going to be successful despite the
editorials in The Washington Post and The New
York Times, and the cartoons in the Los Angeles Tines.' "
And Morton Halperin, the director of the left-leaning
Center for National Security Studies, says that many key
officials in the Reagan administration have a philosophy of
government that doesn't include public discussion and de-
bate. "These guys came here straight out of nineteen forty-
six." he says. "They came out of World War Two, when
the government lied all the time, and it was all-right to lie.
The whole Normandy invasion, and the covert operations
that surrounded it, are an important part of that mind-set.
... They still think fundamentally that foreign policy
should be left to the executive branch and that people
shouldn't even try to find out what they're up to.,,
Deceptions by government officials take many forms, and
it's not always easy to show what they amount to. They
can include simple face-saving, such as Geraldine Ferraro
claiming she felt "vindicated" by a House report critical
of her failure to disclose her husband's financial interests,
and routine political posturing, such as the White House
announcing full support for people like Anne Burford and
James Watt, when both had clearly become major liabilities
and were on their way out of the government. And there is
the endless, predictable attempt by administrations to por-
tray themselves in the best light, as Reagan did in a speech
to the National Council of Negro Women in July 1983.
"We have authorized for filing three school desegregation
cases, more than were authorized by the previous admin-
istration during its first thirty months in office." he said.
At first blush, this looks like a simple statement of fact.
But when James Nathan Miller took a look at the numbers.
he concluded in an article in The Atlantic on Reagan's civil
rights record that "This seemingly straightforward twenty-
four-word sentence contains three carefully crafted semantic
deceptions."
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filed only one. while Carter's had filed two. Secondly, while after they leave office, and using polygraphs to search out
Reagan seemed to he saying that he had filed more cases, people who talk to the press all have the effect of restricting
he hadn't really said that. What he had said was that his access to information. and of making it harder for reporters
administration had authorized that the suits be filed. And to report on the way Reagan is running the government.
thirdly. while he implied that he was talking about his record Jack Landau. who heads the Reporters Committee for Free-
and Carter's on the same terms, in truth he was using an dom of the Press, goes so far as to say that such actions by
apples and oranges comparison of legal suits his people had the Reagan administration constitute the greatest restrictions
authorized (hut not yet acted on), with suits that Carter on public access to government information since World
actually had taken to court. War 11. There is no question but that the Reagan adminis-
The fact that it took Miller about twelve hours' worth of tration is seeking restrictions and kinds of censorship in
digging just to deal with that one sentence gives some notion peacetime that Eisenhower. Kennedy. Johnson. and even
of the problem at hand. Richard Nixon didn't ask for in times of war.
There is a temptation to shrug that politicians have always
The Reagan twist - and John Mitchell's maxim lied and that the Republic nonetheless has survived. But
The problem, in the view of many, is very real, not nec- David Wise, in The Politics of Lying, argues that to dwell
essarily because face-saving and political posturing are out- on historical examples of lying is to miss the point entirely,
rageous in themselves, but because a pattern of routine and because it was only in the 1960s that government deception
systematic deception has very real costs, both in terms of came to be perceived by large numbers of citizens. Many
loss of confidence by people in their government, and in actually were shocked to learn at the time of the U-2 incident
terms of citizens not learning until it is too late just what it that their government would tell such a lie. And once large
is that their government is up to. And while it is not clear numbers of people come to distrust their government, he
that the Reagan administration is any more duplicitous than says, a new political environment is created in which the
others, it unquestionably has gone well beyond other recent president can no longer assume that most people believe
administrations in its attempts to bottle up information, to what he says.
prevent public access to government officials and records, According to Wise, a former bureau chief for the New
to threaten and intimidate the bureaucracy in order to dry York Herald Tribune, this is a dangerous situation in a
up sources of information, and to prevent the press and the society in which the government is supposed to operate with
public from learning how their government is functioning. the consent of the governed. Indeed, writing in 1972, he
This goes well beyond just shielding the president from termed the erosion of confidence between people and gov-
questions (Reagan has had fewer official news conferences ernment - an erosion that was documented by University
than any president in modern times), and doing silly things of Michigan studies - "perhaps the single most significant
like revving up the helicopters while he's getting ready to political development in America in the past decade."
leave for Camp David, so that reporters won't be able to Wise laid much of the blame for this erosion on 'official
make themselves heard over the din. The administration's deception, and he in turn laid the blame for much of the
proposals for limiting the Freedom of Information Act, cen- deception on the growth of the nation's intelligence-gath-
soring the public statements of government officials even ering agencies since World War II. Once the government
`Many citizens actually were shocked to
to learn at the time of the U-2 incident that
their government would tell such a lie'
U-2 pilot Francis Gan. Powers testrfeing
before the Senate Armed Services Convnittee in 1962
range problems for a democracy if people don't trust their
m was in the national interest, argues that while there are long-
will be better off in the long run," she writes. "From there,
it is a short step to the conclusion that, even if people will
not be better off from a particular lie, they will benefit by
all maneuvers to keep the right people in office. Once public
servants lose their bearings in this way. all the shabby de-
ceits of Watergate - the fake telegrams. the erased tapes,
the elaborate cover-ups, the bribing of witnesses to make
them lie, the televised pleas for trust - become possible.
And Jody Powell, President Carter's press secretary and
a man who admits to at least one lie that he still believes
told so long as they can convince themselves that people
began running covert operations it had to have cover stories
to hide them. and that required government-sanctioned lies.
The chief criterion thus was not truth, but just the opposite
- developing lies that would be plausible enough to he
accepted as truth. "Thus the standard is not truth," Wise
wrote, "but fashioning lies that will be believed."
Sissela Bok. in Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private
Life, argues that it is dangerous to let public officials get
away with even minor lies, or lies that they feel are for the
public good. "Some come to believe that any lie can be
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S
Defense Department
spokesman Arthur Sylvester
(below) at a press
conference on the 1962
Cuban missile crisis: and
(right) President Kennedy
conferring with his cabinet
and advisers during the crisis
'It is not known who first argued that the government has
a right to lie to its citizens, but the person who touched off
the greatest furor by saying it was Arthur Sylvester'
government, there can be more immediate consequences,
too. "An administration that has a reputation for being not
credible, for evoking 'national security' to cover political
embarrassments and things that don't involve any real na-
tional security matters at all, that sort of administration is
going to have a harder time protecting national security
secrets when there's a need." he said in a recent interview.
In short, if reporters come to distrust an administration's
officials, they won't believe them even when the matter is
serious and the officials are telling the truth.
All three - a former journalist, an academic, and a
former press secretary - would argue that it is important
that the press not shrug off lies as just part of the routine,
but must, instead, set out aggressively to expose them, and
to hold officials accountable for them. The reason is not
just to expose deceptions for the sake of exposure (although
Bok, more than the others, would argue that this is an
important goal in itself), but to make it possible for people
to know how, their government is working.
To this end, the best piece of advice for reporters was
offered by John Mitchell, the former attorney general and
no particular friend of the press. His words: "Watch what
we do instead of what we say." In truth, he wasn't talking
to reporters at the time (he was talking with a group of
people concerned about the direction of civil rights law
enforcement under Nixon). and he never did much to help
reporters learn what his department was doing. But sorting
out the difference between what a person, or a government,
is saying and doing is at the heart of reporting, and central
to the role of the press in a democracy. Among other things.
this means getting access to information about the process,
about alternatives that were debated and discarded. about
how a decision came to be made, and about all the predicted
results of the decision. not just those that the government
sees fit to release.
This also means being able to report on the decision-
making process while it is still under way. and while it is
possible to show what the alternatives are. On this point.
Deakin says. the press is very much like Lyndon Johnson,
who when he was Senate majority leader used to complain
to the White House that Congress wanted to be "in on the
takeoffs as well as the crash landings."
Letting the public in on the takeoffs means telling it what
an administration really is up to - whether it really has a
commitment to enforcement of civil rights laws, whether it
really is providing a "safety net" for the helpless, and how
far it really is prepared to go in trying to prop up allies in
Central America, for example - and what the likely con-
sequence of its actions will be. And the single biggest com-
plaint of many reporters now working in Washington is not
just that the government has deceived them in major ways,
but that it has taken unprecedented moves to try to prevent
them from getting behind the deceptions.
Does government have a 'right to lie'?
It is not known who first argued that the government has a
right to lie to its citizens, but the person who touched off
the greatest furor by saying it was Arthur Sylvester. a De-
fense Department spokesman during the Kennedy admin-
istration. On December 6, 1962. during a dinner meeting
of the New York chapter of Sigma Delta Chi. Sylvester was
asked by Jack Fox of UPI what he thought about half-truths
and deceptions by government spokesmen.
This was in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis of
October 1962. and many reporters were still fuming about
some of the misinformation that had been released during
the crisis. For one thing, Kennedy had cut short a political
trip to Chicago, and had rushed back to Washington to deal
with the evidence that the Soviets had placed offensive
missiles in Cuba. Instead of telling the nation that a major
confrontation with the Soviets was brewing, however. Ken-
nedy's aides explained the sudden return to the capital by
saying that the president had come down with a cold.
Later in that same week, with tensions rising and ques-
tions flying thick and fast, Sylvester had authorized a press
release from the Pentagon that read: "A Pentagon spokes-
Cootin11e4
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man denied tonight that any alert has been ordered or that
any emergency military measures have been set in motion
against Communist-ruled Cu.;a. Further, the spokesman
said, the Pentagon has no information indicating the pres-
ence of offensive weapons in Cuba."
The first sentence may have been technically correct. The
second was false, a government-planted lie at a time when
Kennedy had made the decision to confront Khrushchev,
but hciore all the strategy for the confrontation had been
worked out.
In authorizing the release, Sylvester later said, he had
come down on the side of the "Lying Baptists" and against
the "Truthful Baptists." His reference was to a dispute
between two groups of Baptists that had erupted at Long
Run, Kentucky, back in 1804. The issue was whether a
man with three children who had been captured by ma-
rauding Indians was justified in lying to the Indians in order
to conceal the fact that a fourth child was hiding nearby.
The "Lying Baptists" argued that the father had the right
to lie, and thus save the child. The "Truthful Baptists"
disagreed, saying that, no matter what the consequences,
the truth should be told.
This is a philosophical and ethical debate that far predates
Arthur Sylvester, the Cuban missile crisis, or even the 1804
dispute among the Baptists of Long Run, Kentucky. Dis-
cussing a similar hypothetical situation, albeit one without
Indians or the possibility of nuclear holocaust, Immanuel
Kant argued that truthfulness cannot be avoided by any
person, no matter how serious "may be the disadvantage
accruing to himself or another." Samuel Johnson's view
was more in line with that of the "Lying Baptists" and
Sylvester. "The general rule is, that truth should never be
violated; there must, however, be some exception," he said.
"If, for instance, a murderer should ask you which way a
man has gone."
Others have argued that the key question is whether the
person seeking the information - a murderer in Sam John-'
son's London or a Miami resident who suddenly has Soviet
missiles aimed at him, for example - has any right to it.
At what point did the American people have a right to know
that their president was wrestling with a major crisis, not
just a cold, and that Soviet missiles had been placed in
Cuba?
Sylvester's argument was that the stakes were so high
that deception, both of the Soviets and of the American
people, was necessary, at least until the president had de-
cided on his next move.
Jack Fox, in his story for UPI, gave what Sylvester later
said was a fair summary of his statement at the Sigma Delta
Chi dinner. "He [Sylvester] said that the government must
not put out false information, but later added, 'I think the
inherent right of the government to lie to save itself when
faced with nuclear disaster is basic,' " Fox wrote.
Others made more of the "right to lie" part of the state-
ment and less of the caveats, to the point where Sylvester,
in an article written for The Washington Star in 1967. com-
plained that they had "distorted my remarks beyond rec-
ognition, howling that they were proof that the government
was not to be believed, under any circumstances."
"He got a raw deal on that." Hess said recently. ''It's
always been taken out of context. as though he said the
government has a right to lie, period. He said a lot more
than that."
In his article in the Star, Sylvester said that as assistant
secretary of defense for public affairs he had always taken
the position that the prime requisite for a government in-
formation program was that it he truthful. And he went on
to argue that it was totally wrong for any press aide to lie
for personal or political reasons.
Many press secretaries would agree. There is considerable
evidence to hack up Hess's contention that most of them
don't like to lie, not just because it makes them feel had
- Lincoln White, who lied about the U-2 flight in 1960,
later told Patrick Slovan, then working for UPI, that it was
"my darkest moment" - but because credibility is im-
portant to their job. To be effective, a press aide not only
has to be able to generate favorable stories, but has to be
able to stop bad ones. And a press aide who isn't trusted
will have a whole lot more trouble trying to head off a bad
story than one who is trusted. "All you need is one lie, and
five years of credibility goes right down the drain," says
Homer Boynton, who acted as chief spokesman for the FBI
from 1973 until 1980. "So when you're giving it out, you
goddamn better be right."
s
ylvester's statement touched off an angry debate
at the time. But the fact is that many reporters
and editors agree with it, at least in principle.
Philip Geyelin, for example, complained in a re-
cent article in The Washington Post that the Rea-
gan administration seemed to be squandering its
credibility with a pattern of deception in its state-
ments about Central America. But he began the piece by
saying, "We will get nowhere without first stipulating that,
while circumstances alter almost any case you can think of,
the president has an inherent right - perhaps even an ob-
ligation in particular situations - to deceive." And he went
on to argue that, when it comes to troop movements and
placement of weapons, a certain ambiguity of purpose is,
as John Foster Dulles used to say, "a necessary art."
Bill Kovach, who runs The New York Times's Washington
bureau, says that, "as a rational human being. I'd have to
say yes. if lives really are at stake. But [the occasions)
should be so few and far between that we talk about them
for years. And it's better for [press aides] to in to avoid
answering the question than to give out real misinformation,
because the next time they won't be believed."
Even Jack Landau, the head of the Reporters Committee
for Freedom of the Press and one of the most vocal advocates
of the public's right to know, says that in some legitimate
national security cases "I would guess . . . [lying] would
be all right." And Jack Nelson. who was lied to by Jody
Powell during the Iran hostage crisis, also thinks there are
times when a government can justify some forms of decep-
tion. "I didn't like being lied to. I didn't like being used.
But I didn't have a great deal of problem with [Powell's]
doing it." he sans. "If it was a real matter of life and death,
and he thought it was, I can't argue with what he did."
cotow~
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/,
What Powell did was to tell Nelson flat-out that there was
no chance that a rescue mission would be launched in the
near future - a lie that Powell still argues was proper,
given the circumstances. At the time he told the lie the
preparations for the raid were well under way, and in less
than forty-eight hours the U.S. planes would be entering
Iranian air space. Not only was he fearful that a story sug-
gesting a raid was possible would alert the Iranians. but he
felt that a flat statement to the contrary would "reinforce
the web of deception" that had been constructed to protect
the mission.
In The Other Side of the Ston% his book on his years as
President Carter's press secretary, Powell argues that there
are two reasons why the government can, and sometimes
should. lie. The first is that the "government has a legitimate
right to secrecy in certain matters because the welfare of
the nation requires it." The second is that the press, for the
most part. has a right to print what it knows. Freedom of
the press is so important to democracy. he says, that when
there is a conflict with legitimate national security needs, it
is probably better for the government to simply lie to the
press than to try to limit it, censor it. or restrict it through
prior restraint.
But Powell admits to at least one other lie that had nothing
to do with national security or life-and-death matters. It was
a question that, as Powell put it, "involved the personal
life of a colleague and that of his family." Powell says he
decided to lie because to respond with the truth would have
resulted in "great pain and embarrassment for a number of
perfectly innocent people." And, besides, he didn't think
that the matter was of any legitimate public interest to begin
with. Powell thus goes a step beyond Sylvester. and argues
that it is sometimes permissible for a government to lie to
protect the privacy of public figures, as well as to protect
the security of the nation.
Powell, now a Washington columnist. says he has come
to understand more clearly than he used to why it is that
"journalists get so damn skeptical about what people [in
'What Powell did was to tell Jack Nelson [of the
Los Angeles Times] flat-out that there was no chance that
a rescue mission would be launched in the near future'
government] tell them." He says he has no doubts at all
that he acted properly in the Iran situation. but has mixed
feelings about the second lie. "That's harder to defend
without getting into the details, which I won't do." he says.
adding that he would probably lie again in that situation,
too.
"The minimal line you can draw there is that you can
absolutely say that lying to cover up your own embarrass-
ments is not permissible," says Powell. "Once you get past
that, you get into areas where. unfortunately, things tend
to be mixed. Then you have to weigh in the sort of long-
term impact. not just in terms of the credibility of a particular
administration, but the credibility of the government over
the long haul. If you contribute to the idea that people can't
believe anything their government tells them, that's awful.
It's also dangerous."
In his book, Powell cites other cases in which he thinks
a government sometimes might have a right to lie, including
protection of intelligence sources and methods. protection
of an innocent person whose name had cropped up during
a Justice Department investigation, and a pending decision
by the Treasury Department that could have major financial
consequences to individuals and to the nation.
And it is here that he runs into conflict with many others,
including Hess, who argue that there is a big difference
between lying to protect legitimate national security matters
and lying to protect anything less. "It's very easy to slop
over into other areas . . . and I'm less sympathetic when it
does." says Hess. "Just because something might concern
the 'public good.' that isn't enough" to justify government
lying. "It has to be to save lives, as in the Iranian hostage
thing, or similar wartime activities."
But while many people in government and in the media
agree that, in some circumstances, the government has a
right to lie. they also agree that the people have a right to
know what their government is really up to. And they argue
that a chief reason that the government gets away with as
much deception as it does is that the press, for all of its
Jiaireratt le(t behind
otter the attempt to tree
lzcmges in Iran
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`The "objective
reporting" standards
of the day held
that if a senator
was going to make
charges of treason,
espionage, and
communists in high
places, that in
itself was news'
Reporters question
Senator Joseph McCarthy
during 1954 hearings
bluster and all its professed skepticism, is far too willing to
take the government at its word.
Sylvester, for example. placed much of the blame for
misinformation about government activities on the laziness
and ineptitude of reporters, saying that they relied too much
on handouts and failed to ask the right questions." Every
sophisticated [reporter] knows the federal government puts
its best, not its worst, foot forward ...," he said. "That
being so, it is [the reporter's] function to penetrate this
protective coloration behind which all men attempt to mask
their errors. If there is a credibility gap, it measures the
failure of newsmen to do their job."
This is a charge that not only was valid when it was
made, and remains so today, but also had been a particular
matter of controversy just a decade before, when Joe
McCarthy was at the height of his influence and there was
much debate within the media over the lengths to which
reporters should go to try to unmask deception and lies.
Joe McCarthy: testing the limits
of 'objective reporting'
To understand the controversy that surrounded McCarthy
and the press, it is necessary to understand not just that
many of the charges by the Wisconsin senator were con-
sidered by many reporters to be reckless. but also that the
press in the early 1950s was very different from what it is
today. There was much less analysis and interpretative re-
porting in news sections (analysis and most forms of com-
ment being reserved for the editorial pages), and almost
none was provided by the wire services. The "objective
reporting" standards of the day held that if a U.S. senator
was going to make charges of treason, espionage. and com-
munists in high places, that in itself was news, and it wasn't
necessarily the job of a reporter to determine the validity
of the charges, or to hold the senator accountable for them.
"We let Joe get away with murder, reporting it as he
said it, not doing the kind of critical analysis we'd do to-
day," William Theis, a former reporter for International
News Service, told Edwin Bayley. whose book Joe Mc-
Carthy and the Press analyzes the coverage and finds much
of it lacking. George Reedy, who covered McCarthy for
United Press and later became a press secretary to Lyndon
Johnson, told Bayley that his frustration at trying to cope
with McCarthy's charges was a major consideration in his
decision to quit newspaper work. "We had to take what
McCarthy said at face value," he told Bayley. "Joe couldn't
find a communist in Red Square - he didn't know Karl
Marx from Groucho - but he was a United States senator.
... It was a shattering experience, and I couldn't stand
it."
As McCarthy's influence grew, the debate over how to
cover him and his charges grew also. Much of the debate
was over the nature of "objective" reporting, but the debate
itself tended to be partisan in the extreme. Editors and pub-
lishers who approved of McCarthy tended to argue that they
wanted his statements reported as they were made, without
heavy doses of analysis or perspective. And they, in turn,
put pressure on the wire services, which provided the bulk
of the daily coverage, to report the charges in a straight-
forward way.
Others, including many who disapproved of McCarthy's
politics as well as his tactics. argued that reporters who
simply wrote down what he said. along with the subsequent
rebuttals and denials, were playing into his hands, because
they were not addressing the large number of inconsistencies
and proven inaccuracies that marked his attacks on supposed
communists.
Some papers developed strategies specifically for Mc-
Carthy. The Milwaukee Journal, for example. began adding
bracketed inserts to stories about McCarthy's charges, using
the brackets to add explanatory information. Here is an
excerpt from a May 8, 1950. article about McCarthy and
Owen Lattimore, whom the senator had accused of helping
to shape foreign policy to the benefit of communist gov-
ernments:
McCarthy said that Lattimore has "long been referred to as the
architect of the State Department's Asiatic policy."
[State Department officials and three former secretaries of state
have denied that Lattimore played any par, in forming policy.]
The Young Republicans guffawed as McCarthy joked about
"individuals with peculiar mental aberrations as far as sex is con-
cerned."
[The individual referred to by Mr. McCarthy here is no longer
in government service.]
continued
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According to Bayley, this got to the point where, in
September 1952. the Journal had bracketed thirteen inches'
worth of such inserts into a fifty-two-inch story. "Mc-
Carthy's tactics produced lasting chances in the media."
Bayley observes in his book. "Newspaper people realized
that it was not enough simply to tell what had happened
and what was said, but that they had to tell what it meant
and whether or not it was true. By 1954, interpretative
reporting and news analysis had become standard practice;
these functions were no longer left to the editorial writers.'
And these devices were to become more important in the
following decades, not just because of the massive amounts
of misinformation released by the government during Viet-
nam and Watergate. but because, as Wise argues effectively
in The Politics of Lying, cover stories and deception became
a significant part of government operations.
Four kinds of lies -
and the problems they pose for the press
Not all deceptions are equal, of course. There is a big
difference between a Joe McCarthy making harsh. and often
groundless, charges of treason, and the sort of political
posturing that causes a president to defend an aide who has
done something dumb. After several years of studying the
press-government relationship from both sides, Hess has
concluded that some reporters tolerate. even welcome, minor
deceptions, because exposing deceptions helps them to dis-
play their skills. While studying the State Department press
operations during Reagan's first term, he says, he found
many examples of deception, most of them minor, and
didn't detect much outrage on the part of the reporters there.
"It is only the Big Lie, the deliberate and consistent pattern
of misstatement on a matter of importance, that turns Wash-
ington reporters into inflamed civil libertarians," Hess
writes in The Government/Press Connection.
Hess cites four broad categories of government de-
ceptions. On a scale of decreasing acceptability
to the press. he says. are so-called "honest lies,"
inadvertent lies, half-truths (which include many
forms of political posturing and selective release
of data), and flat-out lies. An "honest lie," for
Hess, is a legitimate national security matter,
such as Powell lying about the raid on Teheran. Even if
they don't approve of such a lie, most reporters can un-
derstand the need for it, he says.
Reporters also tend to forgive inadvertent lies, because
they know from their own work that mistakes happen when
things are done in a hurry. Bill Beecher. a former Defense
Department information officer and now a reporter for The
Boston Globe, has said that "half the initial internal re-
porting within government in a crisis is wrong.'
It is with half-truths, a specialty at the State Department.
that some reporters begin to get resentful. The chief tech-
nique here is for a press officer to define the question as
narrowly as possible and then answer it that way. Here are
two examples Hess cites in The Government/Press Con-
nection. Both. he said in an interview, are real examples,
with the facts altered just slightly "to protect the guilty."
Q - Has the assistant secretary of state been invited to China?
A - No. (Meaning: He will go to China as an adviser to the
vice president. It is the vice president who has been invited. There
fore. 1 am not lying. Rationale: I have to say this because protocol
requires that the Chinese must first publicly extend the invitation.)
Q - Will the ambassador-at-large go to Egypt?
A - No decision has been made. (Meaning: A "decision" is
made when the Secretary of State signs the cable. The cable will
be signed tomorrow. Therefore, I am not lying. Rationale: I do
not have the authority to give a premature confirmation.)
In the Reagan administration, examples of all four types
of deception can be found in the invasion of Grenada. Larry
Speakes himself may not have known that he was telling a.
lie when he said that it was "preposterous" to think U.S.
forces had invaded, and that no invasion would take place.
But Rear Admiral John Poindexter. who told Speakes it was
preposterous. knew that the landing would take place the
next day, and kept Speakes and other press aides in the dark
about it. Speakes did not respond to a request for an inter-
view, but Hess and Powell and a number of the journalists
interviewed for this article argued that, even if he had known
and then told the lie, it might have been justifiable.
The initial claim by the government that there were no
civilian casualties appears to have been inadvertent. The
Pentagon says that it didn't know about the bombing of a
mental hospital by a Navy plane (at least seventeen persons
were killed) until several days after it occurred, and no one
has yet proven otherwise.
The claim by the administration that leaders of other
Caribbean countries urged it to take action appears to be in
the nature of a half-truth. The administration said that the
urging from other leaders came after the assassination of
`The inflation of the number of Cubans
in Grenada was part of the data used to
argue that a Cuban takeover was at hand
and that "We got there just in time" '
Cuban prisoners captured by the U.S.-fed Grenada invasion force
/.
P?=>r Wed
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Maurice Bishop. the Marxist prime minister of Grenada. on
October 19. But Stuart Taylor. Jr., in a lengthy piece in
The New fork Times on some of the misinformation put out
by the U.S. government during and immediately after the
invasion. quotes the prime minister of Barbados as saying
that U.S. officials had been talking about possible action at
least as early as October 15. four days before the killing.
And while it's hard to determine whether the government
was telling an outright lie when it said it had prevented
reporters from accompanying the troops because of concern
for the safety of the journalists, subsequent comments by
Secretary of State George Shultz seem to give some sense
of the real reason for the ban. "These days, in the advocacy
journalism that's been adopted, it seems as though the re-
porters are always against us and so they're always trying
to screw things up," he said. "And when you're trying to
conduct a military operation. you don't need that."
It is difficult to know whether some of the most important
misinformation was deliberate or inadvertent because the
degree of the deception depends on whether there was any
intent to deceive. Reagan, in a television speech to the
nation, said there were an estimated 400 to 600 Cubans on
the island, and that they were "a military force," rather
than construction workers. The next day, Admiral Wesley
L. McDonald said that captured documents showed that
there were at least 1.100 Cubans on Grenada, and that they
were all ''well-trained professional soldiers."
Eventually, the State Department said that the Cuban
government's own figure probably was right - that there
had been 784 Cubans on the island. Still later, U.S. military
authorities on Grenada said that, after interrogating them,
they had concluded that most of the Cubans really had been
construction workers, and that only. about 100 had been
combatants. "Thus, over three days the Pentagon estimate
of the number of Cuban fighters who had met the invading
force seems to have plunged from more than 1,000 to fewer
than 200, including the estimated 30 to 70 Cubans who were
killed," Taylor wrote.
"You can say anything
you want in a debate
and 80 million people
hear it," Bush's
press secretary said.
"If reporters then
document that a
candidate spoke
untruthfully, so what?
Maybe 200 people
read it"
George Bush during
his October 1984 debate
with Geraldine Ferraro
What difference does it make whether there were 784
Cubans on Grenada or 1 . I (10. and whether they were "well-
trained professional soldiers." as Admiral McDonald in-
sisted, or construction workers. as the Cuban government
claimed? One answer, of course. is that one version suggests
an attempt to take over a country and perhaps export rev-
olution (which the Reagan administration said was the case),
while the other version suggests that Cuba might only have
been providing economic aid to a government that it con-
sidered an ally.
The inflation of the number of Cubans, and the initial
characterization of them as a military force. was a part of
the data that were used by the Reagan administration to
argue that a Cuban takeover was at hand, that American
students were in danger, and that, as many newspapers
repeated in their headlines, "We got there just in time."
G renada also highlighted a major problem in try ing
to counter deception and misinformation. The pres-
ident was able to give his version on national tel-
evision, to a huge audience, and was backed up
by carefully selected and edited television film
clips. The challenges to the official version came
over a period of days and weeks, and they were
fragmented and uncoordinated. One paper would challenge
one statement, a second paper would challenge a second
one, and a television report would challenge a third. A large
number of Americans heard the president say. "We got
there just in time." But it was only in a disjointed and
scattershot way, over a period of weeks following the in-
vasion, that the press raised the two immediate and obvious
questions, neither of them yet fully answered.
Did we?
In time for what?
This issue arose again during the presidential campaign,
when George Bush claimed in his television debate with
Geraldine Ferraro that Mondale had said that the American
Marines who had died in the bombing of the embassy in
Beirut had died in "shame." Mondale denied this, and
pressed Bush for a retraction. And in the process Peter
Teeley, Bush's press secretary, brought the whole problem
into focus.
"You can say anything you want in a debate. and eighty
million people hear it," he told reporters. "If reporters then
document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what?
Maybe two hundred people read it, or two thousand or
twenty thousand,"
Which makes the point that, particularly in the television
age, reporters need to be aggressive in documenting and
pointing out deceptions, half-truths, and outright lies. unless
governments and officials are going to be allowed to lie
with impunity.
How some journalists cope
with official misinformation
There are some kinds of misinformation that quickly become
apparent on their own. For example, there was Tricia Nix-
on's wedding cake. According to the White House. it had
been based on a recipe for old-fashioned pound cake, a
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'The whole wedding cake episode suggested
that a White House that would put out
misinformation about a recipe probably
couldn't be expected to tell the truth about
the war in Cambodia. Which it didn't'
favorite of Tricia's, that had been in Mrs. Nixon's recipe
box for years. But when the White House released a recipe
for the wedding cake, scaled back down to family size,
there was a problem. Housewives and amateur cooks all
over the country, including food writers for several news-
papers and magazines, rushed to test it. The result in many
cases was a porridge-like glob that overflowed the baking
pans and messed up the ovens.
When asked for an explanation. the White House first
said there must have been a miscalculation in the attempt
to scale down the recipe. There was hemming and hawing
when it was suggested that the White House should simply
produce the original recipe. from Mrs. Nixon's recipe box.
There was bobbing and weaving when it was noted that
most recipes for pound cake call for whole eggs (this one
called only for the whites), while the White House chef was
quoted as saying that his pastry chef had gotten the recipe,
"where I don't know." This in itself was of no great import,
except that the whole episode suggested that a White House
that would put out misinformation about the origins of a
cake recipe probably couldn't be expected to tell the truth
about the war in Cambodia. Which it didn't.
It's not possible to test all government statements as easily
as a cake recipe, of course. Some deceptions are so major
and so long-running and so tightly held that it takes the
combination of Congress. the courts, and the media, work-
ing over a period of years, to unravel them. But Patrick
Slovan. a Washington reporter for two decades and now
Newsday's London bureau chief, argues that basic reporting,
common sense. and "simple math on a pocket calculator
can often deflate the biggest government lies."
One of the easiest and most obvious ways to challenge
official statements is simply to go to the opposition. When
Reagan claimed that his administration had made "great
progress" in its efforts to protect the environment. Francis
X. Clines, of The New York Times, made clear that officials
of some of the nation's leading environmental groups didn't
know whether to laugh or cry at the statement. For specifics,
he went to Representative James L. Florio of New Jersey,
who noted that of 22.000 hazardous waste sites identified
by the EPA, only six had been cleaned up by the Reagan
administration in four years, and that even as the president
was trumpeting his record on the environment. he was op-
posing proposals in Congress to combat acid rain.
Many such claims are more a matter of opinion than fact,
of course, and going to the other side is a first lesson of
journalism. But some of the most basic kinds of reporting
can be used to provide a second, often different, view of
events and issues. And in covering an administration that
works as hard as Reagan's does to control and shape the
information being released, basic reporting is particularly
important.
Go to the scene: During the invasion of Grenada, Reagan
and the Pentagon camera crews combined to show American
television viewers warehouses on the island that seemingly
were stacked to the rafters with automatic weapons. The
president said there were enough of them to "supply thou-
sands of terrorists." But when reporters themselves got to
the sites they found some of the warehouses half-empty,
some of them stacked with cases of sardines, and many of
the weapons antiquated, possibly more suited for defense
by an island militia than for the export of terrorism and
revolution.
Go to the people affected: The Reagan administration in-
sisted that its changes in the Social Security Disability law
were intended only to get rid of people who had no right
to the government aid in the first place. The people being
removed, it said, were able-bodied people who had managed
to slip through loopholes and get themselves into the pro-
gram because of lax monitoring and ambiguous standards.
But it turned out that a third of a million persons, including
many with serious physical handicaps and mental disorders,
had been cut off from the payments in a massive purge of
the rolls, often on the basis of reviews of their health records
by doctors who had never examined them in person.
Here is how Bob Wyrick and Patrick Owens of Newsday
began a series that grew out of a months-long study of
persons whose benefits had been taken away:
"Lyle Ely was blind in one eye and had tunnel vision in
the other. He could not, as he complained in one of the
many forms he filled out in the last years of his life, see
well enough to read, drive a car, or watch television. His
partial blindness, along with the convulsive seizures that
also plagued him, was caused by a tumor that grew to the
size of a large orange in the front part of his brain. But
claims examiners and reviewing physicians who had never
seen him found him well enough to work, cancelled his
Social Security disability pension, and reaffirmed the can-
cellation when Ely applied for reconsideration."
rntmn
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`in covering an
administration that
works as hard as
Reagan's does to
control and shape
the information
being released,
basic reporting is
particularly
important'
President Reagan
at a 1982 White House
press conference
Go to the documents: In February 1981, the State De-
partment issued a white paper on El Salvador, which it said
"presents definitive evidence of the clandestine military
support given by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and their Com-
munist allies to the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas now fighting
to overthrow the established government of El Salvador."
It said that the evidence was drawn from captured guerrilla
documents and war material, and had been "corroborated
by intelligence reports."
The white paper was accepted by much of the nation's
press, was used by State Department officials to drum up
support in Europe for Reagan's Central America policy, and
was used on the Hill by White House lobbyists to persuade
Congress that more funds were needed to help counter the
outside aid being given to Salvadoran guerrillas. But when
Jonathan Kwitney of The Wall Street Journal began a study
of the documents a few months later, and went back to the
people who had drafted the white paper, he found the evi-
dence something less than it had been made out to be.
"Several of the most important documents, it's obvious,
were attributed to guerrilla leaders who didn't write them.
And it's unknown who did," he wrote in the Journal. "Sta-
tistics of armament shipments into El Salvador, supposedly
drawn directly from the documents, were extrapolated .. .
and in questionable ways, it seems. Much information in
the white paper can't be found in the documents at all. This
information now is attributed by the State Department to
other, still-secret sources."
Kwitney's article did not totally discredit the conclusion
of the white paper, which was that some weapons and sup-
plies were being sent to the rebels by communist govern-
ments overseas. But it made clear that the evidence cited
by the State Department, which had been accepted at face
value by much of the press, wasn't as clear or as precise
or as unambiguous as the government had claimed.
So, too, with Grenada. Admiral McDonald said on Oc-
tober 28 that captured documents showed that "341 more
officers and 4,000 more reservists" had been scheduled to
arrive from Cuba as part of a plan for "the Cubans to come
in and take over the island...." But Stuart Taylor of The
New York Times reported that the captured documents, when
finally released, showed an agreement by the Soviet Union
and North Korea to provide Grenada with S37 million worth
of equipment; the only reference to more Cuban soldiers
was a promise by the Cubans to provide twenty-seven mil-
itary advisers to train Grenadian troops.
A senior Pentagon official was quoted by Taylor as saying
that McDonald had been mistaken about the 4,341 additional
troops - they were to have been Grenadians. not Cubans.
And he went on to report that "there is no evidence .. .
that the Cubans had planned to take over Grenada either in
the documents released Friday or in any other materials
made public by the administration."
Check the numbers: When James Nathan Miller set out to
examine Reagan's civil rights record, he went to the data
that Reagan himself had used to illustrate what he termed
"our unbending commitment" to civil rights. What Miller
found were not outright Iies - he did not once use the word
"lie" in his Atlantic article - but a selective use of infor-
mation that told only a part of the story. For example,
Reagan had touted the fact that his Justice Department had
reviewed 25.000 proposed changes in the Voting Rights
Act, and had vetoed 165 of them because it felt they would
be discriminatory. When Miller looked at the actual record,
however, he found that the veto of 165 proposed changes
was not an unusually strong enforcement of the law but a
dramatic reduction in the rate of objections. From 1965 until
Reagan took office, the department had vetoed 2.4 out of
every 100 proposed changes it had examined. But the figures
that Reagan cited amounted to a veto rate of .7 per 100 -
a decrease of 71 percent.
Again, in a speech to the American Bar Association,
Reagan said that in his first thirty months in office the
Justice Department had filed more than a hundred cases
charging criminal violations of citizens' civil rights. This,
he said, was not just a respectable number. but was "sub-
stantially more than any prior administration during a com-
parable period."
In terms of criminal cases, the Reagan administration
actually was ahead of where the Carter administration was
after the first thirty months. Reagan's Justice Department
ContUwed
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had filed 114 criminal cases. while Carter's had filed 101.
But the civil law has been a potent weapon for civil rights
in recent decades. and when the number of civil cases was
added, the Reagan administration fell well behind the record
of the Carter administration at thirty months - a total of
225 civil and criminal suits filed by Carter, and only 156
filed by Reagan.
"Almost every one of the major points I made in the
article was being made for the first time." Miller says. "The
people in the daily press, even those covering civil rights,
had simply printed the statements without any serious at-
tempt to check their validity."
The need for a more aggressive press
It is not necessary to challenge every statistic to make a
point, and readers of most major newspapers have been told
repeatedly that the Reagan administration has a philosophy
about enforcement of civil rights laws that is very different
from that of most recent administrations. But Miller none-
theless has a point when he says that for reporters to accept
such numbers on their face is to allow themselves and their
readers to be manipulated and deceived.
The challenge is likely to become greater as Reagan,
immensely popular and recently swept back into
office by a landslide, moves ahead with his stated
goals for limiting the flow of information to the
public. Already, his administration has supported
bills. that would exempt the Secret Service, the
CIA. and most FBI activities from the Freedom of
Information Act, and has imposed a rule at the Defense
Department that any person with access to classified infor-
mation must submit to lie detector tests whenever asked to.
It has reversed the Carter administration policy and now
allows the FBI and CIA to infiltrate the media if the attorney
general finds it in the interest of the national security to do
so, and has set regulations that allow the FBI to infiltrate
and monitor domestic groups. including the press. while
conducting investigations of organized crime or terrorism.
It has slashed the budget of the indexing staff of the National
Archives, meaning that access to historical records, includ-
ing the Nixon tapes, will be delayed for years. It has created
mechanisms for monitoring contacts between White House
staffers and reporters. and has issued guidelines telling
officials handling FOIA requests to be stingy in giving fee
reductions to journalists, scholars, and authors. It has re-
written the classification system to insure that more, rather
than less, information will be classified. And it has made
proposals - already implemented in some agencies - that
would require all officials who have had access to classified
information to come back to the government for the rest of
their lives and submit for prior censorship any speeches,
letters to the editor. news articles. or works of fiction.
Nick Horrock, of Newsweek, who has worked in Wash-
ington for most of the past two decades. says that some of
the changes are atmospheric, and not entirely caused by
Reagan. ''There has been a shift back to an atmosphere
much more like it was in the early 1960s." Horrock says.
"During the Vietnam War and Watergate. a lot of dissidents
were in the government, and they were quick to speak out.
to tell reporters that things weren't working the way they
should. Now, there aren't so many dissidents. It's not pop-
ular to take risks. Being a whistle-blower is no longer pop-
ular. "
In a recent article, William Greider, the former assistant
managing editor for national news at The Washington Post
and now national editor of Rolling Stone magazine. argued
that the press, too, seems to be in retreat. "It seems to be
pulling in its lances, taking fewer risks, avoiding the hard
and nasty confrontations it would have zealously pursued
five or ten years ago ...," he wrote. "The trend I see is
deep and subtle - a shift toward 'hard news,' which means
narrow splinters of unexamined fact, a turning away from
more provocative explorations of subjects that have not been
legitimized by official sources."
If he's right, and many in the media agree that he is. it
is happening at a particularly bad time. The history of the
press-government relationship since World War II shows
that administrations have claimed a right to lie in some
circumstances, and have been unable to resist the temptation
to deceive in a great many others. And this particular admin-
istration, headed by a tremendously popular president. has
made clear that it wants to make information about gov-
ernment operations harder to get, and, in terms of threats
to their careers, more dangerous for civil servants to provide.
That means that the press needs to be even more ag-
gressive, not less, if it is to follow the John Mitchell rule
for covering government: Don't watch what we say. Watch
what we do. N
`The press needs to be more aggressive
if it is to follow the John Mitchell rule
for covering government: Don't
watch what we say. Watch what we do'
Attorney General John Mitchell appearing
before a Senate subcommittee in 1971
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/11: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504240002-8