A Curious Detachment

The final weeks of a presidential campaign can usually be counted on to generate a crescendo of press partisanship.

But there has been little that can be called usual about the 1964 campaign.

And as it drew to a close last week, the press coverage, while as comprehensive as ever, reflected a curious and almost deliberate note of political detachment.

It was as if the newspapers, in an effort to be scrupulously impartial, had measured their attention to the candidates with a ruler.

Reporters and columnists alike might well have been making amends for earlier sins of excess, for the extra emotion that once showed so strongly in story after anti-Goldwater story. Or perhaps the press was just plain bored by a dull campaign, had lost interest in interpreting it. Newsmen traveling with both Johnson and Goldwater may have decided that there was no longer any doubt at all about who was going to be the winner, that further displays of partisanship on their part were unnecessary and redundant.

This did not mean, of course, that the editorial pages stopped taking sides. But even there, the pattern was not familiar.

Editor & Publisher, announcing final results of its Who's for Whom poll, reported 440 papers, with 27 million circulation for Johnson, against 359 papers, with 9,000,000 circulation for Goldwater. Johnson's percentage of 42.4% came nowhere near the 67% registered by Eisenhower in the magazine's 1952 poll, but it was a long way from the mere 14% support that went that year to Democrat Adlai Stevenson --who understandably raised the charge of a "one-party press." This year's tabulation demolished Stevenson's accusation with statistical authority.

About the only pattern that endured was stitched by those papers that took no sides at all. About half of the nation's newspapers refused to choose. One last-minute entry in this neutral rank was the New York Daily News--which up to last week had been neutral for Goldwater. The largest daily in the country is not known for its reticence; it gives its readers advice on everything from love problems to safe driving. But in the end the only recommendation that the News had for its readers was to vote.

"The Goldwater campaign has been so clumsily conducted that one wonders how capable a President he would be.

On the other hand, we wonder whether the country could stand four more years of Johnson." With that, and "with great regret," the News boldly came out for neither man.

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