Credibility Cloud

Though they have personal preferences like anybody else, political reporters cherish their neutrality in news stories as the cornerstone of their credibility. But credibility suffered a serious setback two weeks ago when Newspaper Guild President Charles A. Perlik Jr., 48, mounted a chair at George McGovern's press headquarters in Miami Beach to proclaim: "McGovern sounds the beat we can march to. Let's fall in line behind him." The executive board of the journalists' union had endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in the Guild's 39-year history. It was an extraordinary move at a time when the reliability and fairness of the press are widely questioned.

Angry protests greeted Perlik's pronouncement, mostly from the working journalists, who now form a minority within the 33,000-member union; the rest include such noneditorial employees as secretaries, business-office personnel and maintenance people. Petitions were quickly circulated to condemn the leadership's "outrageous, arbitrary action." The Guild's Minneapolis and Washington-Baltimore units disavowed Perlik's action.

Liberal Leaning. Most of the heat centered in Washington, home base for a sizable army of political reporters who feel they will now have to cover the coming campaign under something of a partisan cloud, their neutrality compromised in the eyes of a skeptical public. The endorsement, complained Chairman Ronald Sarro of Washington's Evening Star--Daily News Guild unit, "gives ammunition to those looking for an excuse to attack the press on any grounds." It bothered even those who, while not at all anxious to belabor the press, feel that it should not only be fair but should also be seen to be fair.

Attacks were not long in coming.

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona observed on the Senate floor that the Guild action "does not surprise me one bit," and reminded his listeners that "many times I have referred to the liberal leaning of some sections of the American press corps." Republican Campaign Director Clark MacGregor thought the Guild "illadvised in openly abandoning the time-honored objective of the American press to confine partisanship to editorial pages."

A dedicated Democrat who learned his labor-union politics in Buffalo, Perlik managed a backhanded mandate for endorsement at last month's annual Guild convention in San Juan. Beaten in his effort to get the convention to endorse McGovern outright, he later won permission for the union's 15-member international executive board to "consider endorsing a candidate for the presidency following the national conventions."

But as soon as McGovern won the nomination at Miami Beach, Perlik decided not to wait for the Republican Convention, polled his executive board by telephone (thereby effectively preventing them from discussing the matter as a group) and triumphantly announced the endorsement.

Insisting on the Guild's right as an organization to endorse a presidential choice, Perlik maintains that "we can't put our citizenship rights aside." (AFL-CIO President George Meany apparently felt he was putting aside no such rights when he refused endorsement to either candidate. See THE NATION.) But those rights are exercised properly at the ballot box and not in the news pages. The Guild endorsement obviously could not commit any member to vote against his conscience. But it did, by implication, impugn the impartiality of its members' reporting. In fact, Perlik's ploy may well prove to be self-defeating with the electorate, lending credence to the contention--loudly asserted by Spiro Agnew and less loudly by some of his White House colleagues--that the press is biased against the Nixon Administration.

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