Her Picture on the Cover

The morning after Sara Jane Moore's matronly visage first made the nation's front pages and television screens, House Minority Leader John Rhodes decided he had had enough. "What possible good purpose can come from this intense coverage of terrorist activity?" he demanded on the floor of the House. "Individuals of questionable mental stability will surely begin to conclude that they too can obtain national publicity and an enlarged forum for their views on redwood trees and other irrelevancies simply by attempting to gun down the President."

Rhodes was not alone. "The less publicity, the less would be happening," theorized an understandably shaken Betty Ford. Said Vice President Nelson Rockefeller: "Let's stop putting it on the front pages and on television." Across the country, public officials and private citizens last week were raising a troubling question: Does exhaustive news coverage of an assassination attempt incite more attempts?

Inconclusive Debate. The issue is not new. In the late 1960s, stunned by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, urban disorder, student rebellion and widespread social tumult, public servants and assorted experts furiously, and inconclusively, debated the role of television in feeding violence. This time, however, the controversy has centered more on newsmagazines. In last Wednesday's New York Times, Columnist William V. Shannon, Novelist Saul Bellow and Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz separately lambasted TIME and Newsweek for putting Lynette ("Squeaky") Fromme on their covers. In Washington, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott asked rhetorically: "Do cover stories in national newsmagazines incite to violence?"

For magazines in this age of television, all that attention was unintentionally flattering. Millions more people learned of Sara Jane Moore's attempt to shoot the President from network evening news programs, let alone countless radio reports and front-page newspaper stories, than will read about it this week in TIME and Newsweek. Yet what loomed largest in many minds was the face on the cover. Says NBC News President Richard C. Wald: "The cover hangs around on newsstands all over the country for a week, and that permanence is bound to have an influence all by itself."

Permanence aside, there is the matter of distinction. A newsmagazine's cover usually shows men and women of achievement. But all sorts of people at the center of major news events, including outright villains, also must be featured on occasion, not as a matter of celebration but simply as the magazine version of a front-page personality. Many readers nevertheless regard any cover story as the bestowal of an ultimate accolade. Clare Boothe Luce complained in the Wall Street Journal last week that "Elizabeth Seton, the first native American to be canonized as a saint, couldn't make the cover of TIME. But Lynette Fromme made it."

Not all press watchers think the newsmagazines and their covers deserved such censure. "Politicians might do better to figure out why our society causes people to act this way than to blame the newsmagazines," says Esquire Media Columnist Nora Ephron. "Even if you could prove that Sara Moore was looking at TIME or Newsweek as she loaded her gun, you'd still have to support a free press." Says Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee: "Journalists are in the business of describing what happens and we don't lie, which is more than a lot of politicians can say. The fearful possibility is that they're going after newsmagazines because they did a good job this week." As Columnist William Buckley saw it, "The purpose of the editors was neither prurient nor inflammatory in the cover treatment. The function of newsmagazines is to vitiate ignorance. In that respect, both TIME and Newsweek passed the test."

Cabalists and Kooks. Whether any news organization's assassination coverage provides aid, comfort and inspiration to would-be assassins is also a matter of debate among psychiatrists. "These are lonely, alienated people who suddenly see an opportunity to become celebrities," says Dr. Judd Marmor, president of the American Psychiatric Association. "Publicity gives them an ego massage." Yet Psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook of the University of Southern California School of Medicine thinks press coverage has little to do with inciting potential assassins to pull the trigger. "They have much more personal, much more fantasy-like motivations than to call attention to themselves," he says. "News coverage does not mobilize a person's fantasies. The press merely reports reality." Adds NBC'S Wald: "There is no indication that Mrs. Moore was influenced by the coverage of Squeaky Fromme. Political cabalists commit assassinations for their reasons, and kooks have their reasons. The press has a responsibility to report both." Asks Minneapolis Tribune Editor Charles Bailey: "Are we in the business of behavior modification or reporting the news?"

No newsman would argue that reporting "reality" is without consequences, or that exercising journalistic responsibility--the many decisions involved in how to play a story--is to be taken lightly. Several journalists, both print and broadcast, worried especially about the impact of television. Charles Seib, press ombudsman at the Washington Post, is offended by televised "instant replay" of President Ford's brush with death outside the St. Francis Hotel. "They played it slow, they played it fast, they paused," he complains. "You've seen that film a dozen times now." A number of newsmen are irked that Lynette Fromme's troubles with her .45-cal. automatic pistol received such instructively graphic attention that any future .45-cal. assassin would never make the same mistake. CBS Commentator Eric Sevareid questions his network's decision to report on President Ford's bulletproof vest and thereby provide what he sees as valuable information to an assassin. Says Sevareid: "People do not have a constitutional right to know every detail."

Suspicion Rampant. Yet how much is too much? "To try to avoid agitating other disordered minds," suggested the Times's William Shannon, "the media could withhold photographs of the would-be assassins and play down detailed coverage of their lives." Few editors would accept the notion of such self-censorship. Once it became known that editors and reporters were suppressing or playing down stories for whatever reasons, suspicion would be rampant. Says Norman E. Isaacs, publisher of the Wilmington, Del., News and Journal and editor-in-residence at the Columbia University School of Journalism: "The amount of rumor would be damn near fatal to the national fabric."

Moreover, when journalists begin substituting other considerations for their own honest news judgment, it is impossible to know where to stop: they open themselves to all sorts of pressures, both from Government and private groups. Warned Shannon's colleague William Safire: "The news has its own free market, and if editors put their notions of the public interest ahead of their responsibility to satisfy the public's interest, a vital freedom would be lost." Most of their peers would see no irreconcilable conflict between freedom and responsibility. Says Norman Isaacs: "There must be a sense of discretion, yet not to the point where we suppress news. The public wants every scrap of detail about someone deranged enough to take a pot shot at the President. We're going to cover it. There's no other way."

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