Turning the Bird Dogs Loose

Moving in on Lance, newsmen were right--mostly

In one of his typically earthy metaphors, White House Press Secretary Jody Powell last week likened the reporters trailing Bert Lance to a group of over-adrenalized bird dogs. "You feed 'em and groom 'em and exercise 'em for six months," said Powell. "And then you finally turn 'em loose and they piss all over the truck and bite roots and eat butterflies. They go crazy."

No wonder Powell is unhappy. The nation's press has delivered almost daily truckloads of damning evidence about Bert Lance's banking habits and kept the story alive long after Powell and his boss thought they had squelched it. In the press secretary's view, some of the reportorial digging around Lance has been gratuitous, overplayed and underresearched.

Some journalists share that opinion. "I don't think this is like Watergate at all, and yet the coverage is of Watergate proportions," says James Wieghart, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the New York Daily News. Columnist George Will theorized that Washington reporters are feeling guilty about having destroyed mostly Republicans lately, and that Lance presents "the first opportunity for the press to demonstrate that it also cares when Democrats fail to measure up." A few editors have observed that in the absence of any other compelling news out of somnolent Washington, Lance was receiving more than his share of attention.

"Hogwash!" counters James Hoge, editor in chief of Chicago's Sun-Times and Daily News. "If you don't vigorously go after the story, people say you're lazy. If you do, people say you are picking on the people involved. You just have to continue to dig and print what you think is newsworthy." St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reporter Thomas Ottenad thinks reporters had no choice but to go after Lance, especially after the comptroller's report pronounced him innocent only of actual violation of law. "There were things in there that cried out for further explanation," he says. Los Angeles Times Editor William Thomas insists that "just about everyone gave Lance the benefit of the doubt. If anything, we were a little hesitant about making a full commitment."

More than a little hesitant. Georgia's major dailies, which are accustomed to treating members of the local business establishment with supreme deference, never bothered to examine Lance's banking practices before he left the state. Nor did the national press catch on until fully four months after he became Budget Director. TIME broke the story of Lance's chaotic personal finances on May 23. Then came the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and other publications, with disclosures about overdrafts, alleged abuses of correspondent banking relationships and other questionable practices.

Most of the reports were cautious, understated and well documented with figures and dates. There were, however, some missteps. The Washington Post's David Broder began discovering a major grass-roots revulsion toward Lance; trouble was, Broder documented his assertions by quoting a number of Republican state chairmen and pollsters, who had not taken any recent polls on the subject. The Post one day reported that Powell told a breakfast gathering of reporters that Lance would be asked to resign; other reporters in attendance recalled that Powell said the White House had decided not to ask for Lance's resignation.

The New York Times, the only paper to match the Post in its almost daily attention to Lance's troubles, was beaten to a few disclosures by its own columnist, William Safire. His relentless scrutiny of Lance's loans and insinuations about possible conflict of interests prompted Senator Abraham Ribicoff to complain on July 25 that Lance was being "smeared from one end of the country to the other," a complaint that Ribicoff later retracted. The Times tried to catch up with Safire, but produced a stream of speculative, melodramatic stories. On Aug. 15, for instance, the Times described how relations had cooled between Carter and Lance, but failed to mention that the President had invited his Budget Director over to play tennis only the day before.

One of the cheapest shots at Lance was a report, spread across five front-page columns of the Chicago Tribune, that Lance had poured "millions" of his bank's funds into Continental Illinois National Bank in hopes of securing a personal loan; buried deep in the story was the fact that he finally got the loan from another Chicago bank, and not from Continental. Not to be outdone, the rival Sun-Times tried to make something of the fact that John Moore, who helped the Carter Administration vet potential appointees, including Lance, for possible conflicts of interest, happened to be a law partner of Lance's own lawyer. Powell called that overblown accusation "a real low point in the coverage."

To help even out the low points, major news organizations have been stepping up their coverage of the affair. The Los Angeles Times has half a dozen reporters working on the story, for instance, while the Chicago Sun-Times and Daily News have beefed up their combined contingent to seven reporters. New York magazine last week printed an inventory of Lance's personal stock holdings, which turned out to be loaded with highly speculative issues. Television camera crews have staked out Lance's Georgetown home in order to record his every coming and going.

Does Lance deserve all that continued scrutiny? "The coverage amounts to overkill only if nothing comes of it," answers Robert Early, assistant managing editor of the Arizona Republic. Even in that increasingly unlikely event, Lance has small grounds for complaint. Most allegations against him still stand. Moreover, even in those periods when the daily Lance installments began to run thin, they served to keep the very important question of his competence before the public.

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