Journalism Under Fire

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

COVER STORY

A growing perception of arrogance threatens the American press

"It may well be that the public reacted cumulatively with a judgment that the press had it coming."

--Robert McCloskey, former Washington Post ombudsman

They are rude and accusatory, cynical and almost unpatriotic. They twist facts to suit their not-so-hidden liberal agenda. They meddle in politics, harass business, invade people's privacy, and then walk off without regard to the pain and chaos they leave behind. They are arrogant and self-righteous, brushing aside most criticism as the uninformed carping of cranks and ideologues. To top it off, they claim that their behavior is sanctioned, indeed sanctified, by the U.S. Constitution.

"J'accuse!" The rallying cry of crusading reporters has been taken up in reply by a citizenry that seems more mistrustful than ever before. Public respect for journalism has fallen dramatically in recent years, threatening one of the foundations of the country's democratic system. The National Opinion Research Center, which found in 1976 that 29% of the population had "a great deal of confidence in the press," reports that this year that figure fell to a new low of 13.7%. The most vivid indication of the souring attitude toward the press came when the Reagan Administration invaded Grenada and excluded reporters from the scene. Journalists argued impassionedly that the press's freedom and the public's "right to know" were at stake. But to many of their countrymen, the lack of coverage seemed inconsequential--even gratifying--as if laryngitis had silenced a chronic complainer.

NBC Commentator John Chancellor, in a Nightly News broadcast, voiced the press vision of what was happening: "The American Government is doing whatever it wants to, without any representative of the American public watching what it is doing." But many in Chancellor's audience rejected his premise that journalists stand in for the people: in 500 letters and phone calls to NBC, viewers supported the press ban in Grenada 5 to 1. ABC Anchor Peter Jennings said that "99%" of his mail from viewers on the issue supported Reagan. Newspapers also protested the exclusion, and evoked the same sort of response: the trade publication Editor and Publisher found, in an informal survey of about a dozen dailies, that letters to the editor were running 3 to 1 in favor of the Reagan Administration's exclusion of the press. TIME's 225 letters on the issue ran almost 8 to 1 against the press.

The support for excluding the media was far from universal, but much of it was expressed in gleeful, even vengeful terms. Further, many of the more thoughtful respondents seemed to reach beyond the battlefield issue to reflect deep, far-ranging resentment of the press. Linda Warren of West Hollywood, Calif., wrote to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: "Journalists are so out of touch with majority values, such as honor, duty and service to country, that they are alienated from the very society that they purport to serve." Duane Bloom of Golden, Colo., argued in a letter to the Denver Post: "The media have frequently misused sensitive and explosive events as opportunities for personal glory and financial gain." Conceded New York Times Editorial Page Editor Max Frankel: "The most astounding thing about the Grenada situation was the quick, facile assumption by some of the public that the press wanted to get in, not to witness the invasion on behalf of the people, but to sabotage it."

The dispute over Grenada seemed to uncork a pent-up public hostility. It reinforced a perception that journalists regard themselves as utterly detached from, and perhaps even hostile to, the Government of their country. Another factor in provoking distrust is the suspicion that journalists care little about accuracy. When the Washington Post, New York Times and New York Daily News all discovered, during 1981 arid 1982, that they had printed stories that reporters had embellished or invented, much of the public took these extreme cases as typical of journalism and expressed delight that major news organizations had been humiliated.

The mistrust has been heightened by several celebrated libel suits, particularly by General William Westmoreland and Los Angeles Physician Carl Galloway against CBS and by Mobil Corp. President William Tavoulareas against the Washington Post. Each raised worrisome doubts about the objectivity of prominent journalists, and called into question the techniques used to shape a story.

Indeed, libel verdicts have become a telling measure of public eagerness to punish the press. According to Stanford University Law Professor Marc Franklin, since 1976 nearly 85% of 106 major libel verdicts by juries have been defeats for journalist defendants, and almost two dozen involved damage awards of more than $1 million. "Juries are the American people," says Eugene Patterson, editor of the St. Petersburg Times. "They want to punish us." The Supreme Court may share some of the mistrust. Since 1972, it has ruled against journalist defendants in all four libel appeals it has heard.

The failings of journalists have been compounded in the public's mind by the perception that as their power has increased, so has their presumption of selfimportance. Says William Woo, editorial page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Arrogance, insensitivity, sensationalism, the sounding of First Amendment alarms at every provocation--these have all lost the press sympathy." Such attitudes are particularly grating to a large segment of the public that has come to see the press as primarily interested in its own profits and renown. "There is no longer a prevailing feeling that the press is righting to right a wrong," says Chicago Attorney Don Reuben. "The sense is that the press is venal, out to make a buck."

This decline of respect has been evident in popular culture: the image of journalism has shifted in movies from the diligent crusading in All the President's Men to the reckless destruction of people's lives in Absence of Malice, the corrupting collaboration with Nicaraguan revolutionaries in Under Fire and the intrusive buffoonery in The Right Stuff.

The press's unpopularity has political implications that the White House has been quick to grasp. "I think resentment toward the press has been stepped up by the public relations genius of the Reagan Administration," says Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship. For all its affability, and its candor on issues it hopes to publicize, the Administration has been as vigorous as any other in recent years in its attempts to control the flow of information and thereby define the nature of public debate. At various times, the President has proposed strict rules on contact between officials and reporters, used the FBI to track down embarrassing leaks, and moved to reduce the scope of the Freedom of Information Act and to impose lifetime Government censorship on tens of thousands of officials who have had access to classified information.

When the U.S. military decided to exclude the press from Grenada, the White House was receptive. According to some sources, the inspiration was the British government's restriction, but not outright ban, of the British press during the Falklands war. There was little fear that the President and military would lose the battle for public opinion if the operation went smoothly. Says White House Communications Director David Gergen, who has tried to temper the Administration's antimedia sentiment: "Unfortunately, kicking the press is a sure-fire applause line with almost any audience."

Nonetheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have asked Winant Sidle, a former public affairs officer at the Pentagon, to help develop guidelines for press access to future military actions. Contrary to some public suspicions, secrecy is not the problem; the press has always been willing to respect agreed-upon security strictures. Nor are logistics necessarily an obstacle; a small group of reporters can act as a "pool" for the rest of the press. Although Sidle has not completed his proposals, his main worry seems to be that the press is too negative. Says he: "They are always looking for somebody to hit over the head."

The press, by its nature, is rarely beloved--nor should that be its aim. Too often it must be the bearer of bad tidings. Since World War II, journalists have covered the turmoil of the civil rights movement, conveyed vivid scenes of domestic protest and battlefield gore during the Viet Nam War, and participated in the collapse of a presidency. Within the past two years, the press chronicled the pain of 10% unemployment. Increasingly, this bad news has been brought by the emotional medium of TV, which can seem rudely intrusive at both ends of its electronic linkage: at the scene of suffering and in the privacy of the viewer's living room.

Moreover, the time-honored image of the reporter--sketched in The Front Page as a low-paid but high-spirited regular fellow drinking beer with the police as the city edition is put to bed--has given way to a persona shaped by television: the anchorman or anchorwoman, cool, comely, and paid far more than the President.

Print journalists contend that when television became an accepted part of the news business, its you-are-there intrusiveness and emphasis on conflict tarnished the reputation of the entire profession. Says Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee: "Television has changed the public's vision of the reporter into someone who is petty and disagreeable, who has taken cynicism an unnecessary extra step." Robert Maynard, editor of the Oakland Tribune, agrees: "When people see a TV person shoving a mike in front of a grieving relative, all of us in the press appear to be boorish and ghoulish." TV executives reply that print can get away with more aggressive behavior because it is gray and abstract rather than immediate. "The printed press does not show the reporter asking the question," says NBC News President Reuven Frank. "What is peculiar to television is that the intrusiveness is part of the story."

As the power of the press has shifted from local newspapers to national networks, the public seemingly has added the news business to the list of remote institutions that it mistrusts simply because of their size. Says Chicago Tribune Editor James Squires: "The press used to be something accessible, owned by the fellow down the street. There is no access now. It is too big and far away." The growth of the press as a business has led to consolidation, so that most cities now have one pre-eminent newspaper, often owned by a large chain. In many cases this has given papers the resources necessary to do their job better, but has also reduced the chance for readers to find editorial voices suited to their tastes. In addition, today's young journalists, often moving from city to city to climb the career ladder, tend to lack loyalty and sensitivity to the communities they cover, further aggravating the public's alienation.

The roster of complaints against the press is diverse, even contradictory, but there is an instructive consistency to the questions that the public asks most often: Are reporters scrupulously accurate, or will they reshape a quote, ignore a fact, even concoct an anonymous "source" in order to make a point? Are they fair and objective? Why are there so many leaks, and do reporters care about threats to national security? What value should reporters place on a person's right to privacy? What purpose is served by the preoccupation with "investigative" reporting?

The most fundamental of these questions is: Can you believe what you read or see? The credibility of all journalists was damaged in 1981 when Washington Post Reporter Janet Cooke was forced to return a Pulitzer Prize after admitting that she had invented the title character of "Jimmy's World," a portrait of an eight-year-old heroin addict. A month later, New York Daily News Columnist Michael Daly admitted that he had made up the name of a British soldier who, he reported, had shot a juvenile in Belfast, Northern Ireland; the story was proved to contain other factual errors. Daly acknowledged that he had changed details in a number of other columns, but contended, in classic "New Journalism" fashion, that altering the facts had not impaired his rendition of the truth. The rash of fraud infected the New York Times seven months later, when its Sunday magazine published a report from Cambodia by Freelancer Christopher Jones. In fact, Jones had written the story while at his home in Spain and for part of it had plagiarized a 1930 novel, Andre Malraux's La Voie Royale.

Journalists rightly pointed out that these deceptions were oddities--most stories of consequence are covered by a variety of news organizations, and the pressure of competition makes it all but impossible to fake a story from, say, the White House. Indeed, the fabrications of Cooke, Daly and Jones were quickly exposed, partly as a result of probing questions from other news organizations. Cooke and Daly were fired, and Jones was dropped from the Times's freelance roster. But the spate of trickery underscored a fundamental vulnerability of the press: editors rely almost absolutely on the honesty of their reporters.

Much more common than willful inventions are errors that result from overaggressive reporting and inadequate checking. Says Robert MacNeil of PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour: "More and more people have had the experience of being interviewed or being at an event that has been covered, and they know what they see on the screen is not the way it was." The Kansas City Times alleged, during a series on athletic recruitment practices, that the mother of a Wichita State University basketball player had received a new automobile and a house as a payoff for her son's success with the team. After another paper, the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, looked into the story, the record was corrected: the money for the purchases came from the settlement of a medical malpractice suit.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a long front-page retraction in August of a 1982 series of front-page stories alleging that people who worked at, or lived near, a plutonium plant in Aiken, S.C., were suffering in disproportionate numbers from a rare blood disease. "We discovered that our reporters obviously had confused statistics and scientific data," wrote Editor Jim Minter. "We did not ask enough questions as the series was being prepared." One key cause of this kind of error: a tendency among young reporters to believe the worst, to see a potential Watergate, hence their fame and fortune, in almost every story. Says Editor Rosann Doran of the Broomfield (Colo.) Enterprise (circ. 18,200): "Every kid I get out of journalism school wants to have some major expose under his byline. Sometimes they cannot accept the fact that something is not crooked."

The "investigative" impulse worries many news executives. Says Editor Maynard of the Oakland Tribune: "We are too hungry for blood--it sometimes seems to readers that we will not do the story unless we can do someone in." The suspicious attitude among reporters leads to negativism in news coverage. The outlook of today's generation of journalists was formed during Watergate and Viet Nam, when figures of authority seemed so often to be the proper adversary. Many citizens regard this hypercritical approach as a form of bias. Says Mobil's top public relations executive, Herbert Schmertz: "There has developed a premise in journalism that it seems to succeed when it systematically undermines public confidence in institutions and leaders. I don't think the public likes that."

On television, the posture of perennial mistrust has been promoted by the success of CBS's often excellent 60 Minutes, which has been among the nation's most popular programs for the past six years. In its edited form, the show has elements of high melodrama: most of its investigative pieces are playlets in which a Lone Ranger journalist corners a villain, not with a gun but with an interview. Real life, however, is not so neat, and the confrontations are rarely so conclusive. This was seen during a libel suit in May brought by Los Angeles Physician Carl Galloway, who was accused by 60 Minutes of complicity in insurance fraud. Galloway lost his case, but won the consolation of making 60 Minutes look silly: film edited out of the report showed the CBS team rehearsing interviews, or repeating them until they got the answers they wanted. In an attempt to force an impromptu interview just outside the clinic featured in the expose, CBS Anchor Dan Rather chased a man, whose identity he did not know, around a parking lot.

The distorting effect of the confrontational style was also evident in a 1982 CBS documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, which alleged that General William Westmoreland, when commander of U.S. forces in South Viet Nam, was part of a "conspiracy" to mislead the public and perhaps President Johnson about the strength of enemy forces. Correspondent Mike Wallace, the most feared questioner on 60 Minutes, challenged Westmoreland on events more than 15 years old and reduced the general to flustered confusion. But after an internal investigation, CBS concluded that the charge of conspiracy was "inappropriate," material supportive of Westmoreland's position had been minimized, and network rules had been violated to give unfair advantage to Westmoreland's accusers. CBS News will defend the program in a $120 million libel suit by Westmoreland scheduled for trial next year.

Tone, even more than the facts, was at issue in the suit against the Washington Post by Mobil Executive Tavoulareas. U.S. District Judge Oliver Gasch, who tried the case, ruled that Tavoulareas had not met the legal standards for proof of libel, and overturned the jury verdict. But he added, "The article falls far short of being a model of fair, unbiased journalism."

Journalists contend that very few factual errors arise from the kind of ideological or political bias that critics, especially conservatives, often allege. Says Mark Ethridge Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina and the former editor of the Detroit Free Press: "I find it particularly objectionable that none of our critics will give us credit for stupidity. To them it is always a deliberate distortion." Indeed, even with the best of ability and intentions, reporters find it difficult to ensure that a story is totally sound. Nonetheless, conservative critics argue that almost beyond debate there is a discernible liberal bent among reporters and editors at the major national news organizations. ABC Interviewer Barbara Walters concedes, "The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition."

In a 1979-80 survey of 240 editors and reporters at the commercial networks PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and TIME, Political Scientists Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Washington University found that 48% believed that the Government should guarantee jobs, 68% argued that the Government should narrow the income gap between rich and poor, and 88% held that the U.S. legal system favors the wealthy. On social issues, 90% believed that women should have a right to an abortion, and only 25% considered homosexuality morally wrong.

Journalists who admit that they are liberals--or conservatives--deny that their personal values show up in their reporting. Conservative critics reply that a newspaper's political leanings are evident in the choice and treatment of stories. Certainly there is often an edge to news reporting in the Washington Post, as in this skeptical lead from a Page One piece on Nov. 8: "President Reagan yesterday celebrated the 'heroic rescue' of American medical students from Grenada in a ceremony climaxing a White House effort to put the best political face on the invasion of the Caribbean island and the terrorist bombing in Lebanon that killed at least 230 U.S. servicemen."

Perhaps the most sensitive allegations of bias are those that cropped up during the Grenada controversy: that journalists are not patriotic enough. "You feel sometimes like they are not on your side in a war," says John Lane, a former commissioner of Chaffee County, Colo., who served in Viet Nam. Fred Barnes, national political reporter for the Baltimore Sun, asserts in the December issue of the conservative monthly American Spectator, "The coverage of Central America in recent months points up one of the ugly truths about the American press: the better the news, the less of it you get. As the war began to turn against the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador, there was a palpable dip in the attention paid to it." Shirley Christian, who won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting from Latin America for the Miami Herald, argued in the March 1982 issue of the Washington Journalism Review that much of the American press corps during Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution was "on a guilt trip" about past U.S. support of the repressive Somoza regime, and thus overlooked warning signals of doctrinaire Marxism among the Sandinistas.

Most journalists insist that they stay detached from news sources. But many admit to a hazardous exception. They readily cooperate with prosecutors, obtaining inside details about impending arrests and indictments in exchange for providing publicity at an opportune moment. Initial publicity can virtually convict an accused person in the public's mind. When Feminist Ginny Foat, then president of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women, was about to be arrested for a murder that happened 18 years ago, news organizations were tipped off. Pictures of the arrest appeared on all three networks and in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of newspapers. Foat, who was acquitted after less than two hours of jury deliberation, claims with some justice that from the moment of her arrest, the press wrote about her as though she were guilty. Says she: "They believed what a lot of people believe, that if you are arrested, you must be guilty."

Often, the mere disclosure that someone is "under investigation" is enough to derail the target's career or wreck his personal life. Last year, every major Boston news organization reported that the Massachusetts attorney general was pursuing charges of corruption within the state department of revenue. The allegations came from an ex-convict, employed by the department, who was caught extorting a bribe and who offered to testify against his superiors. One of the three men whom he accused--but only after a prosecutor put the name forward--was a longtime close friend of then Governor Edward King. The scandal ended whatever chance King had of winning a second term. For King's friend John Coady, the consequences were far more grave: while the inquiry was under way, Coady was found hanged in the attic of his home, and his death was widely reported as a virtual admission of guilt. Then the two other accused employees were tried and acquitted. That turnabout last month prompted the weekly Boston Phoenix (circ. 83,650) to attack the city's news organs, including itself; it placed special blame on the dominant daily Globe (circ. 515,000). Said Phoenix Publisher Stephen Mindich: "It is a clear example of irresponsibility, and it creates distrust among the public." Globe Editor Winship replies, "It was an important, live story. We were evenhanded then, and we are re-examining it now."

Many complaints about the press have less to do with the accuracy or fairness of stories than with the techniques used to get them, which have gone so far as breaking and entering, electronic bugging, impersonation, entrapment. Says Walter Jacobson, anchor of CBS's WBBM-TV in Chicago: "I do not believe there should be any restrictions. I have had to use all sorts of ruses to get information, but I do not feel I have to be honest with public officials who are never honest with us." New Orleans Television Reporter Pierre DeGruy posed as the owner of a film production company in order to obtain interviews with young male prostitutes, then aired footage in which the youths' faces and voices were recognizable. He has some regrets: "We scammed them to get them to tell us the most intimate details of their lives. Now that I have done it, I have serious problems with it." Undercover reporting was once widely accepted in print journalism, and is still praised by many editors as the only way to get certain kinds of stories, many of which serve the public well.* But standards are changing: the Pulitzer Prize board denied awards to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1979 and to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1982, at least partly because their reporters used false identities. The Sun-Times set up a saloon business and paid bribes to city officials; a Herald-Examiner reporter claimed to be an illegal alien and took a job in a garment-industry sweatshop.

Another controversial technique is the use of unnamed sources. At best, reporters may subject themselves to manipulation by a person who passes on information for his own motives; at worst, readers suspect that the anonymous source may not exist. In some cases, reporters seem to feel that using a "deep throat" lends a touch of glamour--a signal that they are in the know. Relying on unnamed sources is often necessary. Most major publications, including TIME, get background information at official briefings or through interviews of behind-the-scenes participants. In such cases, the source justifiably insists on anonymity. "The alternative is not to do a lot of stories the public ought to see," says Wall Street Journal Executive Editor Fred Taylor. But editors have become more aware that anonymous information must be used carefully. Michael Carlin, producer in charge of investigative stories at Atlanta's WAGA-TV, says, "The more I use anonymous sources, the less I like it. The more critical you are of someone, the greater the demand for a public accuser."

Some of the most controversial actions of journalists come when their desire for a good story causes them to collide with an individual's right to privacy. When 239 U.S. servicemen were killed in a terrorist attack in Beirut, the homes of the victims were surrounded by reporters and camera crews seeking to record the families' grief. When word came over the wires that Private First Class Michael Devlin of Westwood, Mass., was the first confirmed casualty from that state, reporters besieged his mother. Recalls Christine Devlin: "They are on top of you before you have a chance to get the family together. Why should people have to know how you look or feel under those circumstances?" At Camp Lejeune, N.C., a TV crew reportedly paid children to go door to door in areas closed to the press to find out which families were awaiting word of a potential death in the Beirut explosion. Said an outraged Marine officer: "You people will stop at nothing. Everywhere you go, you leave a smell."

In perhaps the most tasteless single snippet of this deathwatch footage, a CBS News crew taped the actual moment when Marine officials arrived to report to his family that Corporal Timothy Giblin of North Providence, R.I., had been killed. First shown on the CBS Morning News, the sequence was replayed that evening on, among others, the CBS-owned station in Chicago. As the tape finished, Anchor Jacobson apologized: "I am sorry, that film should not have been shown. It was inappropriate." NBC chose not to air similar footage its crew shot at a Marine's home in California. Said Anchor Tom Brokaw: "We looked at it and said, 'That is a blatant intrusion,' and we did not put it on." Nevertheless, the footage had been shot. Indeed, nearly every local TV station in America airs comparably intrusive interviews with the survivors of fires, auto accidents and other calamities that may have claimed family members. Newspaper and newsmagazine reporters and photographers can be equally intrusive when covering personal tragedy.

Restraint does not come naturally to most journalists. Indeed, some of them argue that the best way to avoid accusations of bias is to go anywhere they can and publish absolutely anything they believe is newsworthy. CBS was accused of following this damn-the-consequences policy in October when it aired videotapes of the arrest of Automaker John De Lorean on cocaine trafficking charges, even at the risk of imperiling the chance of finding an impartial jury. The tapes were of dubiously lawful origin--CBS acquired them from Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt, who bought them from a clerk at a law firm that had briefly represented De Lorean--and they did not break news that would otherwise have gone unreported: the actual footage was scheduled to be introduced into evidence at the trial. The network's rationale, according to CBS News President Edward Joyce: "It was newsworthy because this was the first time we actually saw the Government making an arrest in this type of case."

This lack of restraint sometimes even extends to cases involving children. When it turned out that a previously identified kidnap victim in Chicago, an eleven-year-old girl, had also been raped, the Sun-Times published the girl's photograph with the word "rape" next to it. The St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press published the names of parents who had been charged with child sex abuse, identifying their children as among the victims. Says Managing Editor Deborah Howell: "We felt readers had a legitimate interest in knowing if their children had associated with the accused parents, but it was hard. I know what this does to little kids."

Often, news executives who might otherwise be restrained rush the news into print to avoid being scooped. The Oakland Tribune, however, chose to run that risk when it learned that Mass Murderer Juan Corona had wanted to enter a guilty plea at his long and costly ($5 million) retrial, but was dissuaded by his attorneys. Editor Maynard kept the story secret until the trial was complete. He explained: "There was no doubt in my mind that if we had printed the story, it would have caused a mistrial, which could have forced yet another trial and the expenditure of still more millions."

A special set of ethical questions concerns the elite of American reporters, the Washington press corps. Indeed, much of the journalistic behavior that the public says it finds objectionable is seen chiefly in telecasts from Washington: rudeness to high officials, prosecutorial shouting of questions at press conferences, overt attempts to trap an interview subject with trick questions, "instant analysis" of speeches that viewers have just seen for themselves. Another blow to the image of all journalists was struck in Washington last Friday when White House Spokesman Larry Speakes announced that he had trapped two reporters purloining internal White House memos. To prove that some writers on the White House beat were snooping, Speakes said, he prepared a "scam": fake messages, one about the timing of President Reagan's re-election announcement, were left out to see who would pick them up and pursue the stories. Said Speakes: "They both bit like snakes."

Apart from manner and attitude, there are other grounds for criticism: reporting from Washington tends, inevitably, to be highly speculative and to rely heavily on anonymous sources and undocumented assertions. Critics also fault the capital's press corps for preoccupation with politics and frequent failure to delve into the performance of government agencies, which spend the bulk of the nation's budget.

Perhaps the most troubling issue for Washington reporters is the growing use of leaks by Government sources. The term leak implies a breach of security and calls to mind the image of a disgruntled lower-level employee seeking to embarrass his boss. In fact, in almost every modern Administration, the majority of "leaks" have come from top-rank presidential aides, Cabinet members and other senior officials who want to get information or a point of view across to the public. Last week, for example, Reagan's top aides indicated their displeasure with Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, through a leak by "a senior White House official" to Knight-Ridder newspaper reporters. The purpose of leaks is often manipulative: to pretest public reaction to a plan, outflank a colleague or sabotage a rival policy proposal. There is an added appeal: journalists are so accustomed to treating the closed-door side of Washington as the "real" one that they tend to report unattributed information with less skepticism than they bring to public pronouncements.

For all its faults, and all the public outcry over them, the press has many claims to make in its defense. To former Vice President Spiro Agnew's much repeated charge that journalists are "elected by no one," editors have two valid responses. The first is that some institutions in a democratic society must be able to stand apart from the electoral process so that they can risk making unpopular decisions. Federal Appeals Court Judge Irving Kaufman of New York has likened the press to the judiciary in that respect. Said he: "Both sustain democracy, not because they are responsible to any branch of government, but precisely because, except in the most extreme cases, they are not accountable at all. Thus they are able to check the irresponsibility of those in power." The second argument is that journalists are elected by their readers and viewers every day. During the past decade, in response to public demand, the number of broadcast hours devoted to network and local news increased sharply and Ted Turner's Cable News Network provided the first 24-hour news service. The average American now spends about four hours a week watching newscasts. The newspaper industry has been shaken by failures and mergers that have stilled dozens of "second" voices in cities, but the 1,700 U.S. dailies still command an estimated readership of at least 110 million people a day. Moreover, consumers have some choice: there may be only local-monopoly newspapers covering their communities, and local TV stations may simply follow the papers' lead, but there are numerous ways to get national and international news.

The competitive urge among these multiple sources of information leads to excesses, but it also contributes to a self-correcting process. When one news outlet reports a story badly, rival organizations can score a coup as well as honor their craft by setting the record straight. Indeed, most irate critics of bias in the press cite stories from other parts of the press to prove their case. For readers of almost any ideological stripe, the perceived or actual bias of some publication can be offset by the availability of others. In soliciting subscriptions from new readers, the conservative weekly Human Events, for example, cites the "distortions of the major networks and your daily newspaper" and offers as an antidote its own pages.

Sophisticated readers know that by comparison with the highly ideological press in Western Europe--or, for that matter, the noisy, brawling, relentlessly partisan and even corrupt papers that were the norm when the First Amendment was written--the modern U.S. press is distinctively balanced. By the standards of the late 19th and early 20th century era of "yellow journalism," the American reporter today is a model of responsibility and restraint.

Most important, U.S. journalism is generally good. Reporters and editors are better educated than their predecessors and are readier to take on difficult topics. Partly as a result of the influence of television, which has made the world seem smaller, many local newspapers now publish considerably more international news, and not all of it is revolutions and earthquakes. Social trends, which newspapers long overlooked because they were not events that happened the day before, are now covered thoughtfully. In recent years, the press has learned to report about economics, education, medicine, science and the computer revolution as fully and discerningly as it follows crime and politics. Says Washington Post Editor Bradlee: "It is strange that so much criticism is coming now, because I honestly believe that the quality of the American press is better than ever. When we set out to do something ambitious and relevant to a problem, we do a helluva job."

Despite the criticisms and controversies the press provokes, it successfully produces hundreds of substantive stories, large-scale and small, that hold government to account and bring the public important information. Perhaps the best overall performance during the past year was the persistent probing, by several news organizations, into improprieties at the federal Environmental Protection Agency, including alleged favoritism to business interests and, at best, lax enforcement of regulations. Despite the Reagan Administration's seeming determination to dismiss the evidence of pervasive EPA wrongdoing as a press vendetta, the reporting eventually led to top-level resignations, the appointment of a capable new administrator and, last week, the perjury conviction of former EPA Official Rita Lavelle.

The public interest has been served by a steady spotlight throughout the year on waste and mismanagement at the Pentagon, another branch of Government that fiercely resists scrutiny. Stories, ranging from cost overruns on weapons systems to price gouging by contractors, forced the military to step up its own investigations. As always, journalists provided community services that are too easily taken for granted: when river flooding knocked out telephone service in Louisiana in April, most radio and TV stations managed to stay on the air to broadcast safety information. There have been innumerable enterprising individual efforts. Samples:

> Associated Press Reporter Bill Vogerin's series, investigating claims that water theft by farmers was drying up the Arkansas River, prompted state and federal officials to review irrigation and conservation practices.

> The Los Angeles Times, in a 21-part series, explored the economic, social and political diversity of its region's 3 million Hispanics.

> Pam Zekman of WBBM-TV in Chicago discovered that the city's police had for years underreported crime statistics for political reasons.

> The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner last week ran a vivid but not alarmist six-part series on Los Angeles County's youth gangs (estimated membership: 40,000), which are believed responsible for 1,000 murders over the past four years.

> ABC News devoted 52 hours in February and March to crime topics. Notable among the segments was a hardheaded yet optimistic Nightline report on the relative success that Patuxent Institution, a state prison in Jessup, Md., has achieved in rehabilitating inmates through education and psychotherapy.

> Washington Post Reporter Neil Henry demonstrated the kind of useful purpose that undercover reporting can serve. Posing as a destitute drifter, he was hired as a migrant laborer in North Carolina. He chronicled work under wrenching conditions, yet his carefully modulated stories managed to be fair to both the labor recruiters and the down-and-outs they signed up to harvest tomatoes.

Many of these stories were controversial. Yet unpopularity is not always a cause for alarm; it can be instead a healthy sign that the press is performing its role. Says Author David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Viet Nam: "The more we do our job of questioning accepted norms, the more we can expect to be questioned."

Still, growing numbers of news executives recognize a real problem in the public discontent with the press, especially the perception that journalists are arrogant. At the most basic level, dealing with this problem requires coming to terms with motivations, the forces that drive individuals to become journalists and the attitudes they take when pursuing a story. Reporters have sometimes lost sight of the fundamental truth that their job is to provide a service to the community rather than to seek the glamour and glory that now often seem to draw people into the craft. News organizations are trying in a variety of ways to make themselves more self-critical and more accessible to the public and to attune their reporters to asking themselves, "Is this fair?" rather than, "Will this make Page One or top the evening newscast?"

Perhaps the most basic obligation is for editors and reporters to be tougher on themselves when mistakes get into print or on the air. One helpful source of pressure: a commitment to correct errors publicly. "In the old days," says Cameron Blodgett, executive director of the watchdog Minnesota News Council, "the way to deal with a complaint about a mistake was to yell, 'There's a nut on the line,' and hang up." In the past few years, many newspapers have created a standing format for corrections. The Louisville Courier-Journal runs its admissions of error on the front page of the local news section under the headline "Beg Your Pardon"; its sister paper, the Louisville Times, uses the blunt designation "We Were Wrong." Some newspapers, including the Seattle Times, Charlotte (N.C.) News and Observer and Miami Herald, mail out questionnaires to the subjects of certain news stories to ask whether they feel they were treated accurately and fairly. When the Los Angeles Times in April found that a business story had grossly misrepresented the cost overruns on Lockheed Corporation's C-5B military transport plane, the newspaper ran a corrective follow-up that was twice as long as the erring story. CBS's 60 Minutes has, on the air, looked critically at its stories and techniques, and CBS and ABC have explored journalistic ethics in series of round-table documentaries.

To provide a further court of review, more than two dozen newspapers have appointed ombudsmen or "reader representatives." Some news executives argue that having an ombudsman shunts complaints aside. Says Editor James Gannon of the Des Moines Register: "The person who should handle the complaints is the editor, not someone in a corner with no real power." Others contend that editors are too busy and too closely tied to their staffs to be able to handle complaints thoroughly. Most critics of the press agree with James Atwater, a former TIME senior editor who is dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Says Atwater: "We need much more self-examination and a whole flock of ombudsmen. This is a very heady business, and we need a moral compass."

Some newspapers and TV-news organizations have assigned beat reporters to cover the field of journalism. Among the most respected is the Los Angeles Times's David Shaw, who occasionally reports on his own employer with cool objectivity. Says he: "Too often, newspapers view what they do as too arcane for the public to understand or as a state secret that is none of their business." Other newspapers and stations send editors to community meetings to field questions. In a few states or regions, journalists have cooperated in forming American counterparts to Britain's Press Council. These boards attempt to judge the rights and wrongs of complaints, but have no enforcement powers. The National News Council, founded in 1973, has never won the wholehearted support of major news organizations, and has been boycotted by some. News executives question whether any organization can oversee the complicated, diverse American press, and note that such councils rarely have adequate research help.

The crucial role of journalism in a democracy is to provide a common ground of knowledge and analysis, a meeting place for national debate: it is the link between people and institutions. Without the information provided by newspapers and TV, citizens would have little basis for deciding what to believe and whom to support. Just as a pervasive mistrust of police could cause a breakdown of order, a growing hostility to the press could sever the ligaments of a workable society.

Moreover, without a strong and trusted press, people would have almost no way to keep their government and other big institutions honest. Government, particularly the Federal Establishment, has vast powers to mislead the people and manage the news. Officials can conceal impending actions until their effects are irreversible. Other big institutions--corporations, unions, hospitals, police forces--prefer to cloak their decision-making process and their performance from the scrutiny of the public, whose lives may be deeply affected. And despite the passage of shield laws to protect journalists from having to reveal sources, they are regularly subpoenaed to testify about what they have reported.

Journalists became so aggressive partly because they knew, contrary to the widely held public view, that they were Davids fighting Goliaths. As the press itself grows into a more powerful institution, it must be careful how it uses its strength, whether it faces an ordinary individual or a President: the attempt to uncover can too easily turn into the impulse to tear apart.

Freedom of the press, like any other freedom, can be dangerous. But Thomas Jefferson, who suffered at the hands of journalists as much as any contemporary politician, insisted that protecting the press at its worst was an essential part of having the press be free. Said Jefferson: "It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press . . . I shall protect them in the right of lying and calumniating." Moreover, the press, however forceful, has no power to indict or impeach, no power beyond what is granted by its audience. A journalist can expose a situation, but cannot compel an indifferent public to change it.

In an earlier era, and one perhaps more optimistic about human nature, Union General Irvin McDowell reported before the First Battle of Bull Run: "I have made arrangements for the correspondents of our papers to take the field, and I have suggested to them that they should wear a white uniform to indicate the purity of their character." Probably no one talks of journalists that way today, and perhaps no one should. But for the sake of American society, as well as for its own sake, the press must try harder to wear white. It must be more responsive to public concerns. Barry Bingham Sr., chief executive officer of the Louisville newspapers and a former chairman of the International Press Institute, puts the case with forceful simplicity: "You cannot hold on to a free press if it behaves irresponsibly. The idea that our mission is so high that no one should question our performance is illogical. The higher the mission, the more responsibly we should carry it out." --By William A. Henry III. Reported by Richard Brims/New York and Christopher Ogden/Chicago, with other bureaus

* Nellie Ely, perhaps the most celebrated turn-of-the-century journalist, got herself imprisoned in order to expose jail conditions for the New York World; Feminist Gloria Steinem became a Playboy Bunny to research a 1963 report for Show magazine.

With reporting by Richard Bruns/New York, Christopher Ogden/Chicago This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.