Katharine Graham |
November 17, 1972
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Katharine Graham
President, The Washington Post Company; Publisher, The Washington Post
Q: Do you see a time for more straight reporting and less editorializing? And the second, do you honestly believe the news columns or items of your publication and other media are unbiased and unslanted, giving only the who, what, why and that only, and that only in their editorials do they become opinionated?
A: Speaking of editorializing. I think that we all agree that the who, what, when, where, why school of reporting, while it looks great, doesn't really tell you what's going on. If you follow that conclusion to its end, you deliver the dictionary. I think that what is going on now as the world has become more and more complicated and events from all over are more and more difficult to put in perspective, I think that what is called in that question "editorializing" is called by us "news analysis." It's trying to tell the readers what really is going on. Because if you tell them - the example we all use is the way Senator McCarthy years ago in '52 used the press, it really is what started the new kind of reporting, the analysis. What he would do is every night at six o'clock release a statement saying there were 356 Communists in the State Department. And every morning he would be quoted on the night news broadcast and again in the morning. And it took a while before we realized that you also had to say that he had said that before, that it had never been proved right. In fact, nothing he had said had ever been proved right. It just really is not as simple as that question implies to tell people the truth.
Q: And this question fairly summarizes a number: What are the most powerful pressures that influence editorial and news reporting?
A: The desire to do it well. I don't mean to be, I don't mean to be self-serving, although I am, but what I tried to say in the last half hour was there really are no pressures on us besides having professional people reporting and editing, and trying in a very complicated world to get across to people what went on the day before, the week before, in the case of Newsweek. People ask you if there are either business pressures or political pressures and, of course, there are, and it's interesting - I mean, there are always in Washington worse political pressures, because the White House is right there to either call you up or send somebody over, and so is Congress. And there are pressures. I mean, we've gotten pressures from the White House, and it doesn't start with this administration at all.
President Johnson used to send over a whole bunch of thunderbolts every so, you know, and Kennedy before and as it is well known, we are in an adversary position, and people on the other side try to influence you, but it's up to us to use our own best judgment. And I don't think - we occasionally get advertising pressure for some story. But I can't think of an instance in which, after awhile, people don't come around.
Q: This question may be somewhat provoking - if you could obtain in some manner full copies of everything in our CIA files, would you publish anything you felt would be newsworthy - and the gentleman adds - and would boost circulation?
A: Again, the idea that we're out to boost circulation by flashy reporting is really demonstratively untrue. Eighty-five percent of the Washington Post circulation is home delivered, and the amount we gain on a newsstand is absolutely negligible, and it for darn sure wouldn't be increased by releasing the CIA files, or any secret information much. The same is true of Newsweek, that their newsstand circulation is small compared to their total circulation and of no interest as far as flashy news is concerned. It doesn't help us.
What does help us is the reputation for good reporting and intelligent reporting. Now, to get to the main point of that question about whether we would, how much secret information would we release, which is a very pertinent one, the duty of a paper or publication is to tell people everything it knows. And I believe that once you start making judgments or picking out things that we think are good for people to know or bad for people to know, we're in real trouble. Now, if the CIA files fell in our hands, which God forbid, the editors use their judgment and I believe that is the way it has to be for responsible editors to use their judgment and their common sense. A lot of the sensitive things or the very few sensitive things that turned out to be in the Pentagon Papers, were spotted immediately by our editors and never had intended to be published. And although the government, when the case started, said there were 49 secret volumes, all of them classified by somebody who had made a full-time job of it, by the time they got through the court cases, I think it was 27 phrases, parts of phrases or parts of sentences...We didn't steal the Pentagon Papers. Somebody brought them to us and we then had to make the judgment about whether to publish or not. And I think that's entirely different from suggesting that we stole them. You can say they were stolen by somebody, but that's entirely different. Or purloined, or whatever word you want to use.
Q: I think what the questioner meant to ask, yeah. Stolen by others, but known to have been so.
A: Well, that's a different question. By the time we published them they were brought to us and they had, in fact, been published partly before. But that would not have influenced our decision. The decision was, do you want to have these volumes, look them over and say, well, we don't think it's in the best interest for people to know what's going on? The fact is, actually of the Vietnam, of the Pentagon Papers, almost everything in them, as was proved later, had been printed. The game of classification of documents in Washington is great. I mean, it employs millions of people, and some people say that you can't get a guy to read a document unless you stamp it classified.
And actually, there are clerks who just stamp everything classified. And so, as I say, there turned out to be almost nothing that hadn't been printed or known or known publicly to all of our reporters in the Pentagon Papers.
Q: Another question in connection with the Pentagon Papers: Is either The Washington Post Company or The New York Times currently involved in any legal action arising from the publication of the Pentagon Papers?
A: No.
Q: And this calls …
A: As you know, there's a grand jury still meeting in Boston.
Q: No, I didn't know that, thank you. And this calls for a rather wide-ranging judgment; judged on accuracy of news coverage and constructive public service, how would you rate our press versus that of England, West Germany, Italy and Spain?
A: I just can't. It's very different, first of all. I don't really know much about European press. I've seen a great, something of the British press; it's just very different. Most of the British press is national, whereas the economy in this country more or less dictates local newspapers, and it's very hard, really, to compare them.
Q: This question summarizes one which was frequently asked before and shortly after November the 7th. Do you believe scientifically conducted responsible political poll reports on who's ahead now in presidential elections should be published in your newspaper? Do they contribute to the democratic process?
A: Yes, I think they do in the sense that the polling techniques have been refined to what I think are really responsible results. We particularly have used polling in a kind of interesting way. We have two national political reporters, Haynes Johnson and Dave Broder, who in collaboration with a poll made for us, where people were chosen scientifically to be interviewed by them, have gone around the country interviewing these chosen people, with really awfully interesting results about how the country is thinking and what it's feeling.
But I can see that polls upset things sometimes or that they influence events, and it bothers me a little bit. But I still think that the information contained therein is something that people want to read.
Q: Mrs. Graham, we shall have time for but one more question. At the conclusion of your answer to which this meeting will stand adjourned. Before asking it, I extend to you the very sincere thanks of The Commonwealth Club of California for your most interesting comments and analysis of a problem that is an extremely difficult one in our country and will become more so in the future. We're deeply grateful to you for coming today to speak to us.
Now, our last question is not always wholly serious and I'm not quite sure in which class this one falls. Please comment on the role played by the media on the results of the last presidential election.
A: Let me just think. We're not supposed to play a role in an election. I think we're supposed to bring people information on which they can make their decisions, and I think we did that. I think the press in this country did that responsibly and well. Now, as far as the editorial opinion of the country is concerned, I guess most of the papers agreed with the landslide victory of the president. It's not always the case. Most of the papers were Republican, as you remember, when Roosevelt was having his landslide. I think sometimes editorial opinion influences events and sometimes it just doesn't. I don't really know quite why.
Q: Thank you very much .
Generously funded by:
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Dee Dee Myers