Katharine Graham |
November 17, 1972
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Katharine Graham
President, The Washington Post Company; Publisher, The Washington Post
Justice Draper, Mr. Forsyth, ladies and gentlemen, to be in San Francisco today and to have an opportunity to talk to this very distinguished group about the news business gives me particular pleasure, for two reasons. First, it's always a joy to come to this lovely city, and second, it's also something of a joy at this moment to get out of Washington, if only for a few days.
It's not that I do not love the city and the community that I live and work in, but as some of you may know, a certain tension, which we hope and trust will be short-lived, has developed between The Washington Post and the administration over our coverage of the so-called Watergate Affair. The Washington Post was central to the pursuit and public disclosure of most of what we now know about the story. And although the administration has not chosen to recognize this achievement with a silver trophy or even a parchment scroll, it has offered recognition of sorts, in a spate of public attacks on the Post itself and on some of its individual employees. Taking this kind of heat is, by no means, an unprecedented experience for those of us in our profession. Still, it is nice to get out of the kitchen every once in a while.
If it makes me a liberated woman, so be it. A certain degree of heat is, of course, a natural and expected part of our business. As Stuart Forsyth said, our company publishes a daily newspaper, the Post, and a weekly magazine, Newsweek, and it operates three television stations and two radio stations. When you're that much exposed to the critical judgments of that many customers with a brand new product every day, one that is different by definition from yesterday's product, the grievance rate is necessarily going to be high. It may be measured in somewhat the same way as the statistics on the number of babies being born every day in the world. Somewhere at any given moment, it seems inevitable that somebody or something arising out of the operations of The Washington Post-Newsweek company, is probably giving someone offense. I hope pleasure, too, and information.
The controversy that has grown up over the Watergate Affair, however, is of a different order from the sort of customer complaint that all of us in business receive on a regular basis. What we're now experiencing is something more than an automobile buyer's gripe about a folding catch on the glove compartment. The administration is claiming defects in our coverage of the Watergate case, which some of its members seem to believe, are grounds for wholesale and some might say permanent recall. We do not, for some reason, agree with this judgment. But that's not why I bring the subject up, or why I'd like to discuss it with you today. The performance of the reporters and editors on the Watergate story speaks for itself. And in our judgment it speaks well for American journalism.
That said, what I'd like to talk about today is the Watergate Affair in terms of what it tells us about the state of relations between the news media on the one hand and the reading or viewing public, in the larger sense of the word, on the other. I have in mind those readers who are not in government as well as those who are; in other words, I want to discuss something of fundamental concern for us all. For what it really comes down to is nothing less than the state of the First Amendment; our freedom to gather the news and to publish it, and your freedom to read it.
This is what we believe to be at stake in much of the controversy swirling around the press just now. And we find disturbing confirmation for this concern and a number of actions taken and tendency shown by government at all levels and in all branches. These include such disparate-seeming activities as efforts to shake confidence in the purveyors of those news reports government does not like, and the singular effort in the case of the Pentagon Papers to restrain in advance the publication of the news. They also include efforts to challenge the claims of the press to the right to protect confidential sources, and to refuse to disclose confidential information, even under court order. This last right is important enough to our profession that reporters are willing to go to jail to uphold it, and, as you all know, have in the recent past.
You may well be asking by now how the Watergate case fits in with all this. And the best way for me to answer that question is to recapitulate the essence of the Watergate Affair, both the Post coverage of it and the government's response, and to talk a little about the questions which both raise concerning the responsibilities as well as the rights of the press.
The charge that's been leveled against The Washington Post is that we have written extensively about the Watergate case out of a deep down desire to damage the Nixon administration on the one hand and to elect Senator McGovern president, on the other. On at least four occasions surrogates for the administration made this charge in remarkably similar language prior to the election. And just last weekend, still another White House official reopened the argument, alleging that our handling of the Watergate story has been a tragedy and that the net impact was probably to erode public confidence in the institutions of government. He went on to share his worry that it also eroded the confidence of a lot of fair-minded persons in the objective reporting of The Washington Post. While the official in question did not say which troubled him the most, his concern over public confidence in the Post struck us as not so much perhaps a worry as a hope.
This is not a charge we can afford to take lightly, because it goes straight to the central issue of fairness and objectivity as distinct from bias and the reporting of news. These are familiar words. We were encountering them and dealing with them long before Vice President Agnew began his long campaign against the so-called elitist press. And we were encountering them, let me assure you, from all shades of the political spectrum - From left and right, from establishment and dissenter. I do not myself subscribe to the view held by some in journalism that engaging the wrath of both sides in a dispute means, as the saying goes, that we must be doing something right. On the contrary, it seems to me that one must not discount the possibility that we are doing everything wrong. I introduce the point only as evidence of a general and widespread discontent with the media at this time in history, and, to suggest that our acknowledged failings do not begin to account for it entirely. Rather it seems to me to be connected with a larger dissatisfaction and restlessness on the part of the public concerning its institutions as a whole. And to some extent I think it also proceeds from our role as the bearer of much bad news, news of the foment and disorder of the '60s, for example, which though not of our making, was ours to report; ours to leave on the doorstep every morning and ours to bring into the living room at night.
We at the Post Company are aware of general crisis of confidence within the public concerning the news media. We are, I hope, also aware of the enormous obligations we have in attempting to deal fairly and responsibly with such sensitive if different events, as a Watergate burglary or an unruly demonstration or march. We are aware that it is the danger of abusing our large and particular power in our news coverage in display, of overplaying and thus distorting the meaning of any given event. But I would suggest to you that these are much more difficult and potentially dangerous problems than our critics themselves seem to understand. For what our critics of whatever persuasion are often talking about when they speak of bias or lack of objectivity is merely something a newspaper or magazine publishes or a television station airs, which does not serve their particular purposes at a given time. Thus, to this administration we are fundamentally liberal and anti-administration. And this supposedly is why we cover the news in the general way we do, and also why we covered the Watergate story in particular the way we did.
There is a much simpler explanation. We covered it in depth because it was major news, an important story from a national standpoint, as well as from the standpoint of our own community. It would've been an equally important story and we would've given it the same treatment regardless of which party was in power or who was running for election.
Now what exactly did happen? We were initially confronted with a highly unusual burglary, a burglary of the headquarters of a national political party, not for money, but for the purposes of bugging and tapping and stealing documents. It was obviously a police reporter's story, and the editors put two of our best police reporters on it. Despite the strong initial denials of the Democrats natural antagonists, the Republican Party and the president's reelection committee, that they were in any way connected with the burglary, strong connections were soon demonstrated. One of the arrested men was security coordinator both of the Republic National Committee and the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Another man soon connected with the case, and subsequently indicted, was a White House consultant. Once those links had been established in the face of categorical denials, journalistic professionalism and responsibility dictated that every possible lead be tracked down and checked out.
As they went about their checking, our reporters turned up a number of extraordinary and entirely legitimate news stories. They found, for example, that a $25,000 check intended for the president's campaign had wound up in the bank account of one of the men arrested at the Democratic Watergate headquarters. They also learned that an additional $89,000 in the same suspect's bank account had not only been intended for the president's reelection effort, but had also been filtered through a Mexican bank to mask its origins. The pursuit of the leads also uncovered a network of political espionage and sabotage efforts directed at the Democrats. Finally, the reporters and other investigators turned up the fact that the sabotage operation was financed from a cash fund kept in the safe of the finance director of the president's campaign committee.
I submit to you that these stories uncovered by our reporters and those working for other publications, far from being politically partisan, were in the highest traditions of American journalism. Once on their trail, our reporters had no choice but to pursue them. To have done otherwise would have been gross negligence. In part because this happened in Washington, where we have a large and skilled staff of reporters, the Post got out ahead on this story. But we were not alone in the developing interest in it. Now, as usually happens in an investigative story of this kind, we did have to rely on anonymous sources. Much of what we reported could not be stated categorically as fact. And in a totally conclusive way, because our informants were people intimately involved on one side or the other of the case, to have revealed their names would've been to risk their jobs and their careers. It would equally have been to eliminate their willingness to provide information, to have dried them up as news sources. However, a responsible paper can and does check one source against another. In all its reporting the Post used three and sometimes four or more checks and the work of the two main reporters was carefully rechecked by three or four separate editors. Time will tell how accurate our reporting has been.
There are three pending court cases growing out of the Watergate Affair, and there will almost certainly by congressional investigations by committees with subpoena power. Sooner or later we confidently expect that the sum and substance of our reporting will be confirmed and expanded upon, if all the facts are allowed to be brought out. It is nonsense to suggest that we could or would have pursued this story with as much intensity as we have done out of some partisan motive and with nothing substantial to go on. To have done that would have been to gamble a reputation and fortunes of The Washington Post in an incredibly reckless manner, for essentially the elusive and, given the circumstances, forlorn political purpose of electing George McGovern. Yet, that is precisely what some members of the administration are contending we did.
Rather than respond on the merits to the disclosures that have appeared in the Post, they have by and large given us ambiguous and unsubstantiated denials, and beyond that a continuing effort to discredit not the reports themselves directly, but the bearers of the reports on the theory presumably that by doing this the reports themselves would be disbelieved. Ironically enough, while accusing The Washington Post of reliance on anonymous sources, the administration itself has cited equally anonymous sources in an effort to impute ulterior motives to us. Based on these nameless sources - for instance, the suggestion has been made that out of some personal, and let me add non-existent hatred for the president, I personally ordered a campaign against the Nixon administration in an effort to elect Senator McGovern, with whom I and others on the Post are alleged to have a curious, and I quote, "social and cultural and ideological affinity."
There are several things to be said about all this. And the first is that it's untrue. I have to interject that I met Senator Dole on the plane coming out here. I've never met him before, and he is the one who happened to make that last charge on "Face the Nation," and he came bounding across the aisle and said, "Hello, Mrs. Graham, I'm Senator Dole." And I said, "Oh, Hello." And then I said, "Hey, I didn't say that. And if I did say it, if I had said anything that foolish it would have no bearing whatsoever on our editors or reporters because they don't, it doesn't work like that." And he said, "Well, it was a tough campaign."
But next and almost of equal relevance, it seems to me, is that it suggests an extraordinary innocence about the way a big newspaper or a news magazine functions, and, as I told him, about the way news is gathered. And because it ignores so much of the reality of these processes, it also entirely misses the real problem any news operations faces in its efforts each and every day to catch and set down the essence of fast-moving and only really dimly foreseeable events.
By way of explaining how it actually works, let me begin by saying that the Post city-room numbers close to 400. Newsweek has a comparable workforce and so in a lesser way do the newsrooms of the Post television and radio stations. They deal altogether on a daily basis or a weekly basis with millions of words having to do with literally scores of news stories. In the case of the print media, the problem is one of compressing an enormous body of material into strictly limited space.
In the case of radio and television it is a problem of compression to meet the limitations of time. There is no way to calculate the number of individual daily judgments that have to be made by reporters in deciding what phrase or sentence to quote from a Supreme Court ruling or an action by a local school board, and by layers of editors and copy readers in deciding what importance to give which story. How much to cut out of this, how much to expand that, and how prominently to display each and every one. But it should be self-evident the decision making on this comprehensive and detailed scale is beyond the effective daily control of any one individual whether owner or publisher or editor. Nor are the people that work on Post-Newsweek news operations indoctrinated in a party line. For one thing we have none. For another, and more importantly, it is our conviction that sound journalism requires a sound professional basis. For when management allows business judgments or personal pre-dispositions to influence the character of the news, it seems to me indisputable if both the public interest and our own professional excellence are substantially undermined. Finally even if all this were not true, it has been our experience that good editors and good reporters, the kind of staff on which we insist and on which we depend, are not people who would submit to any partisan and discreditable dictation. This is not to say that people in the news business are not human beings, subject to their own individual predilections and idiosyncrasies and preconceptions, and yes, obviously prejudices at times, but it is to say that no common overriding bias determines the end product.
As for the notion that some uniform ideological affinity for Senator McGovern explains our handling of the Watergate case, I'd simply call your attention to some of the things we said about the senator's campaign. In one editorial toward the end of the campaign we observed, "It will come as no surprise to those who have been reading our commentary on the candidates in this election so far, that we have our profound misgivings about Senator McGovern's grasp of the essential techniques of political leadership." At another point, "While his emphasis on urgent domestic needs may be admirable, the result in foreign policy could well involve a considerable element of risk." And on Vietnam we said that Senator McGovern had created a new moral problem. In the crippling blow he would have this country deal itself and the Vietnamese ally, as it made its way abruptly out of what it had originally proclaimed to be an ennobling enterprise.
And finally, it can be argued issue by issue and in a conventional and compelling way that the burden of proof in the case for change is upon the man who would supplant a sitting president, and that George McGovern has failed to meet that burden convincingly. Not much affinity, cultural or otherwise, there. We do not pretend that this answers the question of unfairness or a lack of objectivity. These weaknesses are always a threat. But we try to guard against them in a number of ways. We've expanded reader access to our pages by doubling the space available for letters to the editors. We take pains to publish retractions and corrections. We recently embarked on an effort to give the people in our community a greater opportunity to register their grievances face-to-face with our editors in a series of luncheon meetings in the surrounding counties of Maryland and Virginia and in the District of Columbia itself. We've been publishing in editorials and in signed columns on our editorial pages criticism of the news media in general and of the Post's own operations in particular. We have created an official ombudsman with the rank of assistant managing editor to conduct a continuing day-to-day monitoring of our performance, and to deal with specific complaints from readers. Some indication of the seriousness and severity with which this self-criticism has been leveled upon us is to be seen and the fact that we have had to limit this assignment to one year, largely for the protection of the ombudsman.
I should say that both the stations and Newsweek are trying to introduce disparate voices and self-criticism, too. It's not only limited to the Post, but I'm talking about the Post and the specific connection with the Watergate. We would not claim perfection, but we would make the case out if our own experience that something that might be called reader bias often exists and must also be taken into account. By that I mean that unfairness is often in the eyes of the beholder, especially when he feels some particular interest of his own has been adversely affected by what others would term a neutral news report. We are in business, after all, of describing people and their activities and their causes and conflicts. And it is a simple fact that people do not like to be described by others. The snapshot never looks quite the way you suppose yourself to look to others. It leaves this or that out of focus or out of the picture altogether. It highlights something else that isn't too flattering. It's not, in short, the way you would choose to describe yourself. It can't be. And that's why we so often hear somebody - and I've done it, we've all done it - say well, you know, that can't be fair because I was there, and that's not the way it was.
Thus, we had Vice President Agnew in recent years assailing the press at a time when he thought the press was being unfair to the president. But in 1972, at a time when an overwhelming majority of American newspapers that endorsed President Nixon for reelection, and most papers were assidiously reporting imperfections and incompetency in the McGovern campaign, the Agnew crusade against the media suddenly stopped. It is significant in the same sense that when William Safire, White House speech writer, and Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of the McGovern campaign, were asked on an NBC panel show during a campaign whether news coverage on the election had been fair, it was Mr. Safire who said yes, and Mr. Mankiewicz who said no.
In the eyes of Mr. Agnew, we remained "radic-libs." In the eyes of Mr. Mankiewicz, as he wrote on our editorial page a few weeks ago, "The Washington Post editorial page is a citadel of conservative chic." Bias, one discovers after a time in this business, must be very much in the eye of the beholder.
Nothing may better illustrate this point than a really tough experience we had in reporting the shocking attack on Governor Wallace by a would-be assassin at a political rally in a Maryland shopping center just outside of Washington. The assault was a personal tragedy. It was also an event of great political significance. It took place by happenstance in our working territory. Our reporters knew the police and the hospitals and the general lay of the land. Thus as with the Watergate Affair, we were able to report before others did the hard and unhappy news that Governor Wallace had been wounded so severely that he would be probably permanently paralyzed, a development clearly of enormous political significance to the campaign. We took no pleasure in reporting it. The Wallace camp understandably took still less pleasure in our having done so. And so our news reports on the governor's medical condition were described to our disagreement with Governor Wallace's political views. Subsequently, however, these reports were borne out. And as we have every reason to be believe, our reporting on the Watergate case will also be confirmed. The common denominator at both cases was that we were reporting something that somebody didn't want to hear. And so the first response on the part of many people was to suspect an ulterior motive on our part for having reported it. This is not a new phenomenon among readers, and the encouragement of such suspicions is not a new phenomenon on the part of government.
Those of us who have been around through many administrations know that the Nixon administration did not invent governmental impatience with the press and does not have a corner on it now. There has been, however, a good deal of evidence of an intensified campaign to undermine public confidence, not just in The Washington Post, but in those segments of the news media which are thought to be hostile to the administration. To inhibit the functioning of the press, to sport with something that responsible public officials ought to be the first to uphold. The free flow of communications between the government and the governed.
To this chorus I would add the administration's supportive efforts on the part of state and federal attorneys to entangle professional newsmen in the law enforcement process, by summoning them before grand juries and asking them to reveal confidential sources and information obtained in confidence. This is a new trend. It started only about two years ago and culminated with the government's successful argument in the so-called Caldwell case before the Supreme Court. In that case, a newspaperman's right to respect confidences was judged to be less important than the state's right to information upon which indictments could be brought against accused criminals. While respecting the Supreme Court's judgment, our own view is that confidentiality is the essence of newsgathering. We could hardly operate entirely on the basis of information provided by sources who are prepared to have themselves publicly identified. And neither, we would add, could the government, for this business of anonymous attribution is used by both sides. That is to say it is used in the dissemination as well as the gathering of news.
We resist when the government seeks to put out unattributed information to large gatherings of newsmen, under circumstances which conceal the sources only from the reader, but which enable the government to disclaim responsibility for what is written. This is an ancient government practice known in Washington as the backgrounder. We insist on the contrary on judging for ourselves on the validity of information gathered from anonymous sources. And it is our further view that the freedom to do just that is part and parcel of the freedom to publish. We would add above all the case of the Pentagon Papers. Although the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the government in this case and freed us to publish these documents, the Times and ourselves experienced for a period of two weeks or more under temporary court orders requested by the administration, the first prior restraint of publication in two hundred years' history of this country.
I would suggest that the "we" who experienced this unprecedented restraint is not an exclusive or exclusionary pronoun; it does not refer in my judgment merely to those publications that were engaged in litigation or even to the media as a whole. It refers to all of us, publishers and public alike. And I believe as well that the growing indifference to the First Amendment it reflects is cause for no less concern on your part, indeed, on the part of every citizen, than on ours. For these are just not just our rights and freedoms, and this is just not our business. This is also your business, because these are also your rights and freedoms. When the press is intimidated and circumscribed in its capacity to report and to inform and to enlighten in its own fashion, it is the public that loses in the end by losing its capacity to participate in a self-governing society. This is not a matter of Republicans against Democrats, or of liberals against conservatives, because sooner or later it will cut all ways. James Madison, in describing why our state constitutions included guarantees of freedom of the press, said this: "In every state probably in the Union, the press has exerted a freedom in canvassing the merits and measures of public men of every description which has not been confined to the strict limits of the common law. On this footing the freedom of the press has stood. On this footing, it yet stands."
Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of everything. And in no instances is this more true than that of the press. It has accordingly been decided by the practice of the states that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than by pruning them away to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruit. We in the news business would ask of our readers and viewers only that they bear in mind this perception of the importance of a free press, whether they count a particular newspaper, news story or newscast among its noxious branches or among those yielding the proper fruits. Thank you.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers