Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)
August 18, 1996, Sunday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: COMMENTARY, Pg. F-4
LENGTH: 554 words
D.C. PRESS GETS RAKED OVER COALS
BYLINE: Reviewed by THOMAS W. HOWARD; Thomas W. Howard is a
retired assistant managing editor of the; Times-Dispatch.
FEEDlNG THE
BEAST: The White House vs. the Press,
by Kenneth T. Walsh;
Random House, $ 25.
If you are one of those persons, whether Republican or
Democrat or independent, who believes that the Washington press corps has lost
touch with Middle America, you will want to read what Kenneth T. Walsh, senior
White House correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, has written in Feeding
the Beast.
Walsh, who has been covering the White House for 10
years, reinforces the accusations -- from both inside and outside the press
corps -- of an out-of-touch press and presents an excellent analysis on why
this has come about.
Feeding the Beast, a phrase used inside Washington to
describe the media, is not a one-sided press bash. The presidency, particularly
that of William Clinton, is hauled up for its own scalding.
THERE IS nothing new about sour relationships between
the White House and the Washington press. These go back to John Adams, the second
President, but the new era is one in which neither side trusts nor understands
the other.
The American public is being shortchanged in the
process, Walsh rightly claims.
The current era of mistrust between the White House
and the press may have begun during Richard Nixon's administration. The
difference is that now not only the Republicans distrust the press. The
Democrats share that distrust as well, and ''a significant portion of the
public is heading in that direction,'' Walsh says.
The politicians are correct, to some extent, in
accusing the mainstream media as being too eager to expose the character flaws
of the nation's leaders and the failures of public policy rather than inform
the country about the positive side of government and the people who run it.
Walsh lists four major trends within the Washington media
that undermine the credibility of journalism: They put too much attitude in
their stories; they are too negative; they rush to judgment on events, trends,
and people; and they have lost contact with everyday America.
News analysis, once the province of a small number of
veteran columnists, is now written by even rookie reporters as a matter of course.
He says he believes that loss of contact with the rest
of the country may be reporters' biggest problem.
The backlash has already begun. ''We journalists ignore
it at our peril.''
NEWSPAPER reading is on a long, steady decline, dropping
from 69 percent who read newspapers daily in 1972, to 50 percent by l989. The decline among 18- to 23-year-olds
is the steepest, from 45percent to 23 percent.
Only readers over 65 have remained faithful readers--actually
increasing from 72 percent in 1972 to 73 percent in 1989, despite the fact that
many newspapers have spent much of their energies unsuccessfully chasing the
younger reader.
Obviously the sole answer to the problem is not change
from within the media fortresses. The current White House policies of evasion
and cover-up contribute to the conditions, and the press is correct in reporting
what develops. It is how this reporting is carried out that has stimulated press
criticism.
Walsh is only one of a number of media critics who have voiced these fears in recent years, but as a prominent journalist with an invaluable perspective of the issue, his views are going to have an impact.
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