Newsgathering in Washington

A Study in Political Communication

Dan Nimmo, Georgie Anne Geyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351502986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the early twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippmann said that the presentation of truthful news lies at the heart of democracy. This volume strong strong stems from Dan D. Nimmo's conviction that opinion and policymaking are also significant, interrelated processes within any political system. A democracy poses problematic questions of the manner and means by which political ideas, opinions, and issues are transmitted throughout the body politic. In the United States, such communication is carried on primarily through the news media. Reporters and their sources interact to form crucial relationships linking citizen and official. Nimmo focuses on that interaction, using personal interviews with selected samples of Washington correspondents and their official news sources as his evidence. Nimmo's research examines the relationships that develop between news sources and reporters as each engages in political communication, indicates the factors most influential in determining such relationships, and suggests the implications such findings have for interpreting the tension that characterizes government-press relations in a democracy such as the United States. In this era of heightened attention to the role of the media in political discourse, reissuance of this volume could not be timelier. This study features a new preface by Daniel Pearl Award winner Georgie Anne Geyer. It should be read by all media specialists, communication scholars, and journalists, and will be valuable for those entering these fields as well.

CHAPTER I
News Sources & Newsmen: Introduction

Times of crisis have a way of bringing into sharp focus certain activities which, in more placid periods, are generally taken for granted. Few Americans, for example, are normally sensitive to the function served by the reporter in the politics of their democracy. Although we may accept in principle Jefferson’s maxim that “No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will,”¹ we seldom concern ourselves with whether the press can and does perform this critical role. We ask little more of newsmen than that they provide a written supplement to morning coffee or a televised nightcap to “wrap up the day’s events.” But, in a period of grave concern, one of so-called national peril, we seek out the aid of the reporter, the columnist, and the commentator by reading beyond the headlines and eagerly twisting the dial.

The significant information on which a citizen in a democracy must base his political actions is most often channeled, in some form, through the written or spoken press. A crisis situation simply makes this ever-present fact more apparent. But what the citizen is only passingly aware of, the politician, the public official, and the reporter emphasize repeatedly through their actions and their utterances. The actions of our presidents are illustrative. Harry S. Truman, for example, enjoyed the working reporter and likened his meetings with the press to the question periods faced by cabinet ministers in the British House of Commons. Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps less eagerly, retained the news conference as a form of public communication. And, finally, the value of the press to administration policy was clearly evidenced in the opening days of the New Frontier when Pres. John F. Kennedy emphasized the need for more numerous, larger, and televised confrontations with the Washington press corps. In fact, no previous American president used such a great variety of tactics in dealing with the news media-exclusive background sessions with newsmen, regularized television performances in news conferences, and television “chats” with reporters. And few lectured the members of the press themselves so frequently on their relation to the “national interest” and the “public interest” as did President Kennedy with regard to Cold War responsibilities and the Cuban crisis.

It is not only the relation of president and press which supports public officials’ recognition of the crucial nature of the reporter’s performance in politics. The growing popularity and utilization of the press secretary is also testimony to official desires to regularize relations with the news media. The names of Stephen Early and Charles Ross became known after World War II, but nowhere near the extent to which more recent “official spokesmen”-Pierre Salinger, Lincoln White, and Arthur Sylvester-have gained public notice. President Eisenhower, on his sickbed in 1955, was reported to have said to Press Secretary James Hagerty, “Take care of things while I’m gone.” Whether the report is verifiable is not relevant. Rather the mere existence of the story illustrates the increased focus on public relations men who are to “meet the press.”

Certainly, the practicing politician is quick enough to estimate the value of recognition by the working press in elevating him to the office which he seeks. Wisely, he courts the press accordingly. And the administrative bureaucracy realizes the necessity of assigning specific people the lion’s share of responsibility in dealing with the press; hence the rise of the public information officer, the press secretary, and the secretary for public affairs. As a person, the reporter may or may not always command deference from public officials, but as the performer of a critical function in the politics of democracy, the reporter is either respected as a positive good or tolerated as a necessary evil.

Newsmen are in politics; officials recognize it and so do the correspondents themselves. But what is particularly bewildering to the professional journalist is that his reportorial efforts within the political environment go seemingly unnoticed, not by the practitioner of politics, but by the student of politics. Recognition by presidents, congressmen, and cabinet officers has thus not been sufficient to offset the scholar’s failure to recognize the importance of the press in the political realm. The magnitude of this “slight” prompted Walter Lippmann to declare:

So deep is the tradition, that until quite recently, for example, political science was taught in our colleges as if newspapers did not exist. I am not referring to schools of journalism, for they are trade schools, intended to prepare men and women for a career. I am referring to political science as expounded to future business men, lawyers, public officials, and citizens at large. In that science a study of the press and the sources of popular information found no place. It is a curious fact. To anyone not immersed in the routine interests of political science, it is almost inexplicable that no American student of government, no American sociologist, has ever written a book on news-gathering.²

It is not relevant here whether the condition of the discipline in the 1920’s warranted such an observation. It is sufficient to note that changes take place in approaches to the study of politics as well as in political activity itself. In recent years, added emphasis has been placed on the function of the mass media in the political process. Students of politics have become sensitive to the fact that the press possesses a political function-one with which the political scientist may legitimately concern himself without incurring the wrath of the professional journalist or feeling guilty at having concerned himself with matters formerly regarded in his discipline as beyond the scope of his professional investigations. Yet the tardiness of this recognition has permitted another concerned and self-styled reporter to twit the student of politics:

Increasingly of late those of us who report from Washington find ourselves the object of curious scrutiny by the political scientists. The press, it has been recognized belatedly, plays an important role in our nation’s capital, though nobody seems exactly sure what it is.³

These chidings of political scientists by professional journalists are cited neither to start an argument nor to settle one. More important is the premise that underlies the journalists’ feelings—that the news media performs a significant political service in making available that intelligence on which government in a democratic society rests. Certainly, the political performance of the press does not take place in isolation. Newsgathering is not an independent process. Any reporter must have his sources; these sources give him information on problems, personalities, and issues-information which he needs to produce stories commanding reader attention. Both newsgathering and information-dispensing form a continuous process involving the activities of newsmen and news sources. Those activities are so tightly intertwined that they lend validity to Lippmann’s assertion that a book on newsgathering involves both a study of the press and the sources of public information.⁴ Government-press relations in any political system take their character from the interactions of newsmen and their news sources.

This is a study of government-press relations. Its focus is on exploration of the information-dispensing processes involving governmental officials and the newsgathering processes in which members of the news media take part. Its purposes are threefold: (1) to specify the relationships that develop between news sources and newsmen as each engages in processes of political communication, (2) to indicate the factors most influential in determining such relationships, and (3) to suggest the implications that such findings have for interpreting the tension that characterizes government-press relations in a democracy such as the United States.

Underlying the research effort devoted to these purposes is a series of assumptions which should be made explicit regarding public opinion, information, and political communication. Taken collectively, these premises form a framework of political opinion and communication within which research findings should be interpreted. Public opinion appears to be pluralistic. It is not here regarded as consisting of an unchanging set of values existing apart from political controversy; it is not treated as a constant that can be used to judge right and wrong sides of political issues. Rather, we speak of public opinion developing when persons are prompted to express opinions on issues around which the public forms. These issues of community-wide concern are generated at several points within a political community. One such source of issues is the formal governmental structure of the community itself. Governmental officials, through advocating, adopting, and pursuing certain policies, are constantly communicating facts, issues, and ideas to the citizen in the hope of making the tasks of governing easier and more responsible. Citizens of the political community are seldom involved in the opinion process until their individual or group behavior is oriented toward particular issues. This becomes the essential feature of that process of public opinion described by Davison as the formation of personal opinions on public issues.⁵

The number of governmental officials who wish to influence public opinion by distributing information is quite remarkable. They may be legislators, bureaucrats, diplomats, or judges; their variety and purposes are endless. Increasingly on the national level, the citizen encounters these officials not as individuals, but as parts of that ubiquitous image of “official Washington” appearing in the news media. When some attempt is made to analyze this strange eminence that touches the lives of all in the United States, we find that “official Washington” is primarily composed of those public officials whose reason for existence is ostensibly to tell the citizen what government is doing. This is the function of the public information officer (PIO). These people serving in publicity offices of administrative agencies make up one set of political communicators-the communicators of messages which have political consequences in the activation, shaping, and articulating of public opinion. Messages of governmental publicity serve both as information and justification; they fulfill information requirements of the citizen and compete with rival explanations for the support of public opinion in defining the limits of agency authority. A primary channel for conveying these messages is that of the press or news media-terms referring to all news outlets and news channels of mass communications. From the standpoint of the governmental body interested in publicity, its relationship to the news media is critical in influencing or soliciting citizen support for programs.

In no area is public relations more important to the American democracy than national government. This is literally the field of “public information.” Modern administration would come to a standstill if government could not constantly speak to the people as individuals and in and through the different groups to which they belong. It must do so mainly through the mass media.⁶

Although the press affords the bureaucracy ready access for communication to the citizen, it also operates in another capacity. Messages of governmental publicity do not necessarily fulfill all the informational requirements of the citizen participating in the opinion process. It is a primary function of the news media to obtain such additional information as is required to fulfill these needs. It performs this function through the process of selection and transmission of information not necessarily originating with bureaucratic publicity. For the news media, this process is that of defining news; for members of the news media, the relationship to the government is a vital one in determining access to the source of news.

This is a model of the explanatory and news defining processes closely akin to that used in opinion and mass communications research. A governmental body acts to formulate, select, and transmit promotional messages to explain and justify its policies. These messages are directed to the citizen, either as an individual or a group participant, who requires information about his political environment in order to satisfy the needs and problems encountered in adjusting to it. The news media serve both as the channel through which the promotional message is conveyed and as an agent in obtaining information outside the citizen’s immediate experience which is non-promotional in nature but also required for adjusting to the political environment. A critical point in the opinion process is the government-news media relation; it determines the official’s access to the public as a source of support and the reporter’s access to the bureaucracy as a source of news. This is not to say that this is the only process through which the citizen adjusts to his political environment. Others include those involving political parties, interest groups, bureaucracies, mass movements, and so on. It is to say that this connective link between government, news media, and citizen shares significance with such alternatives and merits independent consideration.

In this process of political communication, the official and the newsman play specific roles in the fulfillment of the citizen’s information requirements. Ultimately the pictures of political reality perceived by the citizen are traceable to actions and utterances of public officials. However, the official source of information transmitted to the citizen is often the information specialist of the department or agency concerned and not the policy-maker himself. He may be designated in the news column as “a high spokesman” or an “unimpeachable source.” In those instances, the source role is played not by the policy-maker but by the information officer titled, perhaps, “Information Specialist,” “Director of Information,” “Public Information Officer,” “Public Relations Officer,” or “Special Assistant for Public Affairs.” The manner in which he performs in that role and the informational requests he fills for the citizen depend upon the view he holds of his own function-advocate of agency policy, informer of the “public,” or link for the reporter, and so on. Although such officers are not the sole source of public intelligence-perhaps, in some instances, they prove to be a minor source-they do comprise a group of officials (information officers) acting in source roles who interact with a group of newsmen in channel roles. This interaction can be examined, explored, and analyzed in order to obtain greater understanding of the process of political communication. We may concur with Herring:

This relationship between the government and the public in actual practice is narrowed down to contacts between a sma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Chapter I, News Sources & Newsmen: Introduction
• Chapter II, Information Officers & Newsmen: Political Communicators
• Chapter III, Sources & Channels in Political Communication
• Chapter IV, External Influences on Political Communicators
• Chapter V, The Source-Channel Relation: Patterns & Variables
• Chapter VI, Tools of the Trade: The Practitioners’ Views
• Chapter VII, Significant Issues of Political Communication
• Chapter VIII, The Source-Channel Relation between Government & Press
• Appendix I: Nature and Method of Analysis
• Appendix II: PIO Interview Schedule
• Appendix III: Newsman Interview Schedule
• Bibliography
• Index