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Show Politicians And Press Naturally Conflict H By EDWIN FEULNER J ft "Every President, when he first enters the tyhite House, promises an 'open Ad-linistration.' Ad-linistration.' He swears he likes reporters, 'Vill cooperate with them, will treat them as 0,,rst-class citizens," Timothy Crouse ob-rves ob-rves in The Boys on the Bus. " "V'The charade goes on for a few weeks or lonths, or even a couple of years. All the cephile the Presidednt is struggling to suppress Hitn overwhelming conviction that the press is spying to undermine his administration, if not 'e Republic. . . Then, sooner or later he tjlows." festj Perhaps the only exception to this rule was ! filliam Henry Harrison. He died one month Eter his inauguration. )ecn Presidential news management has been i f4n American dilemma ever since the birth of lizes, ngtt; the Republic. George Washington wanted a State Department clerk fired because he edited an anti-Washington newspaper. John Adams and his supporters in 1798 pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson promptly pardoned all those convicted con-victed under the act when he took office in 1801, but later remarked that a few good prosecutions might restore the integrity of the press. Woodrow Wilson once considered a federal news agency to make sure the public got the "real facts." Harry Truman maintained main-tained that in a national emergency he had the right to seize the nation's newspapers. John Kennedy suggested that The New York Times' Saigon correspondent be replaced after he consistently sent dispatches at great critical and pessimistic variance from the reports he was getting from his own people. George Reedy, a former Special Assistant to Lyndon Johnson, ascribed this longstanding long-standing antagonism between the President and the press to a fundamental dichotomy of interests that exists between newspapermen and politicians. "Politicians, as a class, are dedicated to changing the world. With very few exceptions, ex-ceptions, they have in their minds some bright and shining ideal which is so obviously superior to what exists that it seems to be reality, with the actual world around them merely some kind of aberration," Reedy observed. "Newspapermen, on the other hand, are held, to some degree, to the facts. . . . it is still their principal mission to present the world as it is. The two points of view are fundamentally incompatible." And this condition leads Reedy to the conclusion that "no amount of manipulation can ever produce newspapers that are satisfactory to political leaders, or politicians who are satisfactory to newspapermen (unless George Orwell's nightmare, in which politicians had the capacity not only to produce newspapers but to rewrite the newspapers of the past, comes to fruition)." Reedy's remarks should be instructive to conservatives, who perhaps harbored hopes that President Reagan's landslide victory signaled a four-year honeymoon between this President and the press. Unfortunately, that's just so much wishful thinking. It's important that we accept gracefully the "bad reviews" that are bound to come, and recognize the inevitability of it all. To expect anything less would be to create a dream world that has never existed in the past, and likely never will. |