Reed Irvine - Editor
The power of the news media upon the Carter Administration when OMB Director Bert Lance found the heat in the Washington kitchen a little too hot to bear.
Mr. Lance endured the slings and arrows for two months, cheerfully insisting that he had done nothing wrong and that the nation would understand this once he had his day in court.
He had his day-three days, in fact-before Senator Ribicoff's committee. There was some evidence that the people who watched Mr. Lance on TV or heard him on the radio were impressed favorably. Calls and letters to the White House were reported to be running strongly in his favor.
But there was no let up in the critical articles and comment in the news media. Whatever the general public may have thought, the media verdict went against Bert Lance. His departure from office became inevitable. President Jimmy Carter had tried hard to save his close friend, but the power of the presidency once again proved inferior to the power of the media.
It has been widely charged that the media carried on a campaign against Lance based on false or exaggerated charges. One who took that view was Edwin Yoder, editor of the editorial page of the Washington Star. Mr. Yoder reported in a signed column that some highly placed friends of his in national banking said that "if Mr. Lance had done anything discreditable or contrary to accepted practices in banking it was news to them." The "political" overdrafts had been an unfortunate mistake, "reflecting poor judgment." "The press treatment of 'correspondent' relation- ships between banks reflected great naivete and ignorance."
On the other hand, some bankers were incensed at the tendency of the media to suggest that some of Lance's business practices were typical of all banks. They charged that this was giving banking a bad name and that it was simply false.
Others have pointed out that the press itself had made some mention of the most serious charges against Lance last January, prior to his confirmation. Why, they ask, was this information regarded as unimportant then and as all. important in August?
For example, an AP story on January 8 had reported that Lance's campaign fund overdrafts had been the reason for a Justice Department investigation of his 1974 gubernatorial campaign, which had been dropped.
On January 11, The New York Times had reported that the investigation of Lance's campaign fund had been dropped the day before Carter announced that he would make Lance his OMB director. The timing was reported to be coincidental.
On January 16, The Times reported that federal bank examiners had criticized overdrafts extended to lance by the Calhoun Bank, which he headed.
The difference was that in January these were reported as matters that had been investigated and satisfactorily resolved. The President-elect knew about them and was satisfied. The Justice Department was satisfied (and it was still under the Republicans). The Comptroller of the Currency was satisfied. In the honeymoon period of a new administration, no one was inclined to suggest that those decisions might be suspect.
Bert Lance was a victim of Watergate. Having ushered in new high standards of morality, once the gauntlet was thrown down, the Washington press corps was unable to gloss over or ignore the evidence that Bert Lance had not, as a private banker, measured up to those standards.
The main gauntlet-thrower was William Satire, columnist for The New York Times. Mr. Satire began his July 25 column with this comparison:
"When Sherman Adams made a phone call to inquire of a Federal official about the status of a Bernard Goldfine request, outraged Democrats pointed to a vicuna coat and demanded the scalp of President Eisenhower's chief of staff.
"When Howard 'Bo' Calloway was accused (falsely as the current Harper's magazine reveals) of using his government job to help along a private project, editorial voices boomed and President Ford's campaign was forced to resign.
"But they were Republicans. Since Democrat Bert Lance, President Carter's most influential adviser, was revealed to have used his public job to line his pockets, the trumpets of rectitude have been muted."
While it was an exaggeration to say that Lance had used his job "to line his pockets," the final record does suggest that his position as an influential friend of the President-elect was helpful to him in settling his problems with both the Justice Department and the Comptroller of the Currency, if not in his negotiations for credit.
There was a time when such maneuverings would not have been regarded as either scandalous or as news. But there was also a time when bugging your political opponents' offices was not considered the crime of the century. Columnist Safire challenged the press and Congress to apply the same standard to the Democrats that they had applied to the Republicans. That was what did Lance in, as Jimmy Carter acknowledged when he said that Lance's troubles had grown out of the fact that he had set such high standards for people in his Administration.
1. The media cannot be relied upon to abjure the double standard and investigate all hints of scandal equally. The Washington press corps has a strong ideological bias which makes it easier for it to generate enthusiasm for investigations of those who are on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Lance had the advantage of being close to a Democratic president, but he had the disadvantage of being known as the most conservative adviser in the President's inner circle. After a little prodding, the press corps went after him with considerable enthusiasm.
2. Study of the Lance affair casts some light on what might have to be done to focus public attention on other situations-such as the presence in the White House of a speechwriter, Hendrik Hertzberg, who three years ago advocated unilateral disarmament for the U.S., saying: "It would he 'better' for the U.S. alone to be destroyed than for the Soviet Union, Europe, and much of the rest of the world to be destroyed as well." (WIN magazine, August 1, 1974)
3. Appointive officials of an outgoing administration may go to extraordinary lengths to curry favor with the incoming administration, and their actions deserve to be viewed with proper skepticism. This was demonstrated by the action in the Lance affair of the acting Comptroller of the Currency, the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, and Assistant Attorney- General Richard Thomburgh. Thomburgh not only approved the closing out of the Lance investigation the day before Lance's appointment to OMB was announced, but he also let CIA defector and secret-piller Philip Agee off the prosecution hook on the last day of the Ford Administration. This permitted his successor to disclaim responsibility for excusing the treacherous Agee from possible prosecution. Mr. Thomburgh is reported to have had hopes that Carter might name him FBI Director.
OPINION POLLS PRESENT PROBLEMS
Public confidence in public opinion polls is severely weakened when different pollsters come up with widely varying results on the same questions.
This happened recently in two different cases. During the week of August 13 to 21, both the Gallup and Harris polling organizations checked the public's rating of the performance of President Jimmy Carter.
Gallup found that 66% of those polled approved the way Carter was handled his job, while only 16% disapprove. This was virtually the same as the results Gallup reported in July, when the percentages were 67% approving and 17% disapproving.
Research Associates, released on September 22, showed that 50% opposed the treaty and only 29% favored it. Eliminating those who had no opinion, we find that the Gallup poll had 54% of the people opposing the treaty and the AP poll had 63% opposing it. Again, the difference is substantial.
One might think that the media would pounce on these discrepancies and both point them out to the public and challenge the pollsters to explain them. This was done in December 1975, when Gallup came out with a poll showing Gerald Ford beating Hubert Humphrey by a margin of 51% to 39% while Harris had Humphrey beating Ford by 52% to 41%.
Lou Harris's pollsters, on the other hand, found that only 52% rated the President positively, while 44% gave him a negative rating. This represented a sharp drop from Harris's July results, when he found the corresponding figures were 59% and 37%.
The gap between the two polls in July was bad enough, but the much larger disparity that opened up in August ought to raise questions as well as eyebrows.
The second case concerns two polls on the Panama Canal issue. A Gallup poll published on September 4, indicated that 46% of those polled disapproved the proposed new treaty on the Panama Canal, while 39% approved of the treaty. A poll made for the Associated Press by Chilton.
At that time, The New York Times did a lengthy story on the differences, saying that this raised a question of whether you could believe any of the pollsters. The Times quoted "a leading academic specialist" as saying that the pollsters "do a very sloppy job." The Tunes said: "All of this causes some to wonder if the press does not give too much play to very shaky polls."
At the very least, the press ought to point out the discrepancies and the flaws in the polls when they stand out as sharply as they did in these two cases. The New York Times reported both the Gallup and Harris polls on Carter's popularity. One headline said: "Gallup Poll Finds Carter's Standing Unhurt by Lance." The other headline said: "Poll Finds President Hurt by Lance Affair." The Washington Post headlined the stories this way: (1) "President Receives 66% Approval After Seven Months" and (2) "Carter's Rating by Public Drops 7 Points in Month." The Times did note that there was a difference between the Gallup and Harris results, but it didn't use this to remind readers of the danger in accepting poll results as truth, as it had in December 1975. The Washington Post did not even point out the gap in the results of the two polls.
The polls on the Panama Canal treaty presented an even more appropriate opportunity for critical press comment on the methods of the pollsters. Gallup had made a very serious error in the way he described what the new treaty would do. The people who were being polled were told that the U.S. would retain control over land and installations necessary to operate and defend the Canal even after owner- ship was turned over to Panama in 1999. That is false, and this misinformation should have invalidated the poll results. This should have been reported, but it hasn't been.
CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE MEDIA
There has been abundant reporting by the media of contributions made to political campaigns by a wide variety of special interest groups, but nothing has been heard about contributions from big media. However, on examination of official records of the Federal Elections Commission and the House and Senate reveals that the media have been active in setting up the political action committees (PAC's) through which campaign contributions can be channeled. These PACs are funded by donations from media executives.
The media PACs have made substantial contributions to key members of the House and Senate Commerce Committees, which oversee the operation and regulation of their industry.
But while the public has heard plenty about the political campaign contributions of the maritime unions that were pushing for cargo preference legislation, nothing has been said about media contributions to the congressman whose committee is currently rewriting the Communications Act.
In 1976, the Communications Political Action Committee (COMPAC) made campaign contributions totaling $200000. The Television and Radio Political Action Committee (TARPAC) gave $50,000. The Cable Television Political Action Committee (CATPAC) gave $20,000.
Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin of California, chairman of the Communications Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, which is overseeing the rewriting of the Communications Act, received contributions from these three PACs totaling $1800 in 1976. Rep. Louis Frey of Florida, the ranking Republican member of this committee, received contributions totaling $1300 from these same PACs. Every member of the subcommittee received campaign contributions from at least one of these three PACs.
On the Senate side, Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada, a key fixture on the communications subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, received $1,500 in contributions from the three media PACs. Three Democrats on this subcommittee who lost their races, Hartke, Moss and Tunney, also received contributions.
In addition to contributions made through the PACs, the media executives also made generous personal campaign contributions to key congressmen. Executives of the three networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Time, Inc. gave Rep. Van Deerlin a total of $3,100 in direct, personal contributions.
All of these contributions are perfectly legal, and Congress- man Van Deerlin and the others are not to be blamed for accepting them. Nor can media executives be blamed for organizing PACs through which contributions to political figures can be channeled. Certainly they are as entitled to do this as every other pressure group.
However, the missing element in the picture is media reporting on media contributions to political figures. As long as the spotlight is focused on campaign contributions, with the implication that the contributors are gaining undue influence by means of their contributions, it seems only fair to ask that the big media include their own political contributions in the total picture. They too have important special interests that they want to protect.
JOURNALISTS TOO CAN BE CORRUPTED
On September 13, 1977, The New York Times announced in a three-paragraph story on an inside page that Laura Foreman, a reporter in the Washington Bureau of The Times, had resigned. Miss Foreman had come under fire after it had become known that she had maintained a special relationship with a powerful Pennsylvania politician during the time that she was working as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In a Washington TV program, On The Record, hostess Sheila Weidenfeld inelegantly stated that Miss Foreman "had been sleeping with" the politician, a description that brought forth an objection from guest Sally Quinn, a writer for The Washington Post. Miss Quinn, who knows all about these things, having shared living quarters with her boss, executive editor Ben Bradlee, for several years, insisted that one should say that Miss Foreman had "dated" the politician and received expensive gifts from him.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer those gifts included jewelry, a fur coat and partial payments on a sports car, as well as some of the furnishings in Miss Foreman's apartment, in which the politician also lived for a time.
Miss Foreman did not deny any of this, but she did argue that there was nothing wrong with what she had done. She said: "Certainly I do not believe I ever wrote anything for The Inquirer which violated my professional integrity."
The trouble is that Miss Foreman was supposed to be writing about politics, not about recipes or real estate. And the man she was "dating" was Henry J. Cianfrani, chairman of the Pennsylvania state senate appropriation committee and one of the most powerful politicians in the state.
It turns out that he should also have been one of the most interesting subjects that a political reporter in Philadelphia might have investigated and written about. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on September 24 that Senator Cianfrani had been indicted by a federal grand jury on 110 counts of racketeering, mall fraud, obstruction of justice and income tax evasion. He was accused of defrauding the state of more than $82,000 by using his office for personal gain.
The Inquirer reported that this indictment was the result of a 13-month investigation by the FBI and other agencies. Thus during part of the period that the senator was under investigation by the government, the Philadelphia Inquirer's political reporter was in an excellent position to observe the senator's high style of living. It does not appear that she felt any obligation to the public or to The Inquirer to find out how Senator Cianfrani managed to pay for all those expensive gifts.
Perhaps Miss Foreman did not write anything that violated her professional integrity, but one has to wonder if she was not somewhat restrained in what she could write about Senator Cianfrani.
It is no great surprise to learn that journalists too are subject to temptation and are corruptible. But the Foreman case has some close similarities to the Lance case, which was going on at the same time. Foreman, like Bert Lance, was under fire for what she had done before she came to Washington. No one said she had not done a good job at The New York Times. Her bosses, like Lance's boss, were noted for the high moral pose they liked to strike. Critics were amused to see them placed in an embarrassing position.
As Carter was defensive about Lance, so The Times was defensive about Foreman. She was not summarily fired, but eventually they had to let her go.
But there was a difference. The Laura Foreman story was handled most discreetly in the pages of The Times. The indictment of Sen. Cianfrani was mentioned in a tiny story on page 8. His connection with Miss Foreman passed unnoticed.
In its September 12, 1977 Issue, Time magazine informed its readers that in Oaxaca, Mexico, the mosquito exterminators are called 'los matagatos, (the cat killers)," Time said that the reason for this unlikely name was that "their cats lick the DDT residue off their paws and die of a disease of the nervous system." Time noted that a consequence of this was that rats multiplied, ate more food, leaving the humans hungrier than ever.
This might be called the "hoary cat story." The New York Times carried a similar story on January 2, 1962, only then the locale was Vietnam, not Mexico. The story began this way: "American DDT spray killed the cats that ate the rats that devoured the crops that were the main props against communist agitation in the central lowlands. The result: the hungry, embittered rural population is tending to support the communist insurgents."
The World Health Organization traces the origin of this story to an incident that took place in Borneo in 1956-58 where a chemical called dieldrin, not DDT, was used in a malaria eradication program. This reportedly had an adverse impact on the eat population of a single district where dieldrin was used. WHO said that no mortality of cats was reported in those areas where DDT was used then or at any time since then.
The Borneo story was spiced up by attributing an outbreak of plague to the reduced cat population. To that, WHO's answer was that the last outbreak of plague in Borneo occurred in 1947, nine years before the dieldrin incident.
The cats did not die from DDT in Borneo or in Vietnam, but neither will the "hoary cat story," which, interestingly enough, had previously appeared in Time with North Borneo as the locale.
Dr. Thomas H. Jukes, professor of medical physics at the University of California and an expert on DDT, has been trying to kill the "hoary cat story" since it first raised its head in Vietnam in 1962. In a letter to The New York Times in 1962, he pointed out that if there were enough DDT spread around to kill cats, it would kill the rats even sooner.
Dr. Jukes wrote: "I suppose it might be argued that the cats ate the rats that had accumulated large amounts of DDT. If a rat had eaten a lethal dose of DDT and had died, and the cat ate the rat, a simple calculation indicates that a 6 kilo cat would have to eat 10 kilos of dead rats to swallow a lethal dose of DDT. This would be quite a feat, even for a hungry Vietnam cat.
"If, however, the eats ate live rats, they would have to eat a larger quantity to ingest a lethal dose of DDT, in which case, they would be so distended with rat meat that they would be unable to chase rats."
"The remaining possibility is that so much DDT was sprayed that it killed the eats by contact. We can rule out this, because, in this case the rats would also have been killed; in fact, the rats would have died first, because they eat crops carrying the DDT spray and these crops are not eaten by cats."
It is difficult to understand the mentality of publications such as Time that persist in disseminating baseless, false propaganda of this type. Presumably in Vietnam the story simply served as anti-American propaganda. In Mexico, it can only serve to generate resistance to the use of a life-saving chemical that has been responsible for the saving of millions of lives through the eradication of malaria. This is irresponsible journalism, and it is not amusing.