Word: krafts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nixon partisans who accuse the press of recklessness in its Watergate coverage have been getting reinforcement from unlikely places. Columnist Joseph Kraft, an Administration "enemy" whose home telephone was once tapped, last week wrote of the "spirit of rivalrous competition and self-important narcissism now so rampant in the fourth estate." Managing Editor Howard Simons of the Washington Post, the most tenacious newspaper on the Watergate trail, spoke recently about "shark frenzy"-the urge among some newsmen "to rush in to get a bite of that bleeding body in the water...
...Kraft was criticizing the coverage of the Watergate grand jury's confidential report to Judge John Sirica, which was handed up along with the indictments. Though his column did not offer examples, he said later that he was thinking of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, James Naughton of the New York Times, Newsweek and CBS. The network had speculated-erroneously, as it turned out-on the number of people who were about to be named as defendants and coconspirators. The three publications, and others as well, discussed the grand jury's deliberations...
With few specific exceptions, grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret. Kraft conceded that in the earlier phases of Watergate, while the cover-up was partly working, journalistic enterprise was necessary to get at the basic facts. Now that the official inquiry is being conducted vigorously, he said, the "traditional inhibitions on reporting" should be applied. Abandoning that restraint, he warned, endangers individuals' rights to due process, threatens to wreck the prosecution's case on procedural grounds and gives journalism a bad name...
...Kraft's demand for restraint, which would be unexceptionable in most cases, raises its own problem in the very special circumstance of Watergate. This unique scandal is far more than a criminal proceeding. It has involved not powerless defendants but some of the nation's most influential officials. There have been repeated attempts to suppress evidence, minimize the case's importance, deflect guilt and hide behind the shibboleth of national security. These factors at first inhibited the press. Now the urge is to print everything obtainable in the belief that self-censorship would be itself a kind...
...more votes, not for himself, but for the other side. They had a motivation for Watergate. And they did not have a sensitivity to Constitutional principles or ethical standards which might have stopped them short. An administration which burgled and bugged the home of syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft and so many others with the approval of its highest officials can hardly plead that these same officials would recoil in shock from a proposal to wiretap Larry O'Brien...