Word: press
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Special Assistant Klein's first big assignment will be to handle the Vice President's news chores on the July good-will trip to Moscow. From then on he will be Nixon's press secretary through the 1960 campaign.* And if 1960 should be Richard Nixon's year, Herb Klein might well be expected to move on to the White House as the successor to Presidential Press Secretary Jim Hagerty...
...years on end two pleas have characterized the plaints of Washington reporters and the criticisms of them: freedom from partisan editors and publishers and freedom of information. Drew Pearson, writing anonymously back in the Thirties, called for a purge of "business and money-drawer domination" of the American press. Harry Truman used to tell White House reporters that he realized they couldn't help the slant which their editors made them put into their copy. Adlai Stevenson favored the term, "one-party press." And, to meet the other complaint, the press now has a Congressional subcommittee to hear its demands...
...role of the capital press corps is that of the participant in government affairs and decisions rather than that of the sideline recorder. Even in such inevitable judgments as what part of a Senator's speech is "news" and what part isn't, the journalist moulds the shape of the headlines and moulds the mind of his reader. By covering one speech instead of another, by putting words in the President's mouth at press conferences, by taking one side of an inter-departmental fight from a "source" and not trying to get the other side, a reporter forms...
...reporters themselves. Even more often, the act of creation is performed not by the writer but by an agency or person who has learned how to use the reporter's limitations and rules. Here, Cater does a most impressive job of documenting the many ways in which the press of a free society can be manipulated for selfish ends. The late Senator McCarthy's use of deadlines and of the "unexpected" charge which could not immediately be proved false kept him in the headlines until "over-exposure" did him in. Herbert Brownell's attack on President Truman over the firing...
...more positive side, it is clear that the press can be used and can act to mobilize public opinion, or just to "sell" it for good causes. The best example, of course, is the promotion of the Marshall Plan. But there are issues--such as the discussion of "permissible levels" of Strontium 90--where reporters digging for the facts and not just for a story perform a considerable service, and there are even times when the President can use his press conference to great effect (though Cater argues that this American "Question Period" has fallen on very hard times...