The Press: A Week of Grievances

OF the 6,000 newsmen who gathered in Chicago last week, it was Columnist Max Lerner who had the kindest words to say for the Democratic National Convention. "Here in Chicago," he wrote, "you see America plain with no holds barred, no warts missing from the portrait, with everything there, including credential fights and platform debates, with Lester Maddox and Julian Bond, with hippies and yippies and the New Left, with soldiers and Secret Service and a maddening security tightness, with newsmen and photographers being clubbed by overreacting police squads, but with an unflinching resolve to show and face what America is really like."

For most newsmen, however, the week was one long grievance—against the restrictions of the convention, the highhandedness of the police and the general air of repression in Mayor Daley's Chicago. "The only people who can possibly feel at ease at this convention," wrote the New York Times's Russell Baker, "are those who have been to a hanging." "We gather," NBC's David Brinkley told his network audience, "that the Democratic leadership does not want reported what is happening." CBS's Walter Cronkite concluded one night by complaining: "It makes us want to pack up our cameras and typewriters and go home."

Chief Villain. If the frustrations of the convention bothered newsmen, however, the violence visited on their colleagues really raised their hackles. Whenever they were chasing protesters and demonstrators, the police seemed to single out reporters and TV men as special targets, blaming them for attracting the yippies and giving them publicity. On the first night of the convention, some 20 newsmen were beaten up and three hospitalized. "If the police ask a newsman and a photographer to move, they should move as well as anyone else," said Mayor Daley, who became the press's chief villain of the week.

When the cops started clubbing three girls in a convertible, Chicago Daily News Reporter John Linstead protested. His reward was a beating and a scalp wound. NBC newsman John Evans was struck by a policeman, had his head bandaged, then began interviewing other bandaged victims. Delos Hall, a CBS cameraman, was filming a cop-hippie clash when he was clubbed from behind. NBC Cameraman James Strickland was photographing Hall's plight when he was hit in the face and toppled. Even while he was on the air, CBS Floor Reporter Dan Rather was flattened by two security men; one hit him in the stomach, the other in the back. Rather's colleague, Mike Wallace, was belted in the jaw by a guard and hustled out of the hall. The attacks on newspaper and TV reporters became so flagrant that eight top executives of news-gathering organizations* strongly protested the treatment in a telegram to Mayor Daley.