NEWSWATCH: Indegoddampendent Is Fine

Now that there is a momentary lull in the outpouring of Watergate books, another legacy of the Nixon era needs closer scrutiny. This is the notion, propagated by Richard Nixon, that Government and the press have an adversary relationship. What Nixon meant by the phrase he made perfectly clear in a letter to Spiro Agnew during the 1968 campaign: "When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend—they are all enemies." But why the press should have seized upon the adversary description and proudly flaunted it ever since is harder to understand.

Of course, it does have a fine, swaggering, macho sound. It suggests fearless reporters, incorruptible, unseducible, bravely doing battle with the powerful or gamely wrestling with octopus-armed bureaucrats. And for many reporters, the Nixon attitude signaled the welcome end of a too-cozy courtship of the press in the Kennedy-Johnson era, when, for example, Ben Bradlee —Nixon's ferocious adversary all through Watergate—had been willing to quash a story because his friend Jack Kennedy urged him to. But the adversary phrase has a lot to do with certain self-satisfied post-Watergate attitudes in the press, including the arrogant defense of sleazy ways of getting stories.

Adversary relationship is a lawyer's phrase, but it's doubtful whether Nixon the lawyer ever really understood the moral philosophy behind it. In principle, justice is served and truth is most effectively discovered when two sides—one doing its best to attack, the other to defend—contend in open court. Even the rascal, the murderer, the rapist is "entitled to his day in court." In practice, the idea clears the consciences of expensive lawyers who get rich defending the worst of clients or the most dubious practices of their best clients. Since a trial is combat, nearly anything goes.

Some parallels to the relationship between Government and press are immediately apparent: officials trying to put their best foot forward; newsmen pressing to discover what they may be concealing. Yet the difference between the news process and courtroom procedure is profound. The judge is missing—that judge who forbids misleading tactics, freely admonishes both sides, determines which evidence is valid and finally instructs the jury on how it should weigh what it has heard. In the news-gathering process, the press is both prosecutor and sole judge of its own activities—answerable in advance of publication to no one (though it can be sued once the story is out), free to select or disregard evidence as it pleases, free to omit counterclaims, to minimize rebuttals. Such absence of prior restraint is essential to a free press, but the press at least should recognize that it enjoys more unchecked advantages than a courtroom adversary, and therefore incurs some obligations.