Newswatch Thomas Griffith: Proving Lincoln Was Right

This is the year in which those who market our presidential candidates mastered the art of bypassing the press. As a result, it took until the first debate before issues finally got joined. The merchandising of the candidates will increase while the press, so far with limited success, seeks to pierce it.

Candidates naturally aim to use the press without being burned by it, but never before have the marketers of candidates so successfully evaded real press scrutiny while staging controlled events that show their candidates to best advantage on television. The Reagan people have had four years of practice at it. Columnist James Reston of the New York Times, who has seen Presidents come and go (he is a few steps short of 75), ruefully describes them as "the best public relations team ever to enter the White House." They got away with cutting presidential press conferences to the fewest in ten years, knowing these can expose Reagan's ignorances. They get their man on nightly television with a planned quip and a farewell wave, while the helicopter's rotors drown out questions. White House advisers anonymously brief network correspondents, promoting Reagan's policies and taking potshots at his critics.

Network correspondents then troop triumphantly out on the White House lawn to mouth these comments as if they were repeating inside information instead of the daily Administration line. Washington's print journalists are a frustrated lot. Pooh-bah journalism is dead, and the role of the Washington columnist diminished, both having given way to television's visual immediacy.

Print journalists continue to do their job, which sometimes involves correcting a President's facts, recording divisions in his Administration or noting his own inattention to affairs, but they wonder how many want to hear it. Two months ago Reston noted "the remarkable gap between public opinion and inside-Washington opinion." Pulitzer Prizewinner Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post began one report: "So far, he's proving Lincoln was right. You can fool all of the people some of the time." The Post's David Broder discouragingly described "a nation that does not want to be bothered by anything that does not translate into immediate personal benefit." Broder in conversation ascribes this to a prospering economy and to "contentment with Reagan as they have seen him. But they don't see him in meetings, they don't see him in unprepared situations." That is why, Broder believes, Reagan's debate performance disturbed so many.