Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:33:18.056Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reporting the Political News at Washington1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

David Lawrence
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

First of all, let me say that there is no question on which you can develop more controversy than the reporting of political news. Within the profession, within the newspaper business, there is a great deal of controversy, and has been for many years, particularly as to whether political news is fairly reported, impartially reported. I have listened to a good deal of discussion on that point. I have recognized, as have others in the newspaper business, the trend of the times—the so-called decrease in the strength of the editorial page, for instance, and the increase in the amount of material of a semi-editorial flavor printed in the news columns.

The first branch of this topic, namely, reporting political news as it affects our domestic politics, seems to me to require an understanding, first, of the pressure and the difficulties that newspaper men face in handling news of campaigns and, second, of some of the pitfalls which they encounter between campaigns. I make that division arbitrarily, because the subject seems to divide itself in my own mind into those two general fields.

It is much easier to report political news between campaigns than it is during campaigns. For one thing, your audience is not sensitive between campaigns. Especially just after a campaign has been concluded there is a sort of feeling that the victorious candidate, the newly inaugurated President, the newly introduced Congress, should have what we call popularly a square deal—as if, by inference, they did not have a square deal before.

Type
Government and the Press
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , November 1928 , pp. 893 - 902
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1928

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

The two papers that follow are adapted from addresses delivered by the authors at the meeting of the American Political Science Association in December, 1927. Mr. Lawrence is president of the Consolidated Press Association, and also of the United States Daily. Mr. Essary is Washington correspondent of the Baltimore Sun. Man. Ed.

References

2 The United States Daily, of which Mr. Lawrence is president, represents a highly significant step toward remedying this situation. There had been earlier attempts to assemble and publish the sort of information referred to, but they were largely futile, and until the Daily was founded no one had tried its now well-known and very successful formula of putting this material into a newspaper carrying advertising, and conveying to readers authentic and clearly presented governmental information very much as the variegated contents of ordinary newspapers are conveyed. Man. Ed.

Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.