Page 2
University Daily Kansan Thursday, Jan. 21, 1965
Your Right
A Responsible Kansan
STUDENTS IN SCHOOLS OF JOURNALISM all across the nation, and KU is no exception, are taught that they have an ethical responsibility to their readers which transcends all private motives of their own. Students are urged to resist any effort on the part of a group or an individual to suppress or distort the news to serve their own interests. The right and need of the reader to know the truth is paramount and the truth alone should preail on the pages of a newspaper.
This responsibility frequently calls for courage and, at times, sticking out the newspaper's neck in an effort to serve its readers honestly and adequately.
AS A RESULT OF THIS EMPHASIS ON duty this writer has perhaps become over-sensitive, but recent events in the newsroom of the Daily Kansan have focused the attention of KU journalism students on the hypocrisy practiced by some newsmen and their disdain for professionally ethical conduct. Some of the most flagrant disregard for duty is being practiced by the very people charged most heavily with the responsibilities of a free press.
FOR EXAMPLE, Kaye Whitaker, student body vice-president, is leaving KU to attend an art institute in Chicago during this spring semester. She is planning, as of this writing, to resign her student body office and then, once in Chicago, write a letter criticizing the All Student Council. The resignation and letter come after her departure in order that she might be free of the controversy and criticism engendered by her actions.
Although these intentions are common knowledge to a score of Daily Kansan reporters and staff members, Miss Whitaker refuses to make an official comment or to answer any questions for
the paper. Her efforts at controlling the news are aided by the Kansan's managing editor, her fiance, who has told reporters to leave the story alone.
THE FACULTY NEWS ADVISER has acquiesced in this matter also; yet if a paper is to report campus politics honestly, this surely must rank as a major story of the semester.
This inattention to professional duty by a faculty advisor has been observed by the Kansan staff in other areas of news coverage in addition to this one. Reporters are not assigned to cover meetings of the Civil Rights Council and controversial issues that might incur disapproval by the administration (actually the administration is quite fair and not unduly sensitive) are not reported or else are played down to such an extent as to distort the news radically.
FOR EXAMPLE, last fall some 400 KU students participated in an effigy hanging. Readers of the Daily Kansas were not informed that any such event had occurred; yet the Lawrence Journal-World had accurate, fair and balanced coverage of the incident.
These policies, as practiced by those people most responsible for the high ethical conduct of the paper, constitute hypocrisy and make a sham of the reader's right to know all the facts. I think there is little disagreement that the Kansan has failed to inform its readers as honestly and accurately as it could and should due to personal motivations and a desire to skirt controversial topics in the news columns.
IT IS TIME THAT ALL CONCERNED and especially, you, the reader, are informed of these current policies in the hopes that they might be corrected in the best interests of the University.
-- Rick Mabbutt
Presidents Meet the Press
THEODORE ROOSEVELT gossiped with Washington correspondents while he shaved and breakfasted. Andrew Jackson handled his publicity through Francis P. Blair, a member of his Kitchen Cabinet, and through Blair's newspaper, the Washington Globe. Warren Harding made such a catastrophic international faux pas at a press conference during the Washington Conference in 1921, that he thereafter required written questions to be submitted in advance. Franklin D. Roosevelt held non-quotable background sessions for his "class." Harry Truman transferred his press conference from his office to the "treaty room" in the old State building, where questioning the President has been compared by Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News to making love in Carnegie Hall — "and even that ascribes to it an intimacy it doesn't have."
RELATIONS BETWEEN the President and the press have depended on the technological state of the communications media. In 1835, it was considered a journalistic feat to get one of Jackson's addresses from Washington to the Cincinnati Commercial in 60 hours at a cost of $200. Even more, the President's personality has determined how he gets along with the press corps.
Aloof and reserved, George Washington disliked and distrusted the partisan press by which he was much criticized. He used newspapers for no higher purpose than advertising for a family cook. Presidents from Jefferson through Grant kept the press informed by their secretaries giving public statements to one or a few newspapermen
whom they trusted. Sometimes they revealed policies by sending an official a letter which the recipient then made public. The era of personal journalism, of Greeley, Bennett, Raymond, Bryant and Dana, saw editors who spoke to Presidents as to equals or worse, not only in their newspapers but in correspondence and frequent visits to the White House. After the Civil War, the "yellow" journalists enjoyed U. S. Grant's administrative scandals and Grover Cleveland's family problems, but nothing much positive developed between the President and the press until the turn of the century and the administration of Teddy Roosevelt.
William Howard Taft, in his youth a courthouse reporter, tried to hold weekly conferences but soon alienated the once friendly White House reporters. They became accustomed to getting most of their information from a reporter for the Cincinnati Times-Star, which was owned by Taft's half-brother.
ROOSEVELT, gregarious egotist that he was, knew how to use the press for his own advantage. William W. Price of the Washington Star had started the practice of standing outside the White House to interview visitors. Seeing Price and a few other reporters one rainy day, the President ordered an antireoom set aside for them. This became the White House press room. Roosevelt usually saw just his few favorites, whom he used for launching "trial-balloon" statements for which he accepted no responsibility. On occasion he summoned 40 or 50 newsmen, as when he announced the organization of the First Conservation Congress.
WOODROW WILSON, a believer in "pitiless publicity" for public business, inaugurated the mass press conference, open to all newspapermen as a matter of right and held at specified times. For two years he held these meetings twice a week. Disliking direct quotations, Wilson began the "official spokesman" device. After the sinking of the Lusitania, the President abandoned the press conferences to avoid embarrassment to his administration.
The campaign of 1920 saw a contest, curiously enough, between two Ohio newspaper publishers. Warren Harding revived the semi-weekly meeting with reporters. After his blunder on the Four-Power Pacific Pact, Harding made the written-question rule, one perhaps more suitable to his ability to cope with inquiries from the press.
REPORTERS CALLED Calvin Coolidge "Silent Cal" to make an attribute of his lack as a news source. Leo Rosten says, "If Mr. Coolidge would remark, 'I am not in favor of this bill,' the dispatches the next day would read, 'In a fighting mood, President Coolidge today served notice on Congress that he would combat, with all the resources at his command, the pending bill. . . ." The Washington correspondents developed imagination and versatility under the Coolidge regime."
Herbert Hoover required his questions 24 hours in advance and simply ignored those he did not wish to discuss. He tried to establish virtual censorship over White House news.
— Margaret Hughes
BOOK REVIEWS
THE END OF THE BATTLE, by Evelyn Waugh (Delta, $1.75).
With this novel of a few years ago, now available in a quality paperback, Evelyn Waugh brought to a close his trilogy of World War II, the others being "Men at Arms" and "Officers and Gentlemen." The reader will find that Waugh's picture of the war is quite different from those provided by Norman Mailer and James Jones.
Not a pretty, romantic picture of war, however. Through the eyes of Waugh's hero, Guy Crouchback, we see the upper crust at war, the club members with their ridiculous names, the members of a regiment called the Halberdiers. Crouchback enters the Halberdiers with starry eyes, and the war in 1939 and 1940 had real meaning to him.
But the meaning to him, and to the author, gradually dissipated. For Moscow, the enemy in September 1939, no longer was the enemy in June 1941. And more and more adjustments were made with the pragmatic purpose of winning the war—and forget the great moral dreams men had had when they entered it.
The purpose with which Guy Crouchback, then, entered the war disappears. He loses his interest in victory; he wants to die, as do many other people in the work. But like most people he survives, and gets involved in a purposeless life that sounds not unlike some of the situations Waugh contrived in his novels of the twenties.
The trilogy, which Waugh now calls "men at War," is one of the great works of World War II, though probably short of the New Republic's praise of it as "the one genuine masterpiece to come out of the war." American readers may find the satire and the quite British wit hard-going; the discerning will welcome this book in an age when we need truly eminent literature.
- * * *
EXPLORATION OF THE UNIVERSE, by H. C. King (Signet Science Library, 75 cents).
With the new worlds being opened up in scientific and space exploration, books like this are achieving special popularity. H. C. King has traced the history of astronomical discoveries, and the book is an original edition.
King is scientific director of the London Planetarium and past president of the British Astronomical Association. He goes back to the Arabs and the testing of the theories of Ptolemy, treats Copernicus, Galileo, and star-explorers of today, like Sinton, who has found possible evidence of life on Mars.
Dailij Hänsan
111 Flint Hall
UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom
UNiversity 4-3198, business office
University of Kansas student newspaper
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press.
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York
22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates:
$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon
during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University
holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawr-
ence, Kansas.
Jim Langford and Rick Mabbutt Co-Editorial Editor
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Roy Miller ... Managing Editor
Don Black, Leta Cathcart, Bob Jones, Greg Swartz, Assistant Managing Editors; Linda Ellis, Feature-Society Editor; Russ Corbitt, Sports Editor;
James Bennett, Photo Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bob Phinney ... Business Manager
John Pepper, Advertising Manager; Dick Flood, National Advertising Manager; John Subler, Classified Advertising Manager; Tom Fisher, Promotion Manager; Nancy Holland, Circulation Manager; Gary Grazda, Merchandising Manager.