Radicalism in Reaganland

No voice is louder than that of government. At the top of a vast pyramid of power is the President of the United States, who at all times is the focal point of an army of journalists. The President can, at his pleasure, commandeer television and radio to speak directly to the nation, and news from Washington regularly dominates the front pages of the press. From the White House down through the ranks of the bureaucracy, stretching from the Potomac to the shining shores of the Pacific, are legions of government public-relations representatives spreading the official word.

This system, weighted as it is toward government, would appear to please any incumbent President and his administration. Such, it seems, is not the case. White House media officials, sensitive to President Reagan’s complaints that his views often are distorted by reporters, are launching an official “news service” to distribute verbatim the President’s speeches and other government news through an electronic mail network--material now disseminated primarily on paper to the White House press corps.

The White House News Service hopes to market, by computer, a wide variety of information to small newspapers, radio and television stations that do not have their own correspondents in Washington. This may be a convenience for local news outlets, but the public would be better informed if the White House allowed more frequent press access to the President, whose news conference Wednesday night was his first in nearly six months.

So for the first time this country will have a government-controlled news service that, in the beginning, sets for itself the benign goal of distributing texts of speeches and other factual material but that, once in operation, can be converted to serve the partisan purposes of any administration in power. In the Reagan White House a government news agency is an anomaly. It is a radical idea adopted by a conservative administration.