Washington’s Influential Sources : Opinion Leaders Dictate the Conventional Wisdom

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy once likened reporters to blackbirds on a telephone wire--when one lands, they all land, he said; when one takes off, they all take off.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more pervasive than in Washington, where McCarthy served in Congress for 22 years.

“Washington is more susceptible to pack journalism than any place I’ve been,” says John Balzar, a political writer for the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve watched reporters go through the agonies of hell because their stories differed slightly from their colleagues’.”

New York is the media capital of the United States--headquarters for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, NBC, CBS, ABC and virtually all the major book and opinion magazine publishers. To some degree, journalistic consensus--conventional wisdom--on any given issue can be said to develop simply because many top decision-makers for these organizations see each other socially, have friends and ideas in common, are exposed to the same stimuli daily and--surprise--arrive at similar conclusions.

But reporters and commentators are more likely than editors and publishers to form the conventional wisdom, and in terms of public policy issues, most of the truly influential reporters and commentators are in Washington.

News organizations continue to send many of their best people to Washington. The number of journalists there has almost doubled in the last decade. Should not this concentration of talent and competition--unparalleled anywhere else in the country--produce cutting-edge journalism, with 4,000 ego-driven reporters all eager to be best, first, different from their colleagues?

“It seems paradoxical to say that competition produces uniformity, rather than diversity,” says Howell Raines, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, but that’s exactly what often happens in Washington.

Have Vested Interests

One explanation: Washington journalists have many of the same sources, sources who have their own vested interests. They are government aides and spokesmen who function much as political aides and consultants do in a campaign; they are “spin doctors,” eager to tell the reporters and commentators just what each event “really means” in terms most favorable to their bosses, their agencies or themselves.

Henry Kissinger was a master at the art, and Charles Peters, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, says James A. Baker III and Richard G. Darman performed the same function early in the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Peters says that Baker, now secretary of state, and Darman, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, also “conned” some members of the press into thinking that President Bush might appoint a “troika” of three aides, instead of just one, Gov. John H. Sununu of New Hampshire, to run his White House staff. Baker and Darman were said to believe that Sununu would not be effective working by himself.

Spin doctors have become both more prevalent and more successful as the size of the press corps has grown, and access to top officials has diminished.

“The less access the reporter has to the event . . . the more he wants to be spun,” says syndicated columnist Robert Novak. “They want to have some kind of an angle.”

Dan Rather, anchor for the “CBS Evening News,” says that when he was a White House reporter in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “we used to complain about having to stand around and wait for an hour to see the President move 500 yards. Now it’s not uncommon for a White House reporter to stand around for four hours to see him move 15 feet--or not see him at all.”

Rather flew from Brussels to Bonn on Air Force One earlier this year when President Bush was traveling in Europe for the NATO summit, and he says he’s “convinced that there were reporters--and I mean more than just a couple--who . . . flew transatlantic, flew around Europe, out of Europe and came back to the U.S. of A. and never saw George Bush once in the flesh.”

Journalistic pools of the sort Rather participated in are also more common today, especially at presidential events, because of the vast numbers of reporters covering the President. In a pool, a very small number of reporters (sometimes only one or two) will attend the event and report back to the rest of the press corps, a process that greatly diminishes any chance for diversity or originality.

A Company Town

But diversity and originality are not indigenous to Washington journalism, even under the best circumstances. Washington is a most insular city, a company town, with the United States government as The Company; as Raines says, most Washington journalists are “drinking from a pretty small pool of news.”

Unlike Paris or London, which are not just government capitals but financial, cultural and communications capitals, Washington is purely a government capital; news coverage and commentary there generally move within a narrower range than in the other, more cosmopolitan capitals. When you have journalists with a great deal in common covering news within relatively narrow parameters, the likelihood of conformity--the pressure to conform--can be great.

“I don’t think a reporter . . . wants to be off . . . from where the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are,” Novak says. “I don’t think he has that much faith in his own opinion or . . . that much desire to swim . . . upstream.”

The compulsion toward consensus in Washington is exacerbated by an insidious “inside-the-beltway” mentality, one of the most important corollaries of which is that people beyond the freeway that encircles Washington are seen as somehow inferior to those within the charmed circle.

As top journalists have become more and more a part of the Establishment--making big salaries and sharing priorities and friends with those they cover--they have also come to share the conventional wisdom of those they cover.

Dismiss Outlanders

Thus, the conventional wisdom in Washington, among politicians and journalists alike in 1981, was that outlander Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor turned governor of California, could not possibly know enough about the congressional levers of power to push his tax reform bill into law. More recently, conventional wisdom held that outlander Sununu could not possibly master the sophisticated bureaucratic infighting necessary to be a successful chief of staff for President Bush.

Sununu was perceived in Washington as “a jack-leg governor from a horse’s ass state; how could he play with us in the big leagues?” says Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post.

Opinion is divided on Sununu’s performance to date, but even most of his critics now agree that he has not been the disaster they expected.

Washington journalism is, of course, largely political journalism; the line between campaigning and governing seems increasingly vague in an era when the media begins handicapping the next race almost before the winner of the last race has taken office. Perhaps it is no wonder then that there is so much consensus journalism coming out of the capital, a great deal of which ultimately proves wrong; after all, the most striking examples of consensus journalism--and of consensus journalism gone awry--come every four years, during presidential election campaigns, and they are often written by the same people who cover Washington between elections.

Peters, of the Washington Monthly, feels particularly strongly about the unhealthy nexus between campaign coverage and Washington coverage.

Respected Voice

A former state legislator and Peace Corps executive, Peters has run the Washington Monthly since 1969, and in that time, it has become both a respected voice for neo-liberalism and a training ground for talented young journalists who have gone on to the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly.

Peters says that even journalists who come to Washington determined to establish their own individuality “learn quickly to take on the values of the community . . . the group instinct,” in part because so many of them have spent time on the campaign trail, where “they travel together . . . (and) get very anxious about deviating any from the opinion of the group. They are very concerned about finding out what group consensus is developing. They build a habit of thinking in terms of a herd.”

The media, like the military, almost invariably fight the last war, so the Iowa caucuses, which gave Gary Hart momentum in 1984, were trumpeted by the journalistic herd as crucial in 1988. The Washington-based media also said forcefully--and more or less unanimously--that George Bush was a political hemophiliac who would bleed to his electoral death if wounded by an early primary defeat; that Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York would enter the Democratic race, and that the choice of Sen. Dan Quayle as the Republican vice presidential candidate would be disastrous for the ticket.

Well, Cuomo stayed out of the race, the Iowa winners in both parties quickly floundered and George Bush, who ran an embarrassing and badly bloodied third in Iowa, won both the nomination and the presidency by large margins--with Dan Quayle at his side.

A Unique Process

But campaign coverage is a unique process, a distillation of the continuing Washington story of who’s up and who’s down and how’s the President doing today; in a campaign, the dominant question--the only question--every day for months, is “Who’s ahead?” and virtually every day, it seems, there is an answer--a new poll, scientific underpinning for the latest conventional wisdom.

Moreover, it is not surprising that reporters thrown together day after day, week after week, month after month, talking far more to one another than to the people they are covering, connected by the same invisible umbilical cord to their (and the candidates’) spiritual center--Washington--wind up thinking, writing and broadcasting the same thing . . . and, often, the wrong thing.

Timothy Crouse wrote about this syndrome in devastating detail in his 1972 campaign classic “The Boys on the Bus,” but it has become even more pronounced since then.

Campaign reporters operate in an echo chamber whose resonance has increased so much in recent years that they sometimes seem deaf to any voices but one another’s. Their words are played back instantly and incessantly via the networks, the national daily newspapers, Cable News Network and Hot Line, a computerized service developed in 1988 to provide journalists with extracts from newspaper and television stories and commentaries throughout the nation every day.

“Every reporter everywhere in the country, as long as he had a laptop computer with a modem, could download the conventional wisdom at 8 a.m. for the day in the most incredible microdetail,” says Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic. “There was no chance that anyone would react independently to the day’s events.”

Fortunately, not all political reporters and Washington correspondents are journalistic myna birds. A few actually have original thoughts.

The most influential Washington journalist today is probably David Broder of the Washington Post, and the most original thinker may be William Safire of the New York Times.

Broder is both an excellent reporter and a respected commentator whose influence is especially strong during political campaigns. Broder analyzes the results of each primary instantly, in time for the next morning’s Post, in a way that establishes “the betting line on politics,” says syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. “He’s fantastically quick. . . . He comes up with his own idea and within four minutes, everybody accepts it, it’s repeated by everybody, and it’s now conventional wisdom.

“Broder’s influence is such that he helps to set up the game even before it starts,” Krauthammer says.

‘He’s Not Predictable’

Safire is influential in setting the conventional wisdom in part because he, too, is a good reporter with excellent sources but also because, unlike most columnists, he’s not predictable; he sometimes criticizes his friends and differs with his ideological soul mates. Safire is a congenital contrarian; he delights in staking out positions counter to the conventional wisdom, thus establishing a new conventional wisdom for others to emulate.

But Broder and Safire are exceptions in more ways than one. They are not just original voices in a largely copycat chorus; they are print journalists in a television era.

“Once upon a time,” wrote Barbara Matusow in the February issue of The Washingtonian magazine, “Walter Lippmann was admired for his cool, dispassionate analysis. . . . Millions of people didn’t know what to think until they had read (Lippmann).”

Syndicated columnists such as Lippmann, James Reston and Joseph and Stewart Alsop helped form conventional wisdom and shape public opinion for a generation of Americans. They were thoughtful, serious, even scholarly. But except for Safire, Broder and very few others, it is increasingly television that drives the journalistic consensus today, especially on Washington-based public affairs stories.

There are now more than 20 public affairs talk and interview shows on television, and their proliferation, combined with the decline of the Washington columnist, “can’t help . . . diminish the quality of conventional wisdom” and the public discourse that ensues, says Robert Merry, managing editor of Congressional Quarterly.

“There’s a show-biz imperative to spout off,” Merry says. “You don’t survive on these shows if your aim is to . . . dig deep into the complexities of Washington happenings and emerge with wisdom. . . . You survive on these shows by being quick--provocative.”

Merry is far from alone in this lament.

The Washington-based TV talk shows are “the most insidious, the most destructive (force) to independent thinking,” says Hodding Carter III, former assistant secretary of state for public affairs and now president of MainStream Television Production Co.

“The best of the shows put a premium on essentially superficial reactions,” Carter argues. “Insight and any depth of analysis, any nuance, is completely gone.”

No one is suggesting that Lippmann and his fellow print pundits were unfailingly enlightened in their analyses. Lippmann, after all, dismissed candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt as “an amiable boy scout . . . without any important qualifications” for the presidency, and he praised Hitler as “the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people.”

But Lippmann’s mistakes--as egregious as they were--did not derive from theatricality or superficiality. He read and thought and wrote; he didn’t just pop off.

Participants in some Washington TV talk shows are encouraged to make thumbs-up/thumbs-down judgments and to give 1-to-10 ratings or A-to-F grades on complex issues and personalities. Since many of the participants also write newspaper and magazine columns, critics worry that these superficial practices spill over into their work in those forums as well, further trivializing both the conventional wisdom and the general political dialogue.

James Fallows, writing in the New York Review of Books three years ago, complained that the pundits who participate in talk shows “drum the subtlety and complication out of public issues and encourage journalists to think as predictably as politicians.”

Indeed, predictability is a major factor in the conventional wisdom dispensed by the TV talk shows.

“It’s like ordering at McDonald’s,” says Martin F. Nolan, editor of the editorial page at the Boston Globe. “I’ll have one bleeding-heart, wimpy liberal and three hard-breathing right-wingers to go.”

Journalistic Food Fights

Some weekend talk shows do provide intelligent commentary rather than what Nolan calls “freeze-dried opinion” (“Washington Week in Review,” for example), but others (most notably “The McLaughlin Group”) seem more like journalistic food fights than exchanges of carefully considered analysis.

None of these shows is more than a blip in the national Nielsen ratings, but they are watched by other journalists, especially in Washington, so they tend to contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom in a fashion disproportionate to their total audience numbers.

Print journalists, once king of the consensus hill, try to minimize the impact of these shows, but they have only to look at their own front pages to measure that impact--especially with the more serious interview shows such as “Face the Nation,” “Meet the Press” and “This Week With David Brinkley.” Nine times this year, these shows have been on Page 1 of the next day’s New York Times; 14 times on Page 1 of the Washington Post; 19 times on Page 1 of the Los Angeles Times.

But the weekend talk and interview shows aren’t television’s only contribution to the conventional wisdom. Ted Koppel also contributes, not only because he is highly regarded for his evenhanded approach to important and volatile issues but also because he is there, on network television, for 30 minutes every weekday night, discussing the news of the day. Based in Washington, Koppel has immediate access to top policy makers and journalists alike.

Significant Role

The morning and evening news shows play a significant role, too--in part because television, even more than newspapers, focuses on institutions, largely Washington-based government institutions. To cover these institutions and the issues they engender, television relies on sources who represent “a very limited range of opinion,” Carter says, sources who mutually reinforce each other and the basic television ethos.

“Television will look for someone who’s outrageous occasionally,” Carter says, “but television will not look for somebody who consistently challenges the orthodoxy.”

Most broadcast news comes from “commercially oriented, mass market agencies which don’t go very far out of the mainstream,” Broder contends. And yet, “Voices on television have a reach which most of us on the print side don’t have, and they have an impact.”

This combination of reach, impact and mainstream predictability make television a potent force in shaping the journalistic consensus--all the more so because the very nature of television requires brevity.

“Television has created a compulsion to judgment,” says Bradlee of the Washington Post. “It takes too long to tell everybody what happened. . . . You’ve got to tell them ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad’ and therefore you’ve got to be judgmental.”

“Good or bad” leaves little room for gradations, and it yields instant conventional wisdom.

“Anchors . . . have an imperative to truncate ideas down to something they can communicate in the fewest possible seconds to introduce a story . . . (that) is itself not usually able to have nuance,” says John Buckley, communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “By so doing, there is an extraordinary role of setting conventional wisdom. The luxury of a print reporter . . . getting in different ideas, showing nuance and . . . alternative positions to the conventional wisdom isn’t there.”

Moreover, Buckley says, “The interdependence between print reporters and television is greater than it ever has been before in that more print news organizations’ conventional wisdom is set by what was on television the night before and not . . . the other way around the way . . . as it used to be.”

Dan Rather makes the point even more strongly. Increasingly, he says, print journalists “cover events by watching television, and that means that everybody sees and hears a lot of the same thing in a lot of the same ways.”

In a sense, there is a circular, self-perpetuating quality to the development of conventional wisdom in the media, and not only in the recycling of Sunday talk shows in Monday newspapers. The print media is still a major agenda-setter, whether through the columns of Broder and Safire, the front pages and editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal or the covers of Time and Newsweek. But television increasingly acts as a megaphone, broadcasting the conventional wisdom back to its vast audience--which includes other print journalists.

Part of the Process

“TV and what TV says is part of the news-making process,” says Henry Muller, managing editor of Time magazine. “If the three networks say that George Bush delivered a terrific speech on such and such, or that the Supreme Court’s decision on such and such is the most important thing they’ve done in the last five years, it is very hard, as a print medium, just to ignore that.

“TV news coverage creates a certain momentum that all the rest of us have to take account of,” Muller says, “and even if we disagree with . . . the judgments, if we think the news is being hyped . . . we can’t avoid taking account of what television has done.”

Maynard Parker, editor of Newsweek, agrees.

Television plays a “big role” in the rush to consensus, he says, “particularly because . . . politicians watch it a lot and they respond to it a lot because they know that’s what their constituents are looking at. . . . Television can help bring a story to a quicker boil.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson realized that in 1968, when he watched Walter Cronkite announce his opposition to the war in Vietnam and thus end any lingering hope Johnson had that the public would continue to support the war.

Today, there is no Cronkite, but his broadcast progeny--from Brinkley to Rather to Koppel to McLaughlin--have an unparalleled collective influence on journalistic consensus and public opinion, especially in Washington, where public policy is decided and where politicians and journalists alike are both players and spectators, eager partners in the formation of conventional wisdom.

Tom Lutgen of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this story.