Flighty Media Coverage Shot Down Washington Post’S Lou Cannon Says Journalism Guilty Of Extremes

The American news media seem to swing from wretched excess to wretched neglect on some of the biggest stories of the era, a noted journalist and author said in Spokane on Tuesday.

To see the excess, one need only follow the reporting of President Clinton’s alleged relationship with Monica Lewinsky, said Lou Cannon, a special correspondent and former columnist for the Washington Post.

Investigating whether the president had an affair with a White House intern is important, because a president’s personal conduct is related to his professional performance, Cannon said.

“The kind of person Lyndon Johnson was made him reluctant to give up on the Vietnam War,” the former White House correspondent said. “But to follow every rumor as if it were news is not a good idea.”

But wretched neglect is a greater problem, Cannon said. It contributed to the riots in Los Angeles after police officers were found not guilty in the Rodney King beating, he told a luncheon crowd in Spokane.

Cannon delivered the third annual lecture on media and society for the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service. The institute is part of Washington State University.

The author of a new book on the King case, Cannon said failures in reporting by the media collided with failures by the police, the politicians and the court in the months leading up to the riots.

“Everybody thinks they know the Rodney King case … because they have seen two videotapes,” Cannon said.

One tape shows King being beaten by Los Angeles police after he was stopped for traffic violations. The other shows Reginald Denny being dragged from his truck cab and beaten during the riot.

The first tape tells a partial story, Cannon said. Almost all television reports showed 68 seconds of the beating. But the original tape was 81 seconds long. The first 13 seconds, edited out, showed King charging police before the beating began.

Some of those 13 seconds were blurry, and the news station that first broadcast them said they were edited out for clarity.

“If you add those 13 seconds, it doesn’t make what happened (to King) palatable,” Cannon said. “It does make it explicable.”

The second tape also tells an incomplete story, he said. The entire nation saw Denny, a white truck driver, being beaten by African Americans.

“Few people know that Denny was also rescued by four black people. They went down to that intersection when police wouldn’t,” he said. Those four people picked up Denny and drove him to a hospital, where two of the doctors who saved his life were also African American.

The Los Angeles Times did a good job of covering the riots, Cannon said. It did a poor job of covering the problems that led to the riot, such as high unemployment among black youths, tension between new immigrants and other minorities, the fact that the mayor and police chief did not speak to each other for months, and the unprecedented decision to move the King trial out of Los Angeles to a community that was likely to be “pro police.”

In an interview before the speech, Cannon criticized today’s newspapers for being too much like today’s politicians. They pay too much attention to the polls they conduct, he said.

Clinton’s success partially results from being able to read polls and sense what people want, he said. Newspapers are doing the same thing by polling their readers and targeting their stories for certain demographic groups.

“That’s not the essence of leadership,” he said. “Leadership is not finding out that two-thirds of the country wants something and giving it to them, but in determining what the country needs to survive and doing it.”