The Press: British Deplorer

Outspoken as they were, McKissick and the committee on presidential credibility were the soul of restraint compared to what followed. Sweeping in with the brisk authority of a North Sea gale, British Press Lord Cecil King, 66, promised that his strictures on the U.S. press would be "mild and moderate." But anyone who reads King's raw and racy London Daily Mirror (circ. over 5,000,000) should have known that mildness and moderation are not traits that he admires.

"I merely deplore that you are producing unreadable, unmanageable newspapers," he began. "Some of your foreign correspondents and your Washington correspondents are excellent journalists. As guests at the dinner table, they are good value. On television they have an impressive fluency and sonority. In the magazines, they write well, brilliantly sometimes." Yet what they write for their daily papers is often "quite appalling, long, loose, rambling and repetitive." This lifeless writing results, King declared, from a "fetish for objectivity." Reporters "divest news of its own inherent drama. They cast away the succulent flesh and offer the reader dry bones, coated with an insipid sauce of superfluous verbiage. They reject the flashing, illuminating phrase, which can make an unknown foreign statesman come vividly alive, or a dash of wit which may relieve the tedium unavoidably contained in much important news."

Sacred Cows. By trying so diligently to be objective, said King, U.S. newspapers fail to "reflect the vitality of life in the American city, which is so striking to the British newspaperman. No New York paper communicates the salt tang of life, the wit of New York, its physical and intellectual energy, its cynicism and idealism, its pursuit of profit and of scholarship."

Editorials, continued an unflagging King, are even worse. "Could a real living journalist have assembled in his human mind such a collection of dim platitudes which lead so inexorably to a non-conclusion?" As for columnists, "I wonder if they would be so lavishly used if they were not dirt cheap; if it was not possible for an editor or a publisher to obtain for a song so much copy of such high respectability?" Many columnists "conceal an idea the size of a pea in a stack of dry straw. Does nobody discipline them? Does nobody make them rewrite or throw a column away? Are they sacred cows that are allowed to wander unmolested through your pages?"

Since local retailers will always need an advertising medium, King concluded, "the newspaper may stay alive as a business, while its primary function is ebbing away. In America, television journalism, radio journalism, magazine journalism are all livelier and more professional than the newspapers."