The Press: A Question of Zeal

Nixon partisans who accuse the press of recklessness in its Watergate coverage have been getting reinforcement from unlikely places. Columnist Joseph Kraft, an Administration "enemy" whose home telephone was once tapped, last week wrote of the "spirit of rivalrous competition and self-important narcissism now so rampant in the fourth estate." Managing Editor Howard Simons of the Washington Post, the most tenacious newspaper on the Watergate trail, spoke recently about "shark frenzy"—the urge among some newsmen "to rush in to get a bite of that bleeding body in the water."

Kraft was criticizing...

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