An early presidential press conference, According to Washington legend, was held involuntarily by John Quincy Adams. While swimming bare-buff in the Potomac, he was spied by an intrepid woman reporter, Anne Royall, who sat on his clothes on the bank and would not let him out until he had answered her questions.
The presidential press conference nowadays is more formal and better attended. Last week, when President Truman faced 180 reporters in the old State Department building, he carefully read a prepared statement, then was bombarded by 31 questions. It was all over in eleven minutes; the reporters hustled for the door, raced for the twelve telephones in the hall outside. Within a few hours, the President's comments on Iran, Korea, price control were headlined across the front pages of the U.S.
The job of covering the President's press conferences—along with everything else that the capital brass says, thinks, plans or does—has become one of the most important journalistic assignments in history. But among the 1,500 Washington correspondents who file 700,000 words of copy a day there is no general agreement on how well the job is being done.
Thumb-Sucking. In fact, some of the more thoughtful and honest among them think the job is being done badly. The sins of commission & omission they cite make a long list. Instead of reporting, they say, an increasing number of newsmen are taking sides and slanting stories, e.g., forming a protective ring around Arkansas' likable Senator William Fulbright to keep him out of hot water by not reporting his indiscreet frankness.
There is lethargy, dependence on government handouts, press conferences, tips and gossip. Too many stories are written on the formula of "fact-plus-hunch-plus-opinion," notably by the pundits and columnists. Says Columnist Doris Fleeson, the capital's top woman reporter: "There's too little reporting, too much thumb-sucking in this town." Many correspondents are not in Washington to report; they are there to give their papers prestige, run errands for the publisher and lobby for his pet ideas, or to make routine checks.
The most telling criticism is that too many newsmen hide behind the cloak of "objectivity," merely report the "who, what, when & where." They leave the much harder and more important job of telling the "why" to a small, hard core within the corps.
The Explosion. But it is also true that there are enough hardworking, intelligent newspaper reporters in the Washington press corps to let it be said—with much justice—that Washington is the best covered city in the world. The shortcomings in coverage are not always the fault of reporters; they are due to the size of the job. In two decades the Federal Government has swollen like an explosion. And there just aren't enough reporters around to do a thorough job.