(4 of 4)
The Confidence Game. Guidance sessions (which sometimes bring more than 400 newsmen to the Press Club to hear a big wheel) often permit correspondents to seem wiser in print with "dope" stories than they really are. And the confidence game has also brought a great evil in its train: the camaraderie between officials and newsmen encourages Government officials to keep facts off the record which should be published, enables them to dodge responsibility for phony stories, permits unscrupulous bureaucrats and politicos to backstab opponents with impunity. Furthermore, even competent correspondents who are constantly being "guided" by off-the-record conferences occasionally miss real news. For example, State Department correspondents had so often been confidentially told that the U.S. planned to get tougher toward Communist China that they missed the story completely when Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk finally made the "get-tough" speech (TIME, May 28).
But such bloopers are becoming rarer as reporters learn to detect the booby traps. The heartening fact is that in the years when history has borne down on the U.S. like an express train so many Washington correspondents have caught so much of the news.