Volume 8, Number 8 · May 4, 1967
Times' Square
By Andrew Kopkind
The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy
by James Reston
Harper & Row, for the Council on Foreign Relations, 108 pp., $3.95
Governments lie; newspapers catch them. It's as simple as that, or should be, but somehow the game of political reporting has been invested with a set of rules that effectively impedes play. Editors identify with an elusive 'national interest,' reporters cultivate confining and ultimately unproductive relationships with news sources, and readers demand an anesthetic 'objectivity' as the price of credibility. And everyone, press and public alike, worries about who is influencing whom, and to what end. As the dean of American political reporters, James Reston must not only abide by those rules, but enforce them. He appears to welcome the task—performed implicitly in his thrice-weekly column in The New York Times, and now explicitly in this modest (by his own characterization) volume of lectures delivered last year unto the Council on Foreign Relations.
Review, 2970 words
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