Books in Brief

The Gods of Antenna, by Bruce Herschensohn (Arlington House, 155 pp., $7.95). The seismograph measuring journalistic paranoia is in for another jolt. Once the media digest this indictment of their proclivity for slanted reportage, the shock waves Spiro touched off at Des Moines will seem a distant tremor by contrast. Herschensohn will be dismissed as obviously biased (he served Richard Nixon as director of Motion Picture and Television Services of the United States Information Agency from 1968 to 1972). Furthermore: What can you expect from Arlington House? Well, you can expect a lucid analysis of a media blitz. Mr. Herschensohn skillfully guides the reader through a veritable minefield of manipulative techniques that have become the subtle hallmark of network newscasts. He does not pretend to be neutral. Rather, he challenges those commentators who masquerade behind the facade of “fairness” to abandon the charade and fly their colors. Skewered like so many ka-bobs on the shaft of their own words, “the gods” appear more life-sized. David Brinkley suggests: “Anyone who is totally objective should be locked up.” Dan Rather says objectivity, like the Ten

Commandments, is “a goal worth reaching for but impossible to live up to.” Consider Daniel Schorr’s reflective concession: “This past year [the year of Watergate] a new kind of journalism developed and I found myself doing on a daily routine some things I would never have done before the press began to try men in the most effective court in the country. We’ve gotten good at uncovering those stories we shouldn’t be covering at all we ought to withdraw from it as soon as possible.” (The scourge of the CIA has obviously since recovered from this temporary attack of conscience.) “The power to determine each day what shall seem important and shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind,” wrote Walter Lippmann. In the wake of a fallen President and a military defeat, Lippmann’s warning is especially ominous. So is this book. alan l. miller

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The Gods of Antenna, by Bruce Herschensohn (Arlington House, 155 pp., $7.95). The seismograph measuring journalistic paranoia is in for another jolt. Once the media digest this indictment of their proclivity for slanted reportage, the shock waves Spiro touched off at Des Moines will seem a distant tremor by contrast. Herschensohn will be dismissed as obviously biased (he served Richard Nixon as director of Motion Picture and Television Services of the United States Information Agency from 1968 to 1972). Furthermore: What can you expect from Arlington House? Well, you can expect a lucid analysis of a media blitz. Mr. Herschensohn skillfully guides the reader through a veritable minefield of manipulative techniques that have become the subtle hallmark of network newscasts. He does not pretend to be neutral. Rather, he challenges those commentators who masquerade behind the facade of “fairness” to abandon the charade and fly their colors. Skewered like so many ka-bobs on the shaft of their own words, “the gods” appear more life-sized. David Brinkley suggests: “Anyone who is totally objective should be locked up.” Dan Rather says objectivity, like the Ten

Commandments, is “a goal worth reaching for but impossible to live up to.” Consider Daniel Schorr’s reflective concession: “This past year [the year of Watergate] a new kind of journalism developed and I found myself doing on a daily routine some things I would never have done before the press began to try men in the most effective court in the country. We’ve gotten good at uncovering those stories we shouldn’t be covering at all we ought to withdraw from it as soon as possible.” (The scourge of the CIA has obviously since recovered from this temporary attack of conscience.) “The power to determine each day what shall seem important and shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind,” wrote Walter Lippmann. In the wake of a fallen President and a military defeat, Lippmann’s warning is especially ominous. So is this book. alan l. miller