Columbia Journalism Review

SIXTY YEARS AGO, the columbia journalism review debuted, tucked beneath a plain white cover. In an opening essay, “Why a review of journalism?,” the editors felt obliged to explain to readers what wasn’t at all obvious: the need for an outlet to critique the press. “There exists,” they wrote, “a widespread uneasiness about the state of journalism. The review shares this uneasiness, not over any supposed deterioration but over the probability that journalism of all types is not yet a match for the complications of our age…. The urgent arguments for a critical journal far outweigh the hazards.” The complications of our age. If only those editors could have known what was to come, from the cultural upheavals of the sixties to Watergate to the Cold War, economic downturn to the…

‘IKE, HOW DO YOU KNOW?” Bob Johnson, the AP’s Dallas bureau chief, asked James “Ike” Altgens, one of his photographers, on November 22, 1963. There were scattered reports that President John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the city, had been shot, but they hadn’t been confirmed. Johnson had begun typing a bulletin but got only as far as the dateline. His fingers were poised, waiting for information. Altgens had an answer: “I saw it. There was blood on his face. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and cried, ‘Oh, no!’ ” The exchange between Altgens and Johnson appears in “The Reporters’ Story,” which ran in the columbia journalism review in the winter of 1964, a collection of firsthand accounts from journalists who covered the assassination as it was happening—before anyone was sure it…

ON THESE PAGES the Review reproduces the words of men who were in the Presidential party in Dallas on November 22. The words are offered in a connected narrative as a case study in the re exes and conscious actions of professional journalists under the heaviest kind of pressure and emotional stress. Several of these narratives have been widely distributed, but they have not been previously collaged. They emphasize again how little there was for reporters to see and how much, after the first phases, they depended on each other to complete their information. MERRIMAN SMITH, United Press International I was riding in the so-called White House press “pool” car, a telephone company vehicle equipped with a mobile radio telephone. I was in the front seat between a driver from a…

JAMES RESTON, The New York Times The trouble with the press during the Cuban crisis was not that it said too much, but that it said too little. It knew what was going on ahead of the landing… but it had very little to say about the morality, legality, or practicality of the Cuban adventure when there was still time to stop it…. Instead, it was encouraged to put out false information and was actually putting it out. THE PRESIDENT We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them… government at all levels must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security. DAVID KRASLOW, Miami Herald What happens when the…

“FOR WHEN THERE WAS PANIC in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the constructive use of reasons, and any order soon seems preferable to any disorder.” So wrote Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion in 1922. Some weeks before his eightieth birthday, at the invitation of Prof. Fred W. Friendly of the Columbia Journalism faculty, Mr. Lippmann held a seminar with a small group of graduate students to discuss the contemporary applicability of this and other observations from his long and distinguished career. The text below is excerpted from the three-hour dialogue which resulted. Public opinion has been the third force that really changed American policy on the Vietnam war. How did that come about? Well, the…

As the convention got under way, I found the CBS people in Chicago expressing increasing dismay over what they felt was a deliberate policy on the part of the Richard Daley administration to hamper television coverage of any civil disorders, of any demonstrations taking place within the city against the Lyndon Johnson administration and American involvement in Viet Nam, of the discussions taking place at delegation headquarters in the downtown hotels, and of the convention itself. The Chicago police were reported to be taking a tough and uncooperative attitude toward television crews working outside the convention hall. The Department of Streets and Sanitation refused to give permits for the networks to park their mobile units on the streets outside the major hotels; when the CBS people attempted to rent space…