Governing With The News: The News Media as a Political Institution.

The News Media as a Political Institution by Timothy E. Cook University of Chicago, $48

This is a provocative and often wise but ultimately unsatisfying book that ends just as it is gathering steam. After a rewarding historical account of the symbiosis between news reporting and governing (of which the saddest recent example was the death of a West Virginia woman killed by a police car engaged in a high-speed chase, with a TV crew in tow), after a solid but more familiar account of how that relationship operates today, Cook delivers himself of this notion: "It may be that newsmaking helps political actors in the short run but pushes them toward particular issues, concerns, and events and away from others, to the point that news values become political values, not only within the news media but within government as well"

As that namby-pamby "may be" suggests, Cook handles this interesting thought gingerly. Again leaving himself an out, he warns later that "to the extent" that the press does organize politics, it directs attention "toward episodic outcroppings rather than continuing conditions" and "away from abstract complexity toward simple if not simplistic renderings of problems, policies, and alternatives."

Now, for a guy who devotes countless pages to proving that the press is an "institution," and then to proving that it is moreover a "political institution," Cook is dismayingly stinting in developing this idea. Perhaps he is counting on our common sense to tell us it is true. But how true is it? By trying constantly to make news, are politicians making bad policy? And are they really reacting to the values of the new business, or simply to the ancient demands of politics updated for the information age?

This administration spends a lot of time thinking about the news media, and scores itself by the daily papers as well as by polls (although the LBJ tapes suggest that this obsession is not new). A day after The New York Times ran a front-page story in May about "heroin chic" in the fashion industry, Clinton criticized the trend in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "You do not need to glamorize addiction to sell clothes," he said. The denunciation received widespread coverage. "Headline robbery!" one delighted Clinton aide crowed at me.

But drive-by social criticism is not substantive policy. Consider an example of the latter, the creation of Clinton's economic plan.

In The Agenda, Bob Woodward details the formulation and packaging of the plan. He describes Hillary Clinton explaining to aides how, to sustain public support in Arkansas for education reform, the Clintons set out to tell a "story" about reform, complete with beginning, middle, and end, as well as heroes and villains.

The aides quickly constructed what they called "The Story" to sell the president's economic strategy--before they had even figured out the plan's fundamental features. According to Woodward, the memo laying out The Story said that every day until Clinton announced his plan before Congress, he "should be in the media with an economic event stressing cuts in government and taxes on the rich."

Setting to one side Mrs. Clinton's somewhat checkered record as a media strategist, I would argue that political considerations, not "news values" propelled that White House policy. A popular sense that the economy was in deep trouble--not just the media's interest in that issue--led to the creation of the economic plan. The Story was just the means to enacting it by playing not only to the news media, but also to a perceived public desire for a compelling storyline to make sense of policy.

The White House embraced news values just to set the conditions under which the announcements were made (a backdrop of cops or a swarm of children). It chose the actual issues to be highlighted largely based on the public opinion surveys of Dick Morris. Morris is said to have scorned other White House officials for obsessing about headlines in the "elite media," preferring polls that showed what most Americans wanted.

The media may be the messenger, but politics is driving the system, and perhaps politics makes good policy. But of course this system is not working very well--not because of a new encroachment of news values on politics but because of age-old weaknesses in both political and news values. There was every political reason for Clinton to stick to simple apple-pie issue in his campaign and not to address a more controversial and complex subject, like the future of Social Security--or, for that matter, the campaign finance system then collapsing around him.

And, often, there is every good news reason to let him get away with it.

In an aside, Cook notes that "newspersons are not a reflective bunch." Maybe, but many newspersons I know chafe at the way politicians set the agenda. Usually outside beats like mine, the news industry has been trying to elevate issues, like job insecurity or food safety, that politicians were ignoring. Responding to their own polling, the network news shows have virtually become health and safety reports, regardless of what official Washington is up to.

But stepping outside the official agenda becomes much harder on a beat, because it is a significant and valid part of the job to inform the audience of what your target politician is saving. Say the President is in Wichita, praising a welfare-to-work program and announcing a drop in the welfare rolls and complex new welfare regulations. Can you ignore him and nose around the program to see if it really works, or make calls back to Washington to investigate something else entirely? No. You have been assigned, properly, to write a story about the event, because the details, while incremental, are still significant elements in the running story of the changing welfare system.

You have an hour to parse the numbers and regulations and write 800 coherent words before the bus leaves.

Let's say the president wanders within earshot. (He didn't, and rarely does) Do you ask him about Social Security--possibly creating an entirely different story but most likely just getting a wave--or do you ask him about welfare, hoping for an interesting comment to improve the piece you're already doing?

That kind of day-to-day grind notwithstanding, the press corps often does pursue stories outside the White House storyline. But it usually does so after those stories, like the campaign finance abuses, have already been thrust onto the public agenda and legitimized by other politicians. As a result, at Clinton's campaign-style events, the news is generally more complicit in the politics than vice-versa.

Cook, who has a complex understanding of the relationship between governing and the news, provides a fascinating account of the origins of this complicity. In part, he is out to prove that the production of news has always been "centrally aided and abetted" by government policy and practice, and he does a nice job of backing up that thesis historically.

Originally, the aiding and abetting was direct. From Hamilton's redoubt at the Treasury Department, the Federalists let printing contracts to a sympathetic Philadelphia publisher. Jefferson reacted by encouraging a rival editor, appointing him clerk for foreign languages to support him and his semiweekly.

Contracts with individual printers to publish federal laws became a sure method for early American leaders to support the newspapers hewing to their line, but not the only one. Under Jackson, dozens of editors received political appointments, from customhouse collector to Librarian of Congress. And Jacksonians instituted nationwide pony expresses, Cook writes, partly so that editors in the west and south would be able to print news before the metropolitan papers arrived by mail.

The rise of the mass -circulation penny press in New York in the 1830s, the use of steam power and cheaper paper, and the establishment of the Government Printing Office in 1860 (no more fat printing contracts), cut the ties between papers and political sponsors and changed the very notion of news. Paid for by advertising, newspapers no longer aimed so much at readers as voters, but at readers as consumers. They had also gone from a rag-tag collection of partisan, fragile journals (when Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State in 1793, his friendly editor lost his job and the paper died), to massive enterprises.

But Federal subsidies of the news did not end. They simply took different forms: lower postal rates, government support for the telegraph, allocation of the broadcast spectrum, and, in Cook's view, the public relations offices that proliferated through the bureaucracy.

Judging from Cook's account, it was at the turn of the century that the tacit agreement governing today's news beats was struck: Government officials realized that the press could be an efficient way to get the word out, and the press realized that the officials could make good copy.

The great innovator was the Agriculture Department. Through much of the 19th century, under pressure from Congress, the government tried to improve farming techniques by getting farmers the most up to date information, and bulletins distributed through the newspapers presented an obvious means. But Gifford Pinchot, who became chief of Agriculture's Forestry Division in 1898, sensed greater potential. Eager to push forest conservation and the creation of forest reserves (which his agency might supervise), he upped the volume of bulletins and began monitoring the results through clipping services. In 1905, he assembled a "press bureau" of ex-journalists, and started mailing out summaries of speeches and reports in the form of news stories.

At the White House, McKinley, in 1897, first invited reporters in past the gates where they gathered to grill entering and exiting officials. Later, McKinley even ordered his secretary to brief reporters every day. It was Teddy Roosevelt, that instinctual photo-opportunist, who set aside a separate room for the White House press corps. He delared: "The newspaper men--publishers, editors, reporters--are just as much public servants as are the men in the government service themselves."

This historical excavation provides a useful backdrop for Cook's discussion of how reporters and politicians have come to use each other. And he is persuasive on this subject, though other writers have made the case before. Yes, it is true that reporters, with an hour to file in Wichita, find it easier to judge style than content, and too often take that easy way out. Yes, reporters are too reliant on "official" sources, and too quick to define as news that which officials do. And it is often true, as Cook writes, that "the sine qua non of news is not conflict in and of itself but an endless series of conflicts and momentary conclusions" With an emphasis, I would add, on the "momentary."

But what do we do about all this? It is a source of enormous aggravation to beat reporters that media critics, blessed with more time to reflect, so rarely suggest any solutions for the press that have meaning in the real world. Cook, a political scientist, does not concern himself with improving reportage. He focuses instead on freeing politicians from the grip of the news media.

I think that is backwards, for two reasons. First, if, as Cook writes, the press has become a branch of government, then we should take advantage of that and use it to push important issues onto the agenda. Second, I think politicians already are breaking free of the news media. With the Internet and cable television fracturing the audience, wonderfully diversifying the coverage, and providing more opportunities for direct access to audiences, I wonder how the mainstream media can stay relevant.

I hope the answer, at least for Washington coverage, will lie in consistent editorial sorting of the official news of the day; clear and reliable reporting and interpretation of what politicians are doing; and an ability, still under development within the news business, to spot and raise important stories long before the Dick Mortises of the world are prepared to have their candidates face them. News values might then start interfering more in political values, the right way.

James Bennet is a White House correspondent for The New York Times.