The news at any cost.

OVER THE last few years some big news stories have concerned journalists, periodicals, networks, publishers, and others who themselves make their fame and fortune reporting the news: Time, CBS, Ben Bradlee, Abe Rosenthal, Milton Coleman, George Will, Mike Wallace, Janet Cooke, Dan Rather, Rupert Murdoch, Alistair Reid, Alexander Cockburn, R. Foster Winans, Myron Farber, William Greider, Daniel Schorr, Michael Kiasley, Laurence Barrett, and Geraldo Rivera, to name a few.

Some of the stories have been scandalous. Others have raised ethical questions. In The News at Any Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News, Tom Goldstein takes a fairly jaundiced view of it all. Goldstein has been a reporter and a press secretary, and is currently a journalism teacher. His book doesn't settle the deep issues, but it gives you a lively sense of what really goes on in the news business.

Journalism, he argues, isn't really a profession, the way law is a profession. It's not well defined as an area of activity; it has no real code of ethics; it doesn't require any training to speak of. And yet it enjoys special constitutional protection, and its practitioners give themselves insufferable airs.

They talk about "journalistic ethics," "investigative reporting," "the adversary press," and the like. Such phrases are meant to create an aura of sanctity around their often grubby business. Goldstein isn't buying this. He knows too much about cronyism, venality, deciet, sloppiness, ambition, and other traits common in the trade, all of which he illustrates vividly.

Not that this is a hatchet job. He writes with respect of Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, who was an excellent reporter when he covered the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice. But Lewis also doubled as an activist and advocate. He hobnobbed with high government officials in Washington, including Robert Kennedy, and helped shape government policy backstage.

"In manipulating behind the scenes a story that he was covering, in giving advice privately to a public figure, Lewis--an exceptional journalist with an exceptional intellect--went beyond the bounds of appropriate journalism," Goldstein writes. "The proper way for Lewis to change policy would have been to write a story or series of stories about faults in the government's position. Instead, unbeknownst to his readers he became a lobbyist and a part of the very story he was covering."

This sounds reasonable. But one wishes Goldstein, himself an obviously intelligent man, had deepened the argument. Yes, Lewis was disingenuous with his readers, but is that all there is to it? Woudl it be proper for a reporter to design is news coverage to achieve a desired policy result? Wouldn't that have been equally disingenuous in another way? Then again, though I'm no fan of Lewis's myself, I can't see that what he did was necessarily unethical. Journalism isn't so pure an activity as to require a monastic separation of functions.

In other words, what is wrong with journalism is less its practice than its pretensions. If you take seriously its occasional claim of neutrality, then Lewis's backstage activism is scandalous. But I don't think it has to be neutral, as long as its doesn't claim to be. I'm content to judge journalists by ordinary standards of honesty, without positing too much in the way of distinctively "journalistic" ethics.

The real trouble is that reporters and their editors have been misled by their own misunderstanding of the First Amendment into supposing they should enjoy a special status in law and in public life. This leads them to make contradictory claims. On the one hand, they assert "the public's right to know" when they want to disclose facts others want to conceal; then again, they claim "confidentiality of sources" when they want to conceal what others think deserves disclosure. The source of a leak is often part of the real story, and the whole truth can be abridged and distorted by the discretion of the journalist who has an axe to grind.

There is a similar contradiction between the journalist's conception of himslef as a crusader or reformer, on the one hand, and his defensive insistence that he is simply a messenger (who shouldn't be shot for bringing bad news), on the other. A messenger who decides what messages to deliver is something more than a messenger.

Goldstein quotes me as saying: "The American reporter is not a neutral umpire, but, rather,one of the players." He seems to agree, but he isn't so clear as to why he disapproves of this state of affairs. Of course we all agree that the first duty of a reporter is to be accurate. That is an irreducible point of consensus. What is murkier is the question of completeness. How much must a reporter report? When does omission become concealment? How frank should he be about the purposes that govern his reportage?

Especially in a democracy, publicity is a weapon. A frequent purpose of reporting is to embarrass a public official--often for partisan, selfish, vindictive, or ideological reasons. This is a dimension of journalism that Goldstein should have given specific attention to. He ignores the ideological motives of journalists almost completely. He seems to be assuming that the journalist can and should be an impartial conveyer of information, whereas the very "facts" journalism traffics in are sometimes highly colored by philosophical presuppositions. It may be easy to be "objective" about axe murders and hurricanes. But what about terms like "poverty," "peace," and "discrimination"? These are subjects of passionate debate, and the reporter has to decide what to treat as (in Richard Weaver's phrase) uncontested terms, terms of moral import that are exempt from critical analysis. Often the reporter decides without realizing it. If the idea of journalistic ethics means anything, it should include the duty of maintaining a certain rhetorical skepticism. But that skepticism is largely absent when the press reports on "civil rights," "feminism" and "peace marches."

The News at Any Cost therefore combines practical sophistication, within a small conceptual framework, with an unfortunate naivete about bigger questions. Its value is that it gives a colorful and well-informed account of the shenanigans of reporters who adopt disguises, invent phony quotes, invade privacy, and otherwise misbehave. Its limitation is that it isn't the critique of a powerful institution that the times demand.