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BURGENSTOCK, Switzerland (NEA) — A few days among the lakes and chalets of the Swiss Alps are remarka bly good for the soul, but even here the political controver sies of the United States are hard to escape altogether. As a matter of fact, coincidentally enough, it was in the Interna tional Herald Tribune (the daily paper published in Paris for the convenience of news-starved Americans abroad) that I came across the other day one of the gaudiest birds in all political journalism I say ‘coincidentally enough,” because the species was first identified in 1964 by Karl Hess and dubbed by him “the Herald Tribune shoehorn,” in honor of the New York news paper, now defunct, in which he spotted it. The New York Herald Tribune fathered the Paris paper, which con sists mostly of stuff reprinted from The New Yorkes and Washington Post (they now own it jointly), but it is a chip off the old block, and is never so happy as when it is pounding some liberal drum — a vice that, in the view of many, ultimately killed its original parent publication. Hess was a speech writer for Barry Goldwater in the pres idential election campaign of 1964, and accordingly was und erstandably more sensitive than most people to jobbing Goldwater got from the press in the course of that memora ble year In a book written afterward, Hess discussed the subject, and singled out for particular condemnation a jour nalistic technique he had observed in The New York Herald Tribune. It was to report, forthrightly enough, something that Goldwater had said — and then shoehorned in, as gratu itously as a commercial for the Democratic National Committee, a sentence beginning .He didn’t explain how ...” or something of the sort. Hess called this “the Herald Tri bune shoehorn,’ and rightly suggested that it had no place in honest journalism The objection to the technique, of course, is that it gets a politically biased reporter directly involved in arguing, with the politician whose speech he is covering, whether some point in the speech is valid or tendentious. If it is, in fact, tendentious, the newspaper reader doesn’t need, and proba ce want. So the reporter who is heavily slanted the way it out to him. He may be able to see the flaw himself (if there really is one), and if he misses it you can be sure that the other candidate or his spokesmen will pounce on it and call it to the readers’ attention the very next day. The Herald Tribune shoehorn, in other words, is simply a gratuitous intrusion in a purported news story, by a reporter biased against the man he is covering that he can’t wait ‘or first melepheamen iran up. With that definition in mind, consider the plumage of this , which was reprinted in the International Herald the other day as from the Williamsburg summit by “Lou Cannon and Hobart Bowen of The Washing ton Post,” and see if you can identify the species: “Mr. Jenon his weekly radio broadcast that the United States is leading the allies toward economic re he did not mention the opinion of many econo mists , high U.S. interest rates had helped lead those same stations into recession and could diminish the recovery.” No, and he also didn’t mention the charge of Democratic National Chairman Charles Manatt that U.S. recovery is itself being achieved at the expense of high unemployment. Maybe he didn’t mention these things because he happens to believe they aren’t true. For that matter, Messrs. Cannon and Bowen didn’t mention that France’s current economic difficulties were, in the opinion of many observers, caused far more by President Francois Mitterrand’s cockamamie Socialist policies than by the world recession, whatever may have caused the latter. And Lo, conservatives are paranoid for believing that most Washington political reporters are biased! The above specimen of The Herald Tribune shoehorn ought to be stuffed and put in the Smithsonian as a perfect example of what conservatives are talking about. As long as that sort of thing can be called political journalism, we need another namice for honest reportage.
Newspaper Details
Key West Citizen
Key West, Florida, US
Thu, Jun 09, 1983
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Roger M.
USA 01 Jul 2026
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