Is 'Fairness' Fair?

It may be, as his supporters say, that biased reporting has hurt Sen. Goldwater during the campaign. At least one election-year practice of the press, however, has helped the Republican nominee.

This is the customary decision of most newspapers to abandon the principle of selectivity during campaigns and allot roughly equal space to the two candidates each day regardless of what they say. The practice is ignored when one candidate says something of earth-shaking importance or makes a local appearance. But for the most part, newspapers seem to regard "fairness" in a campaign as something that can be measured in inches. The standard reply to charges of journalistic partisanship is to sit down at one's back copies with a ruler and figure out that Sen. Goldwater has received 533 1/2 inches of space since June to 529 inches for President Johnson. Equality of display is considered necessary, too; stories get similar headlines and run in neighboring columns, or they run under one large headline, with smaller "dropheads" indicating which story is about which candidate.

Under this system small day-to-day inequities are taken for granted. The other day, for instance, Sen. Goldwater's statement that he would cut back our crash program to put a man on the moon got the drophead treatment in most papers, although President Johnson had merely spent another day promising to be President of all the people and worrying about the button.

It is assumed that over the course of the campaign these little discrepancies will even up and the candidates will receive equal treatment. This year, because of a tactical decision of Sen. Goldwater's, this has not been true.

It has been the Senator's policy over the course of the campaign to hold few press conferences, to make no informal speeches: in other words, to make no news at all, if he can help it, outside of the remarks he makes in his prepared speeches. By the nature of a campaign, these speeches often vary little from day to day.

If Johnson's speeches have been less than startling, the President offers the relief of informality. Despite the security that surrounds him he has managed to be hit on the head with a sign and punched by a policeman; he has dropped in uninvited for coffee at a stranger's house; he has talked to newsmen while taking 20-lap tours around the White House lawn.

For content as well as color, Johnson's campaign has been superior to Goldwater's. Johnson seems to love holding press conferences, and a great many stories always come out of Presidential press conferences. (Stories would come out of Goldwater conferences, too, if he would hold more, as the response to his unofficial brieing Saturday indicated.)

The President's reaction to stories from the overthrow of Khrushchev to the Walter Jenkins case is newsworthy; in situations where Goldwater's reaction would be of interest, the Jenkins case, for instance, the Senator has tended to stay aloof and let his subordinates do the shouting. The press devotes yards of copy to him because he is a Presidential candidate, but apart from throwing out an occasional stimulating idea (such as his tax cut plan) Goldwater has done little to earn his space.