Davis, The Media Critic   

On the wire services: "Like most radio newsmen, I am heavily dependent on the wire services...I can't cover it all myself – not even all that happens in Washington; usually I cover about one story a day on foot, get angles or elucidations on half a dozen others by telephone, and must depend on the wire services for the rest. Experience has taught me, when the versions of the same story given by two wire services differ materially, to prefer the less exciting; the other might have been souped up to beat the competition."

On objective reporting: "In 1951 Sen. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, a very moral and religious man, was a member of a subcommittee passing on the fitness of persons nominated as delegates to the U.N. Assembly, including Philip Jessup. [Sen.] McCarthy and [Harold] Stassen had accused Jessup of communist affiliations and sympathies [and] the committee rejected Jessup on a vote of three to two. Senator Smith said he had absolute confidence in Jessup's ability, integrity and loyalty; he explicitly repudiated any belief in the charges against him; yet, because Jessup was a 'controversial figure' and for other reasons quite irrelevant to the issues before the committee, he voted against Jessup...One of the best reporters in Washington thought of beginning his report of that episode: 'Yesterday afternoon Sen. Alexander Smith wrestled with his conscience. He won.' He didn't write that because he was afraid his paper wouldn't print it. But it might have printed it; in any case it seems to me an objective report of what happened. It is unthinkable that so high-minded a man as Senator Smith would have come to such a decision without wrestling with his conscience, and he certainly pinned it to the mat. Yet it could be argued that if that had been printed, it might have encouraged more free-wheeling interpretation by reporters of less ability or less integrity."

On covering Washington: "It was the realization that objectivity had leaned so far over backward that it had become unobjective which led to the rise of the syndicated newspaper column, and a little later of the radio news commentary. These are both news and interpretation; our listeners, or readers, understand that we are saying, 'This is the news and this is what I think it means.' But even for us, with much more latitude than the ordinary reporter, it is becoming harder and harder to get at the three-dimensional truth in Washington – partly because the news becomes more and more complex, partly because so much of it is coming to consist of never-ending serial melodramas, like soap operas on the radio, or those newspaper cartoon strips that used to be comic. Especially is this true of Congressional committee hearings, where the same witnesses appear and reappear. Adequate coverage of such stories entails reporting not only what a man says now, but the very different thing he may have said last year – or last week."

Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co. from "But We Were Born Free," originally published by Bobbs-Merrill Co. © 1954 by Elmer Davis, renewed 1982 by Carolyn Anne Davis.