The Media By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Views v. news

MOST EDITORS are notoriously reluctant about letting their readers in on the wheel-turning that goes on inside a newspaper. Some, however, are coming around belatedly to an understanding that how they do their job is of the utmost public importance, even if the airing of "family business" proves troublesome, which it often does.

Tom Blount, the editor of the Decatur Herald & Review, is a praiseworthy example. His weekly column is an always interesting, surprisingly frank report on some of the personalities and problems behind the local headlines.

At least one reader found one of Blount's recent columns to be particularly interesting. In it, the editor noted that Bob Sampson, the staff member who had covered the Durbin-Findley congressional campaign, had taken a job in Washington as legislative aide to the new congressman (Democrat Richard Durbin). Though Sampson's outspoken partisan liberal convictions were well-known in the community for a long time, Blount wrote that "he wanted to cover the race" and indeed wound up "covering the hell out of it."

What stood out in the column was Blount's observation that there were those at the Herald & Review who forecast several months before the election that Sampson would be on Durbin's staff if he were elected.

Harry G. (Skinny) Taylor, the long-time Republican county chairman of Macon County, promptly fired off a letter to the editor: "Shame on you for trying to rationalize [Sampson's] decidely unobjective treatment."

Taylor declared, "Sampson wrote as if he were Durbin's campaign manager. One can only wonder with such a narrow margin of victory by Durbin (1,410 out of 200,109 votes cast) what might have happened had Sampson been objective or if you had a reporter covering Paul Findley's activities and philosophies as closely as Bob did Durbin."

Blount told me later that his response was that Taylor was trying to blame the newspaper for his organization's failure to produce for Findley.

It is not unusual, however, for reporters to cross over into the financially more lucrative pastures of public service. After the election two years earlier, when Findley's district stretched as far south as Alton, Doug Thompson of the Alton Telegraph took a job on Findley's staff.

The door usually swings only one way. On those rare occasions when a reporter who has taken a political job reenters journalism, it is almost always a loftier level. Michael Sneed, one of several Chicago Tribune reporters who worked for Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, returned to the Tribune as a columnist. And in Washington for some years, the positions of deputy assistant secretary for national security affairs in the State Department and reporter for the New York Times covering national security affairs in the State Department have swapped back and forth, depending on which party controls the White House, in a blatant disregard of journalistic ethics that only the Times could get away with.

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The Sampson and Thompson cases in Illinois were aggravated by the fact that both men also wrote personalized columns for their newspapers. Sports writers routinely grind out both straight news stories and free-swinging columns, but the separation of opinion and news is not that simple when the columnist is, to borrow Blount's description of Sampson, a "political specialist." The reader may not always be sure which hat the journalist is wearing — and whether the head under the hat is serving up information with or without a twist.

In 1980, Thompson wrote columns in the Telegraph that were critical of David Robinson, who was Findley's opponent in that campaign. In 1982 Sampson's voluminous reporting of the Findley-Durbin race in the main news section was being watched closely by Blount and his associates for evidence of bias. Sampson himself made no effort to disguise his "image," according to Blount's column, but "agonized over every story, every paragraph, sometimes every word" in his determination to be fair.

In 1982, as in 1980, Findley's Arab-Israeli views were an issue in his campaign. A campaign fundraising reception at the Country Club of Decatur became part of the issue. The club has no Jewish members, a condition that has existed for a long time, but one that the Herald & Review had not seen fit to report or comment upon — until, that is, Sampson's story which, according to Taylor, served to further enflame the Jewish community of Decatur against Findley.

In this era of public relations deception and obfuscation, it is more important than ever that good political reporters cut through the flackery and tell us what the news means. With this order to interpret the meaning of the news goes an added burden of responsibility to be fair and unbiased.

All political reporters have political views — informed political views for the most part. The good ones keep their opinions to themselves, however, recognizing that a journalist who flaunts his personal political preferences can hardly be expected to report the news without a twist. If Sampson was so committed to Durbin's success that fellow staffers expected him to join the congressman's staff after the election, the editors might have been well advised to assign someone else to cover the straight news of the campaign.□

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