Impact: how the press affects federal policy making.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

Impact: How the Press Affects Federal Policy Making

When reportersget together to drink and complain, the subject occasionally turns to the issue of power--our power. Of course we have it, most will argue. If we don't, what the hell are we doing at the office at two in the morning diddling around on a word processor for less money than our brain-dead ex-classmates spend on lunch? Look how much power we have compared to bureaucrats; the cabinet secretary reads our stories before he reads their memos. The lobbyist? He goes one on one; we go one on thousands or millions. Reporters can usually be counted on to brag about how stories they wrote causes the closing of a sadistic mental institution or sent a politician to jail back in the days when they worked on the city desk.

At about this juncture in the conversation,when the self-congratulation over keeping score this way reaches its peak, a friend of mine usually pipes up with a theory depressing enough to send everyone directly to business school. The stories from the small town metro desk are precisely the point, he says. A reporter can only be truly powerful if his power is exercised directly. But "agenda setting," the most common definition of journalistic power on a national scale, is accomplished diffusely. In Washington, he says, there are simply too many individuals and institutions clashing at too many levels for any single reporter to really claim much credit for anything beyond simply contributing information. In other words, at precisely the moment we broke into the big leagues, we lost most of our power.

I think my friend's at least partlywrong, but it can be hard to prove. He even argues, with some merit, that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not responsible for bringing down Nixon; Judge John J. Sirica did it. So I was glad for the ammunition this book provided my argument. Martin Linsky and a team from Harvard Kennedy School of Government have interviewed important policy makers (plus a few reporters) and produced an informative study of the way press coverage frames issues at the federal level.

Linsky points out that with10,000 journalists from 3000 news organizations covering Washington, the institutional power is now so overwhelming that we sometimes forget it wasn't always so. "I doubt I spent much time thinking about the press as distinguished from the general public and the Congress," says Theodore Sorensen of his years as John F. Kennedy's top aide. Compare that to...