The media's rush to judgment.

• Author: Fallows, James
• Position: Errors in news reporting

Quick, facile pronouncements on Clinton, the Gulf War, and Japan dramatize a dangerous new tendency: a McLaughlinized press would rather jump to conclusions than work to get it right

When I started working for this magazine nearly 22 years ago, Richard Nixon was about to win re-election over George McGovern in the face of mounting evidence about Watergate. One of the first stories I did for the magazine, which like so many other stories reflected the heavily guiding hand of our editor-in-chief, Charles Peters, blamed The Washington Post and its Woodward-and-Bernstein team for not pushing the story harder while it could still have made a difference at the polls. Surely (I asserted) the paper could see that the trail of incriminating facts was leading straight toward Nixon himself. So why did the stories taper off and the paper seem so timid in the month before the election? If the Post was willing to go for Nixon's jugular, why did it wait until he'd been returned to office before doing so?

Ah, to have such problems today. Some residents of Oregon might still sympathize with my old complaint about the Post's hesitancy. If the Post itself, along with the Oregonian, had pushed harder with stories about Bob Packwood in the month before the 1992 election, Packwood might have been removed from the Senate quickly and cleanly. But these Oregonians would be in the minority. For every case in which today's press errs by being over-cautious, as in the Packwood episode, there are dozens of cases of the reverse--of reporters and commentators reaching sweeping conclusions for which they cannot possibly have proof. The result is to aggravate the cynicism and short attention span that characterize today's political culture. We read about one world-threatening peril this week, a completely different one next week--and pretty soon we are numb to all of them. Here are three examples of what I'm talking about:

* Four months after Bill Clinton's inauguration, the verdicts were in: He had failed disastrously as a leader and his administration was for all practical purposes at an end. In early June, Time published its cover story on "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency," and Newsweek's cover showed a picture of Clinton with the caption, "What's Wrong?" The Washington Post ran a front page story presenting Clinton as a case study of what it means to use up your "political capital." A New York Times editorial asked "Can the Democrats Govern?" and a Times columnist wrote, "Four months into a new presidency, people who voted for it are wondering if it can be saved." The weekend talk shows rang with schadenfreude-edged dissections of "another failed presidency." Even David Broder, usually the soul of sobriety, weighed in with a column calling Clinton's performance a "calamity that reached beyond our borders." This column ended, "That this is happening to a man who will remain as president for the next 43 months is an international disaster."

Comeback Kids

Whoa! No one knows just how strong or weak Bill Clinton will look by the end of his administration, or even what emergencies may have arisen by the time this magazine comes out. But that is exactly the point. No one could possibly know, four months into a president's first term, how things were going to turn out in the long run. With the possible exception of William Henry Harrison, who caught pneumonia on Inauguration Day and died a month later, no president has made mistakes in his first four months in office that proved to be the fatal and decisive errors of his presidency. Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt got off to strong legislative starts in their first years in office. John Kennedy, by enduring and learning from the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, became much more sophisticated about foreign policy during his first year. But most of the events that lead us to classify presidents as successes or failures occurred well into their terms. Jimmy Carter's main success, the Camp David peace agreement, took place near the end of his second year in office. His most obvious failures, involving the Iranian hostages and the Soviets in Afghanistan, occurred in his final year. George Bush triumphed in leading the Desert Storm coalition during the second half of his term. He...