VERBAL BATTLE

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33370, 31 October 1973, Page 17

VERBAL BATTLE

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, Oct. 30. The White House and the American press are continuing the duel of words begun by President Nixon’s attack last Friday on what he called “vicious, distorted, and hysterical reporting by the television networks.”

The President’s anger has been aroused again by a report in the magazine, “Newsweek”'—three days after Mr Nixon had also complained at his press conference that the American people were being bombarded with false information about him—that Federal investigators are looking into the possibility that he may have manipulated family-owned property transactions to reduce capital gains tax on them. Picking up the President’s theme at his press conference last Friday, a White House statement says: “This latest report to cast doubt on the President’s integrity is symptomatic of the witchhunt atmosphere in which false information and harmful impressions about the President are being generated, and broadly disseminated to the American people, by the major news media.”

At the regular White House briefing today, reporters demanded that the White House spokesman, Mr Gerald Warren, should give them half a dozen or so good, solid examples of what the President had in mind when he said that in his 27 years of public office he had never seen such vicious, distorted, and hysterial reporting. Mr Warren replied that he would look into the matter.

In a television programme yesterday, a speech-writer for the President (Mr Patrick Buchanan) suggested that the power of the three main television networks was too great, and that they should be broken up, perhaps by forming up to eight new networks, to give the American people a wider variety of news and comment.