Misleading headlines

My son called me the other day. He lives in Wyoming and he was apologising for not having kept a promise to come east about now and renew his boyhood pleasures down at the end of Long Island, swimming, sunning, fishing the bay for weakfish and blues – not many around now, but always coming up, especially in hot weather with the poor, dumb porgy, which flaps sluggishly along the seabed in the foolish belief that he's safe down there.

He, my son, was sorry he couldn't be with me. I told him he was wrong. He was lucky, since we were then in the thick of what, by American standards, is an early heatwave – temperatures in the high nineties and the sweat dropping like a leaky tap from the collarbone to the toenails. I said, on the contrary, I wish I were out there with him in the crunchy snows of the mountains. He told me I was wrong. 'Looks like,' he said, 'I've had the last of the skiing. The snows are gone or going and today it's a shivering or hot 55.' So you see what a different sort of Letter From America you'd be getting if he was doing it.

Well, after the longest, wettest spring on record – in the north-east, that is – we then had this abominable heat and now, as I talk anyway, we're soothed every evening by the weather boys on the telly who promise and deliver delicious days, what they call mild temperatures, in the mid eighties, that is. Hallelujah! So now we can try to face some of the many knotty problems that disturb Americans and hope to untangle them.

This week I want to talk about two topics that are never out of the news or the wrestling minds of the pundits and never out of the mouth of President Reagan, who is privately riled by what he takes to be wide public misunderstanding of these two issues, though it is one of the president's most effective political gifts that he rarely seems riled in public about anything. He must be the chucklingest president in history. This enrages a lot of people who see the chuckle as a crinkly reflection of complacency, but I suspect that for many more people going to bed nagged by thoughts of El Salvador, wobbling banks, foreclosed mortgages, not to mention the Russians, Mr Reagan's smile has the effect of the old night watchman going his rounds chanting, 'Eleven o'clock and all is well'.

We've not talked much about El Salvador, Nicaragua and the administration's overall policy in Central America, except to say that the president has had a victory, in Congress anyway, in the sense that reluctantly, frettingly, it has gone along with him on the money he wants to pump in down there, two-thirds of it for economic help, one-third for arms.

Well, about El Salvador. I came on a figure which I'm sure would astonish most Americans who think this country is fuming and arguing over Central America. People, for instance, who would readily believe a headline, the other day, in the New York Times which read, 'Poll Finds a Lack of Support for Administration's Latin Policy'. The lead sentence of the piece was this, 'Only one American in three supports President Reagan's policies in Central America'. Well, I would have guessed the support was touch and go, but not thought it would be so drastically small.

This first sentence was reinforced by the remark which seems fair enough that, and I quote, 'the findings of this poll of 1,367 adults – and, of course, they were not randomly picked, they constituted a statistical cross-section of the United States – the findings reflect a general unease towards Mr Reagan's conduct of foreign affairs'.

Now in the body of the story we come to the gist, the nitty-gritty, the actual figures of the poll. Remember – only one American in three supports the president's policy in Central America. But now look – 62 per cent of those interviewed said they had not been following events in the region carefully enough to identify which side the United States supported.

So, now if you put together the 33 per cent who support the president and 62 per cent who say they don't know enough to have an opinion, what you get is 95 per cent of all Americans. That leaves five Americans in a hundred who are opposed to the administration policy, as against 33 per cent who support him. Hardly evidence for supporting a headline saying 'Lack of Support for Latin Policy'.

It's only one example of the mischief, maybe quite unwitting, that can be spread by headline writers. A truer headline, based on the actual story printed below would have been 'Only 5 Per Cent of Americans Opposed to Central American Policy'. No wonder the president can smile and smile. He knows something that the headline writers of the Times don't know, or wish weren't true.

The other bit of misinformation or, rather, glaring misinterpretation came from an equally distinguished newspaper and had to do with another hobby horse which the president's critics like to ride. This has to do with unemployment. Now, the government issues once a month a report which you can get free from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's an enlightening bit of reading, sometimes even funny since you learn not only how many people are employed, how many aren't, who's switching jobs, how many hairstylists have gone out of business, how many young people are coming in, who's taking holidays, how many young women are on maternity leave, and so on. By the way, two states now have laws requiring employers to grant unpaid paternity leave to, naturally, fathers, for as long as two months.

Well, on the basis of the latest government report, which is always entitled 'The Employment Situation', this distinguished paper reported that unemployment was down but only by a fraction of one percentage figure. The story was mainly about the chronic persistence of unemployment. It was what in the newspaper trade they call a 'jump' story, that's to say if you're interested enough, the only way you can follow the story from the front page is to jump to page 29 and there you could read an amazing figure.

The total number of Americans with jobs, it says, now stands at 106,978,000. In other words not expressed, more Americans are at work than at any time in history. Of course, you could rightly argue that when the population of any country keeps going up and up, there had better be more, absolutely more, people employed or the country would be in deep trouble. Unless a country is in appalling depression or has a declining population, there are bound to be more people employed than there were, say, 30 years ago.

But, on that same page, there's another figure which, perhaps in another newspaper could have been the lead sentence of the piece and inspired a blazing headline. This is it. 'In the past month alone, there has been a gain in employment of 886,000 jobs'. Now this really is the biggest single monthly gain in American history. The reporter slips in the thought on page 29 that this is, 'perhaps the most eye-catching figure in today's report'.

Well, I must say it caught his eye awfully late in the day. The most eye-catching fact of any story you might think would be reported in the first sentence so as to catch the eye. So there you have it. A piece on the persistence of unemployment which is down slightly and no emphasis at all on an historic, all-time record increase in employment.

Now I'm not saying that intelligent people ought not to criticise or have not good cause to criticise the president's policies on Central America and unemployment. I am saying that in order to do so, they ought to adduce true and scary facts and I have to say that the Democrats, who certainly are the president's most vocal critics on these two issues, had better rouse themselves and do some better homework. They're losing the November election every week by ignoring awkward facts that run in Mr Reagan's favour and stoking their rhetoric with wishful thinking.

There's something about presidential candidates, especially in opposition to the incumbent, that makes them terrified of conceding that their opponent is right about anything. How different from that immensely wily politician – but grittily honest man – Abraham Lincoln, who has gone down as a legendary saviour of the black people, so that all the schoolbooks tell you in pious prose how devoted from the start he was to a single aim to free the slaves, how he ran on that promise, how the Civil War was fought exclusively with that noble purpose in mind.

Well, the truth is quite different. For one thing, the historic, the sainted, proclamation by Lincoln which emancipated the slaves applied only to the Southern states and not to the slave-owning border states, the ones that are neither in the South nor the north – Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri. But on the main point, Lincoln, during the war, made his aim brutally clear. 'If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do it. The thing is to save the union.'

If the Democrats could find a man who said, 'The president is right in some things and wrong in others and it's the wrongs we must right', he might seem, and sound, like a Daniel come to judgement.

Talking about my son in Wyoming, I have a word from out there that brings an exciting echo from a century ago but it echoes a still-persistent scandal – cattle rustling in Sweetwater county. It's gone professional and it's now done mostly at night with big trucks taking off along eight-lane highways. There's a deputy sheriff out there, one stoical, tooth-sucking Ed Cantrell. He tries to police 10,000 square miles – the area of his county. He says a successful night rustle can swipe between 20 and 30 thousand dollars' worth of cattle and some blue-eyed reporter asked him if there was any way to stop it.

'Sure,' said Ed Cantrell, sucking on his teeth, 'you could move the 82nd Airborne Division in here. I guess that would stop it.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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