The remarkably unedited Boyd piece makes essentially the same point, something you learn in high school civics--the congressman has so many obligations to answer his constituents' letters, give speeches back home, help get voters jobs, etc., that he does not have time to "legislate," i.e., vote on bills. There is no discussion of the value of doing these other things against the value of legislating. Legislating (in that narrow definition) is the legislator's job, Boyd implies; it is his roiled in keeping the machine running.

The Broder piece on political reporting is another example of the liberal guilt-responsibility phenomenon. Broder makes virtually no point at all in 13 pages of rambling, except that political reporters have a lot of power and they do not use it very responsibly--they are careless and make mistakes. Broder is writing in response to a "credibility gap"--"the open skepticism and even derision with which they are viewed by their customers." His justification of the gap is that reporters simply have a great deal of power and sometimes they hurt people with it.

He cannot see the problem that the public imagines the press as an instruction, that it is all the same. If there were a competing partisan press in this country, with contending points of view, then the public would not mistrust the press (certain elements, yes), but the press would not exist as a whole institution. Broder is also very conscious of causing dissension and division within his "lodge" by talking too much about the press. He does, not name names of journalists who "misuse" their power, and his restraint is evident throughout the piece, the same kind of restraint that is found in his political writing. Broder is tied down by his own responsibility, just as Peters is, just as the whole idea of the magazine is.

The Washington Monthly has no ads and no pictures, just 80 pages of raw, ugly type. The variety is in the typography; some pieces are set two columns to a page of very small type, some are set one column of very large type, one has unjustified (uneven) lines of very large type. The type, someone said, looks like it comes from the Lord and Taylor catalogue, long and thin and soul-less.

THERE IS NO urgency in this magazine (the cover is an off-color American flag) and no excitement. There is no precision and no depth. And worst of all, there is nothing new. These same liberal journalists, who feel such horror over 1968 and so much desire to do something, do not have the slightest chance of doing anything, chained to the institutions they write about by their own guilt.

The first thing for them to do is to admit they have very little power to stop assassinations and riots, or even to elect presidents--for this is the case, even if they do learn about the news first. That admission will free them from their guilt, make them work harder at finding solutions that may even divide (which is the solution of pluralism anyway).

This freedom from guilt and from responsibility is so necessary to a journalist. Today, he is simply publicizing someone else's nightmare. When the day comes, he will write: "Gestapo officials estimated today that 346 detainees were exterminated by the state because of crimes . . . " He will sit down and write it, because he has no values. He is afraid to have them because he is afraid of a power that he does not have.