THE AMERICAN press has praised itself a great deal in recent months. It has claimed credit for bringing to light the deepest dimensions of Watergate, priding itself on its continuing vigilance in the service of freedom. Watergate, we are told, has once again validated the importance of the Fourth Estate as a vital bulwark of democracy. Even Richard Nixon, an old enemy, has capitulated out of respect: after concluding his April 30 speech about the scandal, he told the press to keep up the pressure on him.

What is the actual state of the American press? Is it in fact the foe of privilege and entrenched power that it claims to be? A closer look at Watergate belies that claim. Despite recent implications to the contrary, hundreds of probing, aggressive newsmen working night and day to unearth the truth was not the story of Watergate. More accurately, two reporters--Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post--kept up through last winter the pressure which eventually helped blow the case wide open. The rest of the press did not get involved until Nixon was already reeling.

In fact, most of the good reporting of the past few years has been done by only a handful of people. Hordes of newsmen descended upon Vietnam in the early 1960s as American involvement deepened, but only one of them--David Halberstam, then with the New York Times--had the courage to report that a chasm lay between the truth and the Pentagon's reported story.

In recent years, Halberstam has been supplanted as the nation's premier investigative reporter by Seymour Hersh, who revealed in staccato succession the MyLai massacre, illegal air strikes against North Vietnam in 1971, and, most recently, the one and one-half year long secret bombing of Cambodia.

THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS of these people and a few others aside, the American press has been most noteworthy for its mediocrity. Reporters encounter rumors without checking them, newspapers print lies without questioning them. The MyLai story, for example, was circulated widely in Vietnam, but Hersh alone had the presence of mind, the courage to investigate it. The fear of ruffling the feathers of any potential opposition at present governs American journalism. It is no surprise that the typical reporter at some time in his career does public relations work; the difference between the two professions in this country is generally mythical.

Why is the American press so mediocre? A large part of the explanation can be traced to the structure of the newsgathering business. Two giant wire services--the Associated Press and the United Press International--provide most American newspapers with most of their regional, national and international news. A typical newspaper front page consists of 80 per cent wire service stories, with one or two local stories by the paper's own staff tossed in for good measure.

The wire services are America's biggest bastions of public relations reporting. To insure that none of their hundreds of local subscribers will object to their coverage, the AP and the UPI are careful to present the official version of news stories in the blandest and least provocative manner. Their philosophy in its most banal formulation is: aim at the lowest common denominator of public interest and avoid alientating either the Chicago Tribune or the Podunk Gazette. Investigative reporting that might raise hackles anywhere is, of course, out of the question: how Hersh managed to break the MyLai story while working for the AP is one of the great unanswered questions of our time.

THE WEAKNESS of wire service reporting is compounded by the oligarchic structure of the newspaper industry itself. Papers or chains of papers are owned and usually directly managed by wealthy entrepreneurs who set editorial policy and carefully supervise what their newspapers print. The owners intervene in newspaper policy for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they step in to protect their own interests: in Chicago, for example, because the police look the other way when newspaper trucks with the late editions break every traffic law on the books, someone is going to get an editorial endorsement come next election day.

Much more often, however, the owners are simply following their political beliefs. They like Richard Nixon; why should they be eager to obtain wire service stories suggesting him guilty of criminal behavior? They like their friends at the local country club; how could they be expected to sponsor investigations into the financial dealings of those friends? Newspaper owners are integral to the American elite, molders and managers of its policy. They can hardly be expected to question their own behavior.

Not all American newspapers adhere to this don't-rock-the-boat view of their business; a few have a more liberal view of the world, a more aggressive and combative concept of journalism. These papers--The New York Times, The Washington Post, among others--are about the closest to responsible and serious journalism that the American press has to offer. Although they are also owned and run by wealthy families, they are powers in their own right and often unafraid to cross those in positions of authority. It is no mistake that the Bernsteins and the Woodwards and the Hershs work for them.

BUT THE TIMES and The Post are not perfect. They sometimes succumb to the same shoddiness that plagues the rest of the newspaper world, and some of their coverage is just as inaccurate. The Times, for example, insists to this day upon calling the Vietnamese National Liberation Front the "Viet Cong," even though the term is considered highly insulting in Vietnam. A newspaper striving honestly for objectivity would report the news objectively and evenly, leaving its insults for the editorial page.

Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, is always "Marxist President Allende" in these newspapers, yet they fail to make the logical extension--"Capitalist President Nixon." Also, the NLF are always "Communist snipers," which is not strictly true because they are not all "Communists." At any rate, these phrases should be accompanied by something like "Capitalist war planes" or, at the very least, "Free Enterprise war planes." One can be thankful for small favors, however; at least these papers have for the most part stopped calling the Khmer Rouge or the NLF "the enemy."

Sadly, the same titillating gossip that drowns most newspaper front pages in triviality also at times works its way into the responsible press. Just last week, for example, The Times featured a front page photo of one of the late Robert Kennedy's sons after his conviction for a traffic violation, a story that must have warmed the hearts of soap opera watchers everywhere.

In a more disgusting example of the same irrelevance, the Boston Globe, usually a member of the responsible press, last month splashed a gigantic photo across its front page of two mountain climbers dangling form their safety harnesses. To add insult to injury, the Globe copyrighted the picture, their way of letting us know they had something good, and they were proud of it.

THIS KIND OF journalistic pandering, of course, is far more prevalent in the the rest of the American press. It is usually justified on the grounds that it is needed to sell newspapers. Leaving aside the morality of the question--why publish newspapers at all if it requires this sort of prostitution? --the basic premise remains untested. No one knows if the American public will buy responsible journalism because they have not been offered any.

At least one piece of evidence suggests that the American newspaper-reading public is looking for more than it is getting. The conventional wisdom in the business with regard to black people has always been that they only read newspapers full of stories about violence, murder and mayhem. Feed the blacks axe-murders and gang-rapes, the story went, and you will start to sell them papers. This particularly racist view fills most newspapers with gory photographs and disgusting horror stories worthy of the National Inquirer. A multiple murder, for example, produces a week of news stories, interviews with practically all of the victim's associates, several dozen photos of the alleged killer being transferred in and out of various jails, a map of the area in which the killing took place and--to top it all off--a diagram of the murder scene with a dashing line tracing the killer's footsteps. Meanwhile, Vietnam gets five inches on page 23.

Murder and mayhem sell papers to anyone, it was thought, but blacks in particular fall for the lure of violence. And as Chicago's four dailies began to battle in earnest over the city's burgeoning black population in the early 1960s, the gore they featured increased.

BUT ONE PAPER, The Chicago Sun-Times, for some inexplicable reason deployed an alternate strategy. The Sun-Times produced its share of gore, but is also started to seriously report on affairs in the black community. The Sun-Times covered speeches by black leaders; it did some features on ghetto problems--in short, it began to accord the black community its rightful place in local affairs. And The Sun-Times jumped into a commanding lead in the circulation war in the ghetto.

This bit of evidence suggests that the American public wants reporting that is unafraid of the local and national pillars of power, wealth an prestige. Americans want journalism that speaks to their local concerns while at the same time makes sense out of the complexities of national and international affairs. Out people want newspapers that at least try to describe and explain the baffling series of crises that have rocked our nation for the past decade. And, the pious post-Watergate self-congratulations notwithstanding, our people are not getting the kind of journalism they want, and need.