PERSPECTIVE ON THE PRESS : Cynicism Works--If You’re Bogart : Reporters think they’re doing their job by being adversarial, but to the TV viewer, it looks like unmerited arrogance.

During the Persian Gulf War, a new and unexpected factor entered the triangular relationship between the press, the government and the public. The new entrant was “Saturday Night Live.”

The Feb. 9 broadcast of the NBC comedy program began with a short skit lampooning the questions reporters had been asking at daily briefings. The journalists were portrayed as ignorant, arrogant and pointlessly adversarial. By gently rebuffing their ludicrous questions, the Pentagon briefer came off as a model of sanity.

President Bush’s chief of staff, John H. Sununu, ordered up a tape of the skit and found it to be evidence that the military was outmaneuvering the press in the battle for public support. Freed from doubts about a possible backlash, the White House and the Pentagon decided to keep the press on a tight leash during the war. Now that “Saturday Night Live” was on their side, they could be confident that the TV audience was as well.

When journalists are heard discussing this issue, they seem unable to grasp its significance, though they can recite from memory the polls showing that most Americans favored even tighter restrictions on the press during the Gulf War. As for the tenor of their questions at briefings, they tend to sigh and explain, as if to the uninitiated, that this is a deliberate tactic. Reporters ask provocative questions at briefings not because they expect a forthright answer, but because the answer they do get may contain some news. This, they claim, is their only hope of pressuring the government to be more candid.

I do not doubt the truth of this explanation, but I do question its relevance. For the issue that journalists need to confront isn’t their technique for getting reluctant officials to talk. It’s their ongoing relationship to the viewer at home. This relationship has been deteriorating for some time, as the adversarial style has become more and more the essence of the journalist’s craft--at least as practiced on television.

TV is not so much a visual as a dramatic medium. By adopting the adversarial stance, journalists place themselves in the company of other characters who prosecute reluctant witnesses on our behalf--especially courtroom lawyers. But there’s an important difference.

The lawyers on, say, “L.A. Law” can be tough, even sadistic in interrogating a hostile witness. Later in the show, however, we see them mount an eloquent and impassioned defense of their client. Thus, the adversarial stance isn’t the only one they project. This enables us to think of them as principled characters, professionals who have real emotions to go with their polished skills.

Journalists, by contrast, take pride in being everyone’s adversary. They think of themselves as equally aggressive in questioning the government and its critics, the right and the left. While this tactic makes sense to reporters who strive for objectivity, they forget that it is their subjectivity--their persona--that comes across most powerfully on television. And the persona most journalists exhibit is a radical mistrust of everyone’s motives, an arrogant disbelief in all the causes that come before them to be scrutinized.

There have been other characters in the popular imagination--Humphrey Bogart comes to mind--who have conveyed a similar cynicism about everyone else’s motives. But because he was a great actor, Bogart was able to project through his bitterness an equally powerful sense of pain and loss. We always had the feeling that his cynicism had been earned through a tragic disappointment suffered somewhere in the mists of the past.

Eric Sevareid of CBS had a touch of this heroic sadness in his television persona, but in ABC’s Sam Donaldson, the exemplar of today’s adversarial style, there is no trace of suffering, no hint of a man forcibly stripped of his illusions.

It is this feeling, that the cynicism of the journalist is unearned and thus false, that grates on the TV viewer at home. The people we see posing questions at press conferences do not strike us as disappointed believers. Nor do they seem like aggressive advocates of a just cause. They appear instead as a chorus of doubters, professional cynics who, despite their clever questions, know less than we do about the real world and its disappointments.

Alert to this widespread perception, the producers of “Saturday Night Live” spoke for all of us, as creatures of television, in their stunning parody of a suspicious press.