ABSTRACT
Max Weber in his famous essay on bureaucracy said that, ‘Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret.’ But, as Weber also pointed out in another essay, politicians like publicity (M. Weber, pp. 233, 97-9). The strain between the rival demands of secrecy and publicity has increased in the twentieth century; on the one hand there has been the greatly increased significance and complexity of military technology — while on the other hand there have been the great developments in political public relations, publicity techniques, and available media. Any group of correspondents who set out to cover the sensitive frontier between secrecy-obsessed bureaucracy and publicity-obsessed politicians — as British Lobby correspondents do — must expect to come in contact with certain anomalies and paradoxes.
