The Media and the Panthers
Brudnoy, David
The Media and the Panthers David Brudnoy "Irresponsible" is a word not usually applied in New England to the operations of the New York Times and the Washington Post. But that charge was leveled...
...The national conservative youth organization, Young Americans for Freedom, followed up the Human Events stories and published several articles refuting Garry's charges...
...Epstein showed that the facts were far different from Garry's charge, which the Panthers' lawyer repeated in a book some months later...
...Although the Chicago Tribune quickly wrote that Garry's charges were false, the media chose to believe Garry...
...Where is the hue and cry from the friends of Pantherism now...
...Epstein's devastating article confirms Agnew's Third Law of Media Dynamics: that is, the Liberal press, with few exceptions, will not print what it doesn't want to believe...
...But that charge was leveled against those journals by Harvard professor Edward Jay Epstein in a mid-February issue of the New Yorker magazine...
...Garry could do little but sputter that Epstein was a tool of the CIA, an agent of the FBI, a "congenital liar...
...We used to cry "foul" at Joe McCarthy's tactic...
...Agnew's Fourth Law of Media Dynamics was verified too: if Liberals listen to anybody, they listen only to other Liberals...
...On 7 and 9 December 1969, the Times.repeated this charge as fact, and the Post stated flatly on 9 December that "a total of 28 Panthers died in clashes with the police since 1 January, 1968...
...There is no adequate excuse for making this kind of error in the first place and none for failing to pursue the truth behind the phony 'facts,' the Post mea-culpaed...
...In my city while the Boston Herald Traveler editorialized and also reprinted the New Yorker article in its entirety, what did the liberal Boston Globe do...
...We were right to do so then...
...Epstein's article demolished attorney Charles Garry's charges of December, 1969, that the police had murdered twenty-eight Panthers across the nation...
...he denied-and here's the beautiful part- that it made any difference whether twenty-eight or two were killed...
...In a democracy of rule by law, even two lynchings are too many...
...Epstein found that of the twenty-eight, most were killed by other Negroes, not by the police, some in inter-factional fighting -St...
...Since the appearance of Epstein's article, WGBH has not seen fit to rectify the situation...
...They appeared in Human Events, the leading weekly conservative journal...
...Where was the comment then...
...Except for an article by columnist George Frazier, not a word editorially from the Globe, which helped spread Garry's distortion...
...Garry denied having written the book which appears with his name as author...
...A few were killed by police after first attacking the police...
...Perhaps two of the alleged twenty-eight, Epstein concluded, were deliberately murdered by the police...
...Garry's charge then became Truth and was immediately picked up and broadcast across the land...
...Where was the comment then...
...After an extensive investigation lasting several months, Mr...
...The New York Times...
...Infuriated, outraged, shocked, dismayed-all the predictable reactions-Mr...
...The Boston educational TV channel, which devotes a lot of air time to presentation of the extremist Negro position, had allowed Charles Garry's lie to be broadcast on various occasions...
...We used to call that sort of nonsense "McCarthyism" back in the days when the senator from Wisconsin was waving his little lists in the air, those lists with the names of fifty-one, thirty-six and eighteen Communists known to be in the State Department...
...Is McCarthyism of the left more acceptable than old-style McCarthyism...
...Later in January, 1970, the journal observed that Garry's list boiled down to so few that there was no way the deaths could be construed as a police conspiracy...
...Valentine's Day revisited-others in marital squabbles...
...Nothing...
...The other TV channels hereabouts have likewise been silent...
...Garry confronted Professor Epstein on David Frost's television program recently...
...The press reaction to Mr...
...On 18 July, Human Events columnist, James Jackson Kilpatrick, explained that the twenty-eight victims dwindled down to the Hampton-Clark shootings in Chicago the previous December...
...What this episode reveals, aside from the fact that we must henceforth be very skeptical about swallowing propaganda about white "genocide" of Negroes, is that we must pay more heed to those like the Vice President who have long correctly pointed out the grave problems in America's distorted media dissemination of the news...
...The story doesn't end there, with deafening silence from the Liberal media...
...It took an article in New Yorker last month to elicit a retraction from the Washington Post...
...Where is their outrage about McCarthyism in defense of Panthers...
...But Epstein showed that the truth is not served by exaggerated charges "that are reported unverified, in the press and in consequence widely believed by the public...
...WGBH...
...The Washington Post, to its credit, editorialized an apology for its irresponsibility...
...But these exposes appeared not in an establishment journal like the New Yorker...
...On 17 January 1970, Human Events columnist, Victor Riesel, debunked the charges...
...The facts are that exposes of the falsehood passed off by Garry as true appeared long ago, fourteen months, to be exact...
Vol. 4 • May 1971 • No. 6
