How CBS Tried to Kill a Book
Kannon, Baron Von
CONTINUING CRISIS (continued from page 2) World tension eased a bit when word came from Bathurst that Gambia and North Korea have decided to establish diplomatic relations. Radio Brazzaville has...
...In East Germany police arrested Mr...
...On March 29, as the last American troops flew out of South Vietnam, the last American POW's left Hanoi...
...March 27 was a mixed day for Mr...
...Although this allegation of left-liberal bias was not new, Miss Efron received much attention because she was the first to document her charges by means of statistical analysis...
...And, while six of the Watergate Seven were being sentenced, the seventh, Mr...
...Martin E. Morris, condemned a seventy-eight-year-old man to thirty days in the cooler for cohabiting with five hundred chickens in his rural four-room house...
...Nixon's garrulous nominee for F.B.I, director, L. Patrick Gray, III...
...Or it could have ignored the charges as the other networks seem to have done...
...That the defense was weak is interesting, but the more crucial question is why CBS even attempted to defend itself if the best defense it could come up with was one based on intellectual dishonesty...
...The bulk of How CBS Tried to Kill A Book is devoted to refuting the specific CBS charges against TNT and showing that the CBS Study was anything but a "spot check...
...And in yet another attempt to stamp out antisocial behavior, Albanian police executed the Reverend Stephen Kurti, a Roman Catholic priest, for surreptitiously baptizing an innocent child...
...Before he finished, he had implicated no less than five more Republicans in the Watergate Affair, an event that may have involved a cast of thousands...
...According to Mr...
...But one thing is certain...
...Richard Cory of San Francisco, California...
...Book Review How CBS Tried to Kill a Book by Edith Efron Nash, $6.95 To understand this book one must be somewhat familiar with CBS's alleged victim, Miss Efron's first book, The Neivs Twisters (TNT...
...It was merely CBS's attempt to defend itself against legitimate criticism...
...In February consumer prices rose 0.8 percent led by food prices which rose 2.4 percent...
...Leonard Lampton won the third annual peanut butter eating championship held at Quigley North High School...
...Sensing a portentous stirring amongst consumers the President imposed price controls on meat...
...As the revelations come tumbling forth it becomes abundantly manifest that not just Mr...
...James W. McCord, Jr., began to sing...
...It could have admitted the bias, and made attempts to correct it...
...The Salant release and appended stu-ies were, according to Miss Efron, the major weapons CBS employed in its attempt to "kill" The News Twisters...
...Later in the day while browsing through San Francisco International Airport, he answered a page from the airport telephone operator, and the gendarme clapped the blockhead back in the calaboose...
...Although a case-by-case comparison of the CBS charges and Miss Efron's rebuttals is beyond the scope of this review, it is obvious that Miss Efron is correct: the CBS Study was not the result of a random sampling...
...The question of television news bias is an important one which has ramifications throughout all of society...
...Alas, America awaits its Gibbon...
...And in a protest of high food prices, informed sources say that Mrs...
...The Supreme Court decided that school systems can be financed in part by property taxes, and that in certain small elections local governments can restrict voting to property owners...
...Salant, The News Twisters "examines only a limited part of network coverage...
...McCord and his pathetic band, but all Americans share the blame for Watergate...
...George McGovern is serving dinner guests salads of tossed lichens and cobwebs...
...Spokane police reported 186 pounds of laughing gas stolen from a warehouse, and the Governor of Michigan presided over the mass burial of several thousand pounds of spoiled mushrooms...
...Food prices continued to soar...
...In Fairfax, Virginia an indurated judge, the Rt...
...And in Chicago Mr...
...The Senate Judiciary Committee continued to tighten its noose around the neck of Mr...
...And it draws erroneous, prejudiced, and un-supportable conclusions...
...In the period Miss Efron studied, this non-editorial opinion made up 69 percent of the opinion heard on CBS...
...The CBS Study makes seventeen charges against The News Twisters, including direct challenges to nine of the cases cited by Miss Efron...
...After all, CBS did have other options...
...But while many POW's were roasting the anti-war activists for their old raspberries from Miss Jane Fonda, whose philosophical retort was that "History will judge them severely...
...A random sample, by definition, must include a sampling from all the original data...
...It uses statistical procedures which are seriously flawed...
...Had the CBS examples been the result of a random sampling of the Efron data, and had they been valid criticisms, CBS probably would have succeeded in "killing" The News Twisters and most people would have adjudged the network's action as justifiable homicide...
...As documentation for these statements, Salant appended to his release a CBS Study of TNT and an analysis of Efron methodology...
...Early in the day he escaped from a prison in San Jose...
...How CBS Tried to Kill a Book, then, is Miss Efron's defense of TNT and her answers to the CBS charges...
...And no sooner did the last American POW's leave Hanoi than those POW's now at home began telling of grizzly tortures at the hands of their erstwhile captors...
...Unfortunately for CBS, TNT is still alive and Edith Efron is screaming murder...
...Although this number seems small when compared to the more than 300 stories Miss Efron analyzed, they gain significance when CBS tells us they are the result of a random sampling, a "spot check...
...Baron Von Kannon...
...Yet the CBS spot check failed to deal with any of it...
...CBS News president Richard Salant recognized the importance of TNT and on October 11, 1971-the same day TNT was published - issued a statement attempting to refute Miss Efron's findings...
...According to TNT, during the seven weeks prior to the 1968 presidential election, network news tended to be "strongly biased in favor of the Democratic-liberal-left axis of opinion, and strongly biased against the Republican-conservative-right axis of opinion...
...However, American planes did continue to bomb communist forces in Cambodia, and communists did continue hostile ground actions in South Vietnam...
...Of course, some areas of the country are being harder hit by the spastic economy than are others...
...Hans Pfeat, a twenty-four-year-old farmer, for stealing two truck loads of cow manure from a Pomeranian dairy...
...Radio Brazzaville has reported that Congolese head of state, Major Marien Ooof Ngouabi has won the Medal for Anti-imperialist Struggle - last year Major Ngouabi returned his nation's only Coca-Cola vending machine to the C.I.A...
...Despite claims to the contrary, the CBS Study was not a spot check of the Efron data and it did not refute the Efron findings...
...When a network chooses to treat the question as CBS has, it is doing a great disservice to society...
...CBS made no attempt to refute this mass of documentation...
...Meanwhile Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley aroused the city's fiscal conservatives by ordering the elimination of all municipally owned comfort stations, whereupon The Chicago Tribune sponsored a contest to devise a suitable monument in his honor...
...Dick Gregory, who had renounced solid foods in protest of the war, can go back to beefsteak, and Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, who had given up brushing their teeth, can return Western Civilization to their mouths...
...production of gonorrhea had reached a record high last year...
...Consisting of items such as "Muskie praises Humphrey as an impressive man" (CBS, 104-68) and "Eldridge Cleaver opposes the war" (CBS, 10-31-68), non-editorial opinion is generally easy to classify as "pro" or "con" and easy to refute if wrongly classified...
...In fact, it totally ignored what Miss Efron calls "the bulk of TNT's findings," the huge mass of opinion voiced by people other than the newscasters...
...Nevertheless these have been boom times for some Americans, and two New York travel agencies announced tours aimed especially at the homosexual market...
...after personally casting a hex on it...
...Apparently those who did not sign some kind of confession or greet Jane Fonda were continuously tortured and some perished...
...The CBS spot check did not do this...
...The American Social Health Association announced that the U.S...
...High prices forced the Agriculture Department to stop buying canned luncheon meat for some 2.6 million needy people...
...It should be pointed out that this type of opinion is very simple and straightforward...
...Instead it chose to, well, I don't pretend to know the answer to this question...
...All of this of course seems to indicate that the war is officially over...
...Though presented in a sometimes complex, sometimes emotional manner, Miss Efron's case is sound...
...It does so with a distinct bias which produces gross distortions of fact...
...But UNESCO startled citizens of the world when it revealed that the Malagasy Republic contains about 2.4 million illiterates over the age of fifteen in its total population of 7.8 million...
...They lose their significance again when we discover that, despite CBS's claim, they in fact are not the result of a random check...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
