Editorial/Journalism Amongst the Elks
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL JOURNALISM AMONGST THE ELKS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Just days before the dastardly Miss Janet Cooke and the Washington Post bespattered the elegant gray robes of the fourth estate by...
...And there was a new twist appropriate to the ideological hypochondria of our day, namely: a link between Eatherly's alleged military exploits and his death from cancer...
...The Board remains journalism's equivalent of the Elks...
...Now Wechsler had discovered that the interview never took place...
...Some are outright fabrications...
...Only the Washington Post spotted Hinck-ley in a porn parlor during his last night of freedom...
...Eatherly had no Distinguished Flying Cross...
...Based on our lazy journalists' favorite expedient-gossiping unidentified sources-the story alleges that a widely admired civil rights activist was a homosexual who preyed on his disciples, one of whom murdered him...
...The Pulitzer crowd still gathers to sing and to solemnize and to carry on the noble business of kissing each other on both cheeks...
...Twenty years ago the Communism of the Rev...
...I know...
...Things were also amiss in his 1973 story asserting that President Nixon two days after his 1969 inauguration personally authorized "a secret Marine Corps" invasion of Laos...
...Actually, it is because they are so absurdly serious that bogus news stories appear all the time...
...All he had done was fly a navigation plane over Hiroshima collecting information on weather conditions...
...Thus when they report news stories they are bowed down by all the bugaboos and primitive myths that idiotize third-rate graduate students sweating to please their haughty profs...
...Will the hoaxes and biased news stories end now that Janet Cooke has been unhorsed...
...Jim Jones he drones on about "how an egomaniac religious leader or political leader can lead the credulous into madness" and "the methods of paranoid leadership and the nature of evil...
...Not if the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board can help it...
...Every other account of Hinckley's last hours ignored this sizable chunk of time...
...Jones and John Hinckley's taste for porn would have been discussed obsessively...
...Who doubts that despite Janet Cooke's downfall there remain earnest Americans solemnly believing that there really is a little black boy gripped by a $50-a-day heroin habit somewhere...
...the prize withdrawn from Cooke was given to a Village Voice journalist for at least one story that is even trashier than Cooke's and scarcely better substantiated...
...Even he now admits that things were amiss in those lurid stories...
...There in the Plain Brown Wrapper adult book store, Hinckley spurned the advances of the store's homosexual clerk, perused the store's bondage literature, and took in a peep show...
...The duped journalists have yet to find out who hornswoggled them...
...In fact, our report in the last "Continuing Crisis" about a Jewish boy becoming Chief of the Sioux is just such a story...
...More recently, a so-called "Dissident Paper" on El Salvador was the occasion for bogus stories by Karen De Young in the Washington Post and Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Globe, along with Flora Lewis and Anthony Lewis in the New York Times...
...The latest word on this odoriferous news story is that James Wechsler of the New York Post believes he has found fraud...
...Jones was a fervent Communist, who had actually made overtures to the USSR...
...As for more recent hoaxes consider the bogus story of May 4, 1980 on CBS's "Sixty Minutes," the burden of which was that Henry Kissinger had once schemed with the Shah to buy more weapons...
...Lewis is one of the greatest urban sophisticates of all time, and so when he writes about the Rev...
...Or consider all those hour-by-hour accounts of John Hinckley's last days before his assault on President Reagan...
...There is no indication of it...
...Or what about Seymour Hersh's dubious contortions on Chile...
...Thus it is possible that this year's Pulitzer Prize for feature writing was given to not one but two bogus stories...
...He had not commanded the Hiroshima bombing mission and had never harmed the hair of a Japanese head-at least not in combat...
...Now fashion dictates that the tough-minded journalists avert their eyes...
...Did the journalists miss this, or were they simply reluctant to appear anxious about porn...
...The Times retold all the ancient claptrap about Eather-ly's tortured conscience...
...Is the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board worried...
...Moreover, if these news stories accord with the pious predilections of other journalists they take on a life of veritable immortality...
...Of course they heave up news stories that are severely biased...
...Shoddy journalism like this could render the Archbishop of Canterbury a homosexual, though he is more fit to defend himself...
...He has filed a complaint with the National News Council...
...Yet in 1978, when Eatherly finally gave up the ghost, the New York Times dutifully reported that in 1945 he had "radioed the B-29 Enola Gay to drop its atomic bomb...
...It is perhaps tasteless of me to mention this, but the piece concluded that journalistic hoaxes are rare today because journalists are so "serious...
...Many journalists consider themselves adepts in the wonder of social science, a pretension that rattles their vision...
...He was awarded the 1962 Hiroshima Award "for outstanding contributions to world peace," and one of England's "Angry Young Men," John Wain, composed a poem whose last lines sobbed "Say nothing of love, or thanks, or penitence: Say only 'Eatherly, we have your message.'" Well, the real message was that here was humbug...
...Passed off as an "official document" from American foreign policy experts alarmed by secret Carter administration plans for El Salvador, we now know that the document was a forgery...
...The touching piety of many of our journalists and their faithful adherence to quack liberalism makes them prime suckers for hoaxes and, occasionally, willing hoaxers...
...It is a hoax, the Arabs can relax...
...Just days before the dastardly Miss Janet Cooke and the Washington Post bespattered the elegant gray robes of the fourth estate by hoodwinking a hapless Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board, there appeared a swell piece about bogus news stories in the Wall Street Journal...
...The story's author implied in the piece that she had gained information from an interview with the murderer of the deceased...
...The hoax began when a larcenous dissipator recently discharged from the Army Air Corps, Major Claude Robert Eatherly, palmed himself off on a credulous reporter as the highly decorated (the Distinguished Flying Cross) World War II pilot who had bombed Hiroshima and-hounded by guilt-entered upon a life of self-destructive petty crime...
...Like a timorous student in Professor Balderdash's seminar, he is too sophisticated to mention that the Rev...
...For bias, consider Anthony Lewis's recent column on Jonestown in the illustrious New York Times...
...My favorite journalistic legend is the Eatherly story, a story that went through many recastings and has endured for more than three decades...
...He became an instant media hero, and a sensation with the peace movement...
...Occasionally I have retold such news stories, only to be corrected by careful readers...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
