Editorial/CBS Beholds the Noose/The Calling
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
vacuum will be filled by a vision--the vision of socialism. The principal item on the agenda then becomes: building a new society. First and foremost, this entails tearing down the old one. In...
...The important point to realize about all this is that the material failure of socialism wherever it is implemented does not undermine the vision in the slightest...
...Never was he identified as a paid consultant...
...As a result, they believe that the whole lot should be swept away and replaced b y . . . A New Society...
...In 1980, education accounted' for over six percent of our Gross National Product...
...Most observers believe that the Yank high schooler is given less academic work than his .Japanese or European counterparts...
...fession magazines: " I Took Hormones To Enlarge My Bust And Cried On Prom Night...
...How he compares with the Somali or the Papuan is best left uninvestigated...
...Actually the educator's work is almost as prosaic as yesterday's dirt f a r m e r ' s . Furthermore it is almost always less productive...
...The real problems reside with those in education bureaucracies, There are too many of these marplots...
...Facts arc facts, the ill-educated products of American education cannot legally be eaten or even smoked...
...Thanks to the pill and suchlike developments, many women were tricked by men into saying " y e s " when they formerly would have said " n o , " and they ended up hating men, hating America, hating the West...
...Mexico, which has been partially socialist for most of this century, could be the next to go the whole way...
...Feminism in its more virulent forms is a manifestation of it...
...In a very p e r s u a s i v e cover story TV Guide described the documentary as a " s m e a r , " incorporating practices violating CBS's own official guidelines and some s u r p r i s i n g l y hamfisted deceptions...
...The Vietnam war was another experience which seems to have destroyed some Americans' allegiance to their own country, and to the West generally...
...Why should it...
...He is General William C. Westmoreland, and last month he fried a libel suit against CBS for $120 million...
...The stories are riveting, beginning on a note of pathos: "Yes, I took those hormones to enlarge my bust, and woke up the next day, prom day, with a mustache...
...It is simply the system tha[ permits exchange and agreement, and as such is the only moral economic system...
...Remember the he-man magazines...
...It alighted upon a dubious conspiracy theory and doctored the evidence in its documentary to validate the theory...
...They run articles with such titles as "I Was Held Captive By 30 Amazons And Survived...
...Evidently, the conditions that give rise to this apostasy are abundantly present...
...Well, television news chose a different model...
...The t a r g e t s of the documentary were never allowed to see the interviews of LlbertyPress hbertyChss s Introduction to the Study of The Law of the Constitution By A. V. Dicey Forward by Roger E. Michener Dicey's classic study of the British Constitution and the rule of law was first published in 1885...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...he consequence of our easygoing schools is that the clever fellow gets A's without much work...
...THE CALHNG I n every nation on this orb there is the noble calling...
...It is an amusing irony...
...My boyfriend hates Hitler...
...In a litigious society such as ours any constriction of the libel laws could transform freedom of expression into a nightmare...
...A sudden calamity would do the trick, however, and maybe nothing else will...
...Cleverness is not wisdom...
...For those of us who feel t h a t u n f e t t e r e d expression is one of the great strengths of American public discourse, this is not good news...
...Yet one of television news' recent targets is not laughing...
...Alas, there are in the Republic many financially strapped taxpayers who could master that level of literacy without ever meeting an American teacher...
...Until recently these poor souls w~re growing in number almost apace with the growth of our appropriations for education...
...All hailed the sturdy plowman...
...He says that he never did anything of the sort and that CBS has palmed off a colossal lie...
...Their pay is often too low...
...Frequently these are the poor, but more frequently these are kids from ordinary families...
...The General made his original complaint three days after the documentary was aired, creating a controversy that TV Guide decided to inv o s t i g a t e . The r e s u l t of that investigation was bad news for CBS...
...They cost too much and demand too l i t t l e - - a t least in academics...
...The last edition Dicey himself prepared was the eighth, which appeared in 1915...
...All the self-righteous blah notwithstanding, students are not getting the education they need...
...Only in the twentieth century, however, has full socialism been achieved...
...The only thing that will-really destroy the faith in socialism is the restoration of the traditional allegiance or faith the loss of which provoked the socialist dream in the first place...
...No one cares if the pulps palm off fiction as fact...
...They could doubtless say the same of college students...
...Right now being young in America is a bore--and a waste...
...People will not lay down their lives for a bigger GNP, and they will not pledge allegiance to capitalism, nor should they...
...Nonetheless the average graduate from an American high school was in more of a haze than his 1970 equivalent...
...B102 Indianapolis, IN 46250 t h e i r accusers or g r a n t e d second interviews to correct misstatements made e a r l i e r . CBS did screen the interviews of other witnesses for a witness whose position abutted the thesis of conspiracy, and it did this so as to persuade the witness to come on stronger in a second interview...
...often it thwarts wisdom...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...In England it is the shopkeeper, in France, the intellectual, in Russia, the jailer, in Iran, the r o g u e - - b u t I wander...
...1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 . . . . . " . . . . . . o ' ' ' ' ' o ' ' ' ' ' o o . - . . o . . . - . , . , o , o o o o . . . . o o o o o o o . o . o . o o . o ~ o o o o o o l . o o o . * o * o o * o e * * o o o E D I T 0 R I A L ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 , o . , o . . . ~ , . . . o . o . , . . . . ~ . . . I . . . . . . , , i ~ , . , . . . ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 , ~ . . , . . . . , . , , . , ~ _9 . . . ~ * . o ~ * e e * o o q c . . . . . . . , ~ 1 7 6 o e * e l o ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 CBS BEHOLDS THE NOOSE Way back in the 1960s when television news beganto metamorphose from its modest and sober format into the Wagnerian spectacle that it is today, who would have envisaged the journalistic model it Would emulate...
...But something more is needed: It is not an end in itself...
...Yet the educators still heave up a r t f u l sophistries, denying the obvious and insisting that theirs is a glorious achievement...
...Without a challenging education they will never have the chance to develop their minds commensurate with their potential-and their potential might far surpass that of the clever fellow...
...This LibertyClassics volume presents that edition rather than later posthumous editions in which Dicey's own work was further updated by an editor...
...The situation in America seems bad today because the number of apostates and (internal) defectors seems to be growing, not declining...
...The saddest casualties of our schools, however, are the students who are not so clever or who come from families where learning and even ambition are scorned...
...Years ago, the plowman was bumped from our fables and prayers by the educator, molder of America's youth...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid inU.S, dollars...
...Now this whole controversy is headed for a libel court...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 37...
...On the other hand, the Falklands war had the opposite result in England, enhancing the sense of national allegiance and thereby undermining socialism--at least for a season...
...something more inspiring than consumerism, the consumer movement, getting a better house, a bigger car, and so on...
...I do not mean that capitalism is "immoral" or anything of the kind...
...Give them the right to discipline their charges...
...Remember the conby R. Ernmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Remember, an integral part of the vision is the destruction of the old society as a preliminary to building a new one...
...Yet if it is true that CBS knowingly broadcast a " s m e a r , " libeling General Westmoreland and deceiving its audience, CBS is a genuine menace to our First Amendment rights...
...America is clearly going to have to regain some sense of mission, or purpose...
...qP Jl...
...These are some of the entries in the balance sheet as I see it...
...And there are others who will roost in our schools for years and still approach the above line with befuddlement and fear...
...Prepayment i s required on all orders not for resale...
...Yet the most disturbing of TV Guide's charges are that CBS misr e p r e s e n t e d its story, and that it actually edited an interview so as to imply falsely that Westmoreland was conspiring to deceive...
...Anyone who watches the morning and evening news shows, the documentaries, and the public affairs broadcasts now knows that the models for television news have been the pulps: he-man stuff for the guys, true confessions for the gals...
...CBS withheld information t h a t cast doubt on its thesis...
...Hardcover $15.00, Soficover $7.00...
...Of course, there are still some Jews for whom the "vision of a new society" is more compelling than the actual one at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, but they remain a distinct minority, even if vocal in the news media...
...Once America's noble calling was farming...
...he who arose with the sun to follow his jackass unto nightfall, hands steady on the plow, shoulders forward, always a l e r t for those derelict pollutants occasionally dropped from his hooved colleague...
...And not a big bushy one like Bill Buckner's which might at least cover my moles, but an eentsy-teentsy one very similar to Hitler's...
...But teenagers are not moving as far beyond the 'three R's' as they used t o . " The American student once beyond education's basics does not spend enough time around books, acquiring knowledge and developing a critical mind...
...According to Christopher Jencks and James Crouse, the problem is not "that primary school children are not mastering the 'three R's' as well as they used to...
...While Dicey's discussion of British law is of interest in its own right, his discussion of the concept of the rule of law will be of at least equal interest to contemporary readers...
...In subsequent editions he tried to take account of intervening constitutional developments...
...continued on page 37) 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 EDITORIAL (continued from page 6) 6 6 I f You Can Read This, Thank A Teacher" the bumper stickers proclaim in perfumed attempts to honeyfogle the taxpayer out of still more of his paycheck...
...He feels that he was libeled by CBS's documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," wherein the thesis was that the General presided over "a conspiracy, at th~ highest levels of American THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 5 military intelligence, to suppress and a l t e r critical intelligence on the enemy...
...Other testing programs attest to the wretched trend...
...Not at all...
...And give their charges more books and more homework...
...But what good is this empty achievement...
...There were Elysian questions for friendly witnesses and blow-torch questions for CBS's prey...
...if anything, they are doing better...
...But give the schoolteachers their raise...
...Let us have higher standards from them, efficiency and economy...
...So the material failure is always seen as the end of the old dispensation rather than the beginning of a new one...
...It still seems to be spreading...
...In the long run he remains doltish, a semi-literate to be victimized by the charlatans and hysterics of our age...
...The long decline in average SAT scores is well known...
...Television news has mixed all this into one appalling bouillabaisse, and General Westmoreland is irate...
...A new flock of build,a-new-society visionaries was thereby created...
...The confession magazines run stories of broken hearts, trauma, and macabre illnesses...
...So, am I against paying our schoolteachers more...
...According to TV Guide, CBS hired Westmoreland's chief accuser as a paid consultant and interviewed him on the show as though he were a disinterested observer...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...Actually, as with so many of our publicly supported endeavors, the achievement is hollow, the solemnities surrounding it are, upon examination, the whoops of braggarts...
...but if network news acts with such abandon people are bound to care, and Americans will in due course see t h e i r right to free expression diminished...
...In his recent book on socialism, Igor Shafarevich makes the point that this "vision" has been experienced time and again since Plato, and it has frequently been embodied in literary form (utopian accounts, with unvarying, repetitive features characterizing the socialist dream) and sometimes in political form...
...In violation of its guidelines CBS rehearsed the aforementioned paid consultant for his interview...
...When Gloria Steinem said that feminism is an integral part of socialism, she was exactly right...
...The he-man magazines run stories of dastardly deeds, bizarre and somewhat humiliating adventures, men tested at the limits...
...Jencks and Crouse, writing in last spring's issue of the Public Interest, estimate that "high school students do less academic work today than they did 20 years ago...
...It presented as fact matters that it knew were still in dispute and in one case matters that were clearly false...
...It is very hard at the moment to see what can possibly restore this sense of purpose or mission...
...Offsetting the Vietnam and the sexual liberation disasters there has been the restoration of Israel, which has greatly diminished the "alienation" of the Jews, who were important "carriers" of socialism as long as there was no Jewish state...
...Most of us would expect television news to follow news standards comparable to those of high quality newspapers, focusing on the same news stories and according them the same dignified coverage...
...besides they are not the chief cause of America's easygoing and occasionally anarchic schools...
...To order~ or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
Vol. 15 • November 1982 • No. 11
