Media / The Road to Anthony Lewis
Rodman, Peter W.
become, "What does the women's movement want?" I t ' s hard to find ar~ answer because when one b e g i n s to study f e m i n i s t thought one is forever at the edge of incoherence. That is...
...sooner or later one begins to rail against the way things a r e - - n e v e r mind t h a t n a t u r e may have graced women in very special ways...
...America's world role and position went through something else: a domestic, i n t e l l e c t u a l uph e a v a l . The media played a major part in it: reflecting it, affected by it, and, undeniably, contributing to it...
...City, tUta, zip I Contributions to AIM are tax-deductible \L 1129 J Not surprisingly, it isn't a book the media are eager to promote...
...It explains its alliance with the Left, which cannot be due to the way women are t r e a t e d in c o u n t r i e s calling themselves Marxist...
...that America wasted the world's resources, exploited the Third World, sustained tyrants in power, provoked the arms race, and either deliberately courted conflict or constantly missed opportunities for peace...
...I hope t h a t nature proves as resilient as she is supposed to be...
...Are women "merely" equal to men or are they superior...
...ofT.r«etAm.ric.ataco»tofon.y$3o DSend me a copy of Target America for $10 postpaid, and with a moneyback guarantee SubSCribe tO the AIM Report tOday DCheck enclosed...
...The first has to do with changes in the parties' legal environment brought about by the efforts of three generations of reformers...
...The Pentagon compiler of the Pentagon Papers, Leslie Gelb, points out in his own book about the war that the decision was not made until early 1965...
...What accounts for this apparently terminal weakness in the party system...
...It is too useful: It conveniently allows many who supported the war in its early phase to disavow responsibility...
...But as many observers from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Joseph Kraft have noted, these changes created a new media elite, and the new elite, for a variety of psychological and sociological reasons, became a champion of what Moynihan called the "adversary c u l t u r e . " It became an article of ideological faith of this new elite that American power was a source of much of the world's problems: that American corporations determined American foreign policy...
...The only good thing one can say for the spread of Herpes II is t h a t it may be n a t u r e ' s way of fighting a g a i n s t the a t t e m p t to divorce sex from risk...
...AFTER CBS did its notorious hatchet job on General William C. Westmoreland last January, Gen...
...The most important was the coming of the direct primary, instituted in the early years of the century and gathering momentum in each decade since then...
...One segment of the s e r i e s was e n t i t l e d , "How We Can Win...
...Today, as the horrors of Communist rule in Indochina have prompted a healthy revisionist literature shedding new light on the moral case for the American effort there, the theme of government deception seems ironically to be taking on special importance as the last refuge of those s t r u g g l i n g to salvage the antiwar position...
...Marines landed somewhere, that the other guys were supposed to be scared...
...Everyone should read the AIM Report...
...The resentment of nature is the key to the women's movement...
...What seems obvious to me at least is that powerful strains on the consensus have always existed but until recently these were contained within a strong, resilient two-party system...
...Not only that: The loss of patronage also cost parties both...
...The c a n a r d of government deception persists nevertheless...
...BECAUSE this is a book so many would like to spike, you may have troubW finding it in your loci bookstore...
...Why all this happened is a subject I leave to better qualified analysts of the American psyche...
...That is probably because feminists never seem to know whether to argue t h a t women are exactly like men, so that all attempts to point out differences are sexist, or t h a t women are so completely diff e r e n t t h a t all a t t e m p t s to think of common humanity have to be opposed as a s e x i s t plot...
...Martin F. Herz did the same with his study of The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972, showing how the media's bitter hostility distorted coverage of the nature and impact of the December 1972 bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong...
...we just want to do what comes naturally...
...Andrei Sakharov...
...they did, however, contribute to how Americans t h o u g h t about Vietnam--and about their country...
...And when one hears all the idiocies about sexual harassment one knows t h a t - - b u t that is a story for another time...
...Distinguished foreign correspondent Robert Elegant gave i m p o r t a n t evidence in Encounter (August 1981) of the s u b t l e and n o t - s o - s u b t l e b i a s e s of many of his former colleagues in the Saigon press corps...
...The self-confident role of world l e a d e r s h i p t h a t America played as recently as the 1960s had suffered a body blow by the 1970S...
...And the answers to many similar questions Get and read Target America by James L. Tyson...
...Accuracy In Media, America's media wai wants you to read Target America...
...In my view that is a reversal of cause and e f f e c t - - i f indeed it makes any sense at all to talk about an American political consensus that once flourished but has now gone to seed...
...How far we have come since then...
...We offering It at the spe $10, postpaid (list pi EVEN BETTER, we v a copy of Target Am absolutely free If you subscribe to ti one year at only $30 Twice a month, the < exposes serious errc If you would like to know: • Who was behind the media war on the CIA...
...AIM Report errors and distortions, propaganda and disinformation in our media...
...A showing of systematic antiwar bias would not, I assume, be irrelevant to the required proof of legal malice...
...Practically everyone now agrees that the traditional American twoparty system is in an advanced state of dissolution...
...I do hope she prevails, defended by both men and women who find it natural to assist n a t u r e . I hope the day will r e t u r n when we can once more c e l e b r a t e sexuality as gloriously as did the writer of the Proverb from which I have already quoted: There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air...
...If CBS, as reported, hopes to put the war on trial, the good general has an opportunity to put CBS's war coverage on trial...
...The most o u t s t a n d i n g paradox of the l a s t f i f t e e n y e a r s is t h a t a movement professing to be interested in liberation has everywhere produced a new sexual c o n s t r a i n t . Fewer women now want to argue with men --bristling is the mode...
...And practically everyone believes that this has come about as a result of the prior dissolution of the century-old American political consensus...
...The author stile t eviewed...
...The extraordinary timidity about the use of our power, pounded deep into the American psyche by the Vietnam failure, Peter W. Rodman served on the National Security Council staff in the Nixon and Ford Administrations...
...What journalist admitted that he and others had been "intermediaries for a lying and criminal propaganda—ingenuous spokesmen for tyranny in the name of liberty...
...It became a key weapon in the counterculture assault on the legitimacy of all American institutions, in keeping with I . F . S t o n e ' s dictum: "Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed...
...Sakharov explained that these include "a great many writers and journalists...and heads of press and television...
...In the bad old days of relatively strong and effective parties, both major parties were ideological shambles...
...aplenty in this...
...No longer can it accommodate these strains, which after all are no more severe than those it faced during such periods as 1896-1912 and 19301940...
...Unlike books that purvey propaganda hostile to this country, It won't be enthusiastically reviewed...
...A huge gap opened up between these elite attitudes and the traditional convictions of most Americans...
...Galbraith was no fool...
...The greatest force for political change, he predicted, would be the intellectual community and its influence over the new educated class that would come to dominate all spheres of American life--business, government, the professions, the mbdia, culture...
...It also explains why the women's movement may begin by promoting sexual equality, but forever bends in the direction of assaulting sexuality as such...
...presumably he was making an accurate judgment of the congressional and public mood...
...There are irony and paradox Karl O'Lessker is a senior editor of The American Spectator and professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...
...Ronald Reagan cannot possibly share such an abjectly timid view of the American role in the world...
...From « letter smuggled out of the USSR and printed in The New York Times, June 8, 1980...
...Nevertheless it can no longer be doubted that, for many of the major national media, faithful reportage soon turned into advocacy...
...But with the 1960s came the Harvard Crimson generation: the hotshot, upwardly mobile, sophisticated analysts of the world scene-not police reporters but aspiring intellectuals...
...A AIM Ronnrt the AIM Report for 30...
...Two broad answers strike me as most persuasive, though each itself is far from being an uncaused cause...
...Today, a p p a r e n t l y , it is different...
...The New York Times, in its June 1971 expos~ of the "Pentagon P a p e r s , " f o s t e r e d the notion that massive deception was involved in the way we got into Vietnam...
...Another triumph of the reform movement, contemporary with the spread of the direct primary, was the adoption of civil service and merit systems of public employment, stripping the parties of much of their traditional patronage and leaving them with hardly any way to reward or discipline the rank-and-file party workers...
...It is as forthrightly sexual b e i n g s t h a t we are most n a t u r a l . When eros p o s s e s s e s us we do not care for d i f f e r e n c e s of race, of nationality, of social station...
...There was a time when one's image of journalists was out of The Front Page: the brash, graying, streetwise, poker-playing, lower-middleclass city reporters covering crime and local politics, which usually overlapped...
...won't be lionized on TV talk shows...
...Rarely has a society undergone such a psychological transformation in such a brief time, short of wholesale political revolution, massive physical destruction, or overwhelming d e f e a t by a foreign enemy...
...The charge of deceit soon spread from the war to foreign policy in general...
...Academics, reformers, and the better class of journalists never tired of pointing with a mixture of pity and horror to the fact that Northern urban liberals sat side by side in the Democratic party with Southern rural reactionaries, while Taftites and Goldwaterites shared the Republican mantle with liberal Eastern internationalists of the Dewey-Lodge-Rockefeller persuasion...
...General Westmoreland's libel suit against CBS promises to be a major event...
...The media did not invent the war or our d i f f i c u l t i e s in it...
...One of its h e a d l i n e s charged that the Johnson Administration had already decided to launch the bombing campaign over North Vietnam at a time when LBJ was telling American voters before the 1964 election that he would not send American boys to fight in Asian wars...
...It's a long way from Ernie Pyle to Anthony Lewis...
...When the President first dispatched the Marines to Beirut in August 1982, he was obliged to give the Congress and the public effusive reassurances that the Marines would come running home to mommy instantly if so much as a firecracker went off in Beirut...
...THE BOOK THEY'D LIKE TO SPIKE allegedly misrepresenting to his superiors the size and strength of the enemy, to make it appear that he was winning the war...
...Henry Fairlie wrote a corrective piece in the Washington Monthly in May 1973, showing t h a t it was all nonsense: Every step taken into Vietnam was public knowledge...
...Flower child Charles Reich popularized the idea in The Greening of America, acknowledging his debt to Galbraith...
...I t used to be the case, when the U.S...
...Today by contrast both parties are ideologically more coherent than they have ever been--and yet are falling apart...
...He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed...
...It is an important book that should be read by everyone...
...This of course is the Vietnam trauma, which is very much still with us...
...And more and more Americans find less and less reason to affiliate themselves with either...
...Nobel laureate...
...Westmoreland's advice...
...As recounted by S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman in the October/November 1981 Public Opinion, a comprehensive survey of leading reporters, editors, producers, and news executives from the major national news organizations revealed that 81 percent of them had voted for George McGovern in 1972...
...I do not know, but signs abound to the effect that nature has been wounded, that in 1982 sex isn't what it was in 1967...
...TARGET AMERICA, a new book by James Tyson, carefully explores the promotion of Soviet influence in the United States through the insinuation of propaganda in our news media...
...One of the f i r s t to document this was Peter Braestrup in his Big Story, an exhaustive analysis of How the American p r e s s and television helped to turn the Tet offensive of 1968 from a Viet Cong military s e t b a c k into a crushing American political defeat...
...What powerful American newspaper launched its own campaign against the neutron bomb only a few weeks before the Soviets began their worldwide campaign against this weapon...
...It is difficult to know the answer feminists would give...
...Of course this reflects the great cultural and social change in America during the postwar period: the explosion of higher education, the democratization of the world of thought and opinion...
...Under the blows of profound social change, however, that system is now crumbling...
...Neither we nor the Chinese have yet fully recovered from our respective cultural revolutions...
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...It explains the movement's grim mood, the absence in it of humor, and of g r a t i t u d e for the world we inhabit...
...But one cannot a r g u e t h a t disagreements about the " b i g " questions attest to the vitality of feminist thought, for in one momentous r e s p e c t all f e m i n i s t s a g r e e . The whole movement distrusts nature...
...a t no moment, as the commitment was made, were the American p r e s s or the American people in the dark about what was being done...
...That is why it puts all its eggs into the rickety basket called "socialization," and does its best to deny that one can socialize with the grain or against it...
...The operative system throughout the nation is that ambitious candidates offer themselves to the voters on their own motion or at the behest of interest groups, and then the party is blessed or stuck with whoever emerges with the nomination...
...Its effect was to deprive state and local party organizations of the power to select their own nominees for office...
...As Abraham Lincoln observed in 1858, " h e who molds public sentiment goes deeper than h e who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions...
...the way of a serpent upon a rock...
...Within a few years, CBS had become a consistent and powerful opponent of the war...
...took the form, in some quarters, of a belief in the immorality of the use of our power...
...To: AIM, 1341 C St., N.W., Washington, D. C. 20OO5 DSend me the AIM Report and a FREE copy Take Gen...
...Can t h i s o n s l a u g h t on n a t u r e succeed...
...But one can blame a hostile environment only so long...
...Westmoreland said, "Accuracy in Media did a fantastic job of exposing the dishonest smear that CBS perpetrated...
...But the incessant and pervasive propagation of the fashionable opinions was bound to have its effect...
...and the way of a man with a maid...
...Professor Galbraith, in The New IndustrialState, declared that the role of the intellectual was "strategic...
...Witness "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam D e c e p t i o n , " CBS's January 1982 hatchet job on General William Westmoreland for 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 "The West and developing countries are filled with citizens who by reason of their positions are able to promote Soviet influence and expansionist goals...
...It would be true poetic justicc if the antiwar media's Parthian shot at General Westmoreland should backfire and turn into a devastating challenge to the veracity, motivation, and ethics of CBS's conduct throughout the Vietnam war...
...Even the strongest bastions of "machine" politics now have crumbled, and today not even the late Mayor Daley's heirs and assigns can dictate the outcome of a Chicago Democratic primary...
...the way of a hip in the midst of the sea...
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...It is clear, at a minimum, that a major change took place in the social composition of the American journalistic profession in the generation after World War II...
...How extensive is the far left lobby and who makes it up...
...Fewer men want to be bold with women--all vestiges of courage are now conside r e d to be a form of d e s p i c a b l e machismo...
...I t is hard to believe, but true, that in the l a t e summer of 1965 CBS television ran a four-part series on the Vietnam war, s u p p o r t i n g the Johnson Administration...
...During the Vietnam era, the liberal media and liberal Congress developed a symbiotic relationship, with exposes in one forum feeding new investigations in the other--Senator Frank Church's intelligence investigations being one glaring, and damaging, example...
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...Much of t e l e v i s i o n ' s impact was inherent in the medium: Seeing the grim r e a l i t y of war every night in o n e ' s living room was bound to corrode the national spirit...
Vol. 15 • December 1982 • No. 12
