Presswatch / Access

Barnes, Fred

PRESSWATCH ACCESS by Fred Barnes Faith Ryan Whittlesey and Ronald Reagan are onto something in their critique of press coverage of the Administration's policy and actions in Central America, but...

...There are references to the size of Nicaragua's army, but no persistent, eyewitness coverage...
...News & World Report and the New Republic deserve considerable credit, as do several British newspapers...
...The other item was entitled "Man of the Hour," and it wasn't about Eddie Murphy...
...what the Syrians and PLO were doing got far less attention because of reporters' limited access to them...
...But there is a broader problem beyond that of any particular story or stories...
...that problem is access...
...yes, that Twiggy, the former model and current Broadway star...
...is doing in Central America...
...No satellite hookup allows us to peer between the Afghan mountains to see what is happening...
...The nature of television news demands that it show whatever horror is available...
...But in the interstices of those beams is darkness, and in that darkness a whole war is being hidden.'' Mention to your friends that you read a great article in Parade magazine and guess what the response will be...
...And it, more than any paper in the country, heralded the coming of the economic recovery, correctly interpreting and then playing up indicators of good times to come...
...Three, "a democracy can wage a quick war if it is on an isolated, faraway island-which enables it to successfully control the news...
...But in the New York Times Book Review, Alan K. Dershowitz,* professor of law at Harvard University, insisted that "the complex truths uncovered by this thorough assessment of the evidence, much of it new, will please neither side in the rancorous controversy...
...Fat chance of getting that approved...
...They're right in suggesting that many reporters, for purely ideological reasons, oppose the Administration's approach in Central America...
...Again, one reason is access...
...Summers says the American effort was not aimed at the enemy's "center of gravity," which was the North Vietnamese army...
...American reporters have full and largely unfettered access to whatever the U.S...
...It had an enormous impact on coverage of the Vietnam war...
...Most likely, you'll encounter more sneers...
...They were shamefully treated by the court and by some of the officials responsible for prosecuting them...
...But it doesn't rank with the overriding truth confirmed by the Radosh-Milton book: the Rosenbergs did it...
...Uncovering CIA support for the anti-Sandinista rebels took no reportorial coup...
...Meanwhile, in skewering a Rosenbergs-as-guiltless book in the New York Review of Books, Radosh and Milton wrote, "Painful as it may be for those who have long held the Rosenbergs innocent, the evidence available today makes it clear that they did indeed take part in an espionage conspiracy...
...Parade failed to mention this conclusion by Summers, choosing instead to trumpet Sum-mers's view that public support is essential if American troops are to be sent into combat...
...The stories are compact and designed to appeal to a mass audience...
...The example of the British versus the Argentines fits here...
...Wattenberg adds that "the new rules of media warfare establish a double standard for all open societies...
...No newsmen swarm across the scene...
...But not always...
...Yet the distortion has ordinarily not been deliberate, and, in fact, surprisingly few individual stories have been wholly objectionable...
...What, for instance, would happen if an American reporter asked to accompany Cuban soldiers during a mission in Nicaragua...
...And if you're worried about what your friends might say, you can always wrap a copy of the New York Times around it...
...lost the war in Vietnam...
...Atrocities by rebels in El Salvador get only fleeting mention in the press...
...What Americans and their allies are doing looms large, if only because it's easy to report...
...Cuban and Soviet activities shrink nearly to nonexistence...
...But the full-scale war in Afghanistan "goes on year after year out of sight," their New Yorker lamented in its "Talk of the Town" section last May...
...Their gist was that the United States and its allies are made out to be devils, while the rebels in El Salvador and the Sandinistas come off as good guys...
...One bit of newspaper lore has it that folks buy the paper and immediately deposit all but the sports pages in the trash...
...The world today is crisscrossed with beams bearing messages and lights...
...Well, at least they get what has become the best sports section around...
...reporters can't go to those countries to check for themselves...
...Radosh and Milton went into the project thinking the Rosenbergs innocent, but concluded otherwise...
...I'm a Conservative," she said...
...The result of the access problem is a dramatic disparity in coverage...
...One was about Twiggy...
...If that assuages the pro-Rosenberg set, fine...
...The phenomenon of sugarcoating a hard-to-swallow fact is with us again with the publication of The Rosenberg File, a book by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton that finds, on the basis of a study of government files and hundreds of interviews, that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets and that his wife, Ethel, though less involved, was also guilty...
...The sugarcoating comes in with the finding that the authorities acted improperly at times in the Rosenberg case...
...It skips the overwriting and sociological approach that mars so many sports sections, and concentrates on the results and stats in the four sports that matter-baseball, football, basketball, and hockey...
...Harry S. Summers, Jr., a strategist at the Army War College and the author of On Strategy, * a brilliant analysis of why the U.S...
...Its invasion of Lebanon last year was intricately covered by the world's press...
...For three decades the battle lines have been neatly drawn: One side has argued that the Rosenbergs were guilty and the process was fair, while the other side has argued that the Rosenbergs were innocent and the process was unfair...
...Without access to Laos and Cambodia, reporters consider one theory about yellow rain to be as good as another...
...These conclusions may not seem equivalent to you...
...The subject was Col...
...I voted for Margaret Thatcher, and I think she's the best thing to happen to Britain in the last few years...
...repeated atrocities by the Vietcong or North Vietnamese got practically none...
...A tiny contingent of American trainers seems like a division, and stories about possible expansion of the trainers in El Salvador from 55 to 125 take on a breathless, hellzapoppin' tone...
...PRESSWATCH ACCESS by Fred Barnes Faith Ryan Whittlesey and Ronald Reagan are onto something in their critique of press coverage of the Administration's policy and actions in Central America, but they haven't quite got hold of a major source of the problem...
...Five, "on non-islands, democracies can wage only short wars, telling the whole truth, all at once and immediately...
...Good luck...
...Or what if a TV reporter wanted to file an-interview with Soviet military advisers in Nicaragua or Cuba...
...The cognoscenti look down on such publications as philis-tine, frivolous even, and sometimes that assessment is correct...
...In a June editorial, the New York Times said the biologist had "compellingly described" his theory...
...The My Lai massacre of several hundred South Vietnamese civilians by American troops got lavish attention...
...That is bound to vindicate the folks who said as much all along...
...Maybe the editors just wanted to be upbeat...
...The uncomfortable conclusion reached by Mr...
...Instead, American and South Vietnamese troops mired themselves in peripheral counterinsurgency drives against the Vietcong...
...It's a case of knowing something is amiss, but not knowing exactly why it is...
...In a way, Afghanistan seems even more thoroughly forgotten in our world of instantaneous satellite coverage than it might have seemed in a more primitive era...
...Taking into account the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, El Salvador, the Falklands, and Lebanon, journalist Ben Wattenberg concluded that TV coverage had "unwittingly made it more difficult for free nations to operate in the real world...
...they didn't to me, either...
...It's too soon to pronounce either the Administration's theory or [the biologist's] as proven...
...Or try something like, isn't that new paper USA Today awfully interesting...
...The bee excrement hypothesis does not account for everything going on in Southeast Asia, but it would explain a lot about yellow rain," the editorial said...
...It seems excluded from what we have now come more and more to accept as reality...
...But covering what the Sandinistas and Cubans and Soviets are doing is something else again...
...And when a Harvard biologist comes up with another explanation-bees did it-ft is judged to have equal merit...
...Whittlesey, the White House director of public liaison, declared in a mid-August Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...that means there aren't many pieces on economic troubles in Indonesia...
...Why has the seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the use of toxic "yellow rain" in Laos and Cambodia, supplied by the Soviets and dispensed by the Vietnamese, been treated so skeptically in the press...
...She turns out to be enormously appealing, and something of a political anomaly in the entertainment milieu...
...To sugarcoat this, they add that "the Rosenbergs died essentially for political reasons . . . [and] were-as the critics charge- made the scapegoats for American insecurity over the loss of its nuclear monopoly...
...The Israelis thus were painted as brutal aggressors, the Syrians and PLO as forces for peace and tranquility...
...Our horror is available: our adversaries' is not...
...Four, "only at great cost can democracies get involved even minimally if the battlefield is an open country...
...But listen, nobody could help the depression that's been going on in the world, and I really think she's done a lot to help Britain out...
...Two, "roughly the same guidelines hold for non-free, non-Communist countries," such as Iraq and Iran...
...Some publications have gallantly tried to cover the Soviet offensive there...
...The impression left is of a whopping American intervention to combat a miniscule threat...
...It conveys more sports information in a day than most papers do in a week...
...Syrian atrocities in Lebanon-and in Syria itself-have gone virtually uncovered in the press...
...For anyone who likes to study box scores or other chunks of agate, it is a feast...
...She's better than all those awful kind of left-wing men who are kind of . . . ugh...
...A sneer, for sure...
...Presidio Press, $12.95...
...If you didn't read Parade last August 14, for instance, you missed two unusual articles...
...And because American correspondents had no access to the Vietcong in 1968, they didn't know the Tet Offensive was a devastating defeat for them...
...Their activities are skimpily covered because reporters aren't granted access...
...Radosh and Miss Milton is that although the Rosenbergs were guilty, 'the government's zeal [in prosecuting them] led to questionable tactics and eventually to a grave miscarriage of justice.'" Sorry, but it looks like one side is going to be more pleased than the other, for the battle involved one issue above all: were the Rosenbergs guilty...
...USA Today is filled with charts and lists, some of them quite interesting, some not...
...I know lots of people hate her...
...One, "Communist countries can wage long, brutal wars and pay very little for it," as in the case of the Soviets in Afghanistan, where there is "no access, no horror" to show on TV...
...The same trick will work when reading Parade, too...
...No reporters were around to see them or, afterwards, to piece together what had happened...
...Yet the threat facing the non-Communist countries appears small in comparison...
...The access dilemma is not a new one...
...If that's the case, they succeeded...
...Still, public recognition of Summers was refreshing, well deserved, and, considering the publication, surprising...
...He formulated five new "rules," all of which bear repeating...
...The most notable scene of uncovered horror is Afghanistan...
...interview with Lou Cannon of the Washington Post that the press is guilty of "deliberate distortion" in its coverage...
...Reagan, addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars a week later, said about the same...
...Where was their criticism off base...
...And she uttered what is to my mind the quotation of the year...
...As for USA Today, the five-day-a-week paper that the Gannett chain has published for a year now, it is the nation's first populist newspaper...
...Israel, too, has learned the downside of access...
...A common rap on USA Today is that its sports section excels but the rest of the paper stinks...

Vol. 16 • October 1983 • No. 10


 
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