The Media and the Panthers
Brudnoy, David
The Media and the Panthers David Brudnoy "Irresponsible" is a word not usually applied in New England to the operations of the New York Times and the Washington Post. But that charge was leveled...
...The other TV channels hereabouts have likewise been silent...
...Epstein's article demolished attorney Charles Garry's charges of December, 1969, that the police had murdered twenty-eight Panthers across the nation...
...There is no adequate excuse for making this kind of error in the first place and none for failing to pursue the truth behind the phony 'facts,' the Post mea-culpaed...
...After an extensive investigation lasting several months, Mr...
...Infuriated, outraged, shocked, dismayed-all the predictable reactions-Mr...
...Where is the hue and cry from the friends of Pantherism now...
...We used to call that sort of nonsense "McCarthyism" back in the days when the senator from Wisconsin was waving his little lists in the air, those lists with the names of fifty-one, thirty-six and eighteen Communists known to be in the State Department...
...Where was the comment then...
...Agnew's Fourth Law of Media Dynamics was verified too: if Liberals listen to anybody, they listen only to other Liberals...
...Nothing...
...Garry denied having written the book which appears with his name as author...
...But these exposes appeared not in an establishment journal like the New Yorker...
...But that charge was leveled against those journals by Harvard professor Edward Jay Epstein in a mid-February issue of the New Yorker magazine...
...But Epstein showed that the truth is not served by exaggerated charges "that are reported unverified, in the press and in consequence widely believed by the public...
...Epstein's devastating article confirms Agnew's Third Law of Media Dynamics: that is, the Liberal press, with few exceptions, will not print what it doesn't want to believe...
...Garry confronted Professor Epstein on David Frost's television program recently...
...Although the Chicago Tribune quickly wrote that Garry's charges were false, the media chose to believe Garry...
...Garry could do little but sputter that Epstein was a tool of the CIA, an agent of the FBI, a "congenital liar...
...Perhaps two of the alleged twenty-eight, Epstein concluded, were deliberately murdered by the police...
...The New York Times...
...It took an article in New Yorker last month to elicit a retraction from the Washington Post...
...Where was the comment then...
...On 18 July, Human Events columnist, James Jackson Kilpatrick, explained that the twenty-eight victims dwindled down to the Hampton-Clark shootings in Chicago the previous December...
...Epstein found that of the twenty-eight, most were killed by other Negroes, not by the police, some in inter-factional fighting -St...
...Garry's charge then became Truth and was immediately picked up and broadcast across the land...
...They appeared in Human Events, the leading weekly conservative journal...
...On 7 and 9 December 1969, the Times.repeated this charge as fact, and the Post stated flatly on 9 December that "a total of 28 Panthers died in clashes with the police since 1 January, 1968...
...The press reaction to Mr...
...The story doesn't end there, with deafening silence from the Liberal media...
...Later in January, 1970, the journal observed that Garry's list boiled down to so few that there was no way the deaths could be construed as a police conspiracy...
...he denied-and here's the beautiful part- that it made any difference whether twenty-eight or two were killed...
...Epstein showed that the facts were far different from Garry's charge, which the Panthers' lawyer repeated in a book some months later...
...We used to cry "foul" at Joe McCarthy's tactic...
...Valentine's Day revisited-others in marital squabbles...
...A few were killed by police after first attacking the police...
...Since the appearance of Epstein's article, WGBH has not seen fit to rectify the situation...
...On 17 January 1970, Human Events columnist, Victor Riesel, debunked the charges...
...The national conservative youth organization, Young Americans for Freedom, followed up the Human Events stories and published several articles refuting Garry's charges...
...The Boston educational TV channel, which devotes a lot of air time to presentation of the extremist Negro position, had allowed Charles Garry's lie to be broadcast on various occasions...
...We were right to do so then...
...WGBH...
...Where is their outrage about McCarthyism in defense of Panthers...
...Except for an article by columnist George Frazier, not a word editorially from the Globe, which helped spread Garry's distortion...
...The Washington Post, to its credit, editorialized an apology for its irresponsibility...
...The facts are that exposes of the falsehood passed off by Garry as true appeared long ago, fourteen months, to be exact...
...In a democracy of rule by law, even two lynchings are too many...
...In my city while the Boston Herald Traveler editorialized and also reprinted the New Yorker article in its entirety, what did the liberal Boston Globe do...
...What this episode reveals, aside from the fact that we must henceforth be very skeptical about swallowing propaganda about white "genocide" of Negroes, is that we must pay more heed to those like the Vice President who have long correctly pointed out the grave problems in America's distorted media dissemination of the news...
...Is McCarthyism of the left more acceptable than old-style McCarthyism...
Vol. 4 • May 1971 • No. 6
