On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television POWER TO THE PENTAGON BY MARVIN KITMAN One night in 1967, a friend of mine who then worked for cbs came home and told his wife to watch the CBS Eleven O'Clock News because the...
...Yes, I will," Tolbert said, eyeing Mudd suspiciously...
...At any rate, nobody at the Pentagon has asked for equal time to answer CBS...
...Mudd asked...
...The people who thought there was something sneaky about the Pentagon before now have the facts to prove it...
...As I recall, everybody in the press supported the Pentagon then...
...If Edward R. Murrow had refused to narrate a film about the glories of the firebombing attack on Dresden in 1945, now that would have been truly an act of conscience...
...I don't know what possible procedures we can institute to guard against it...
...My guess is that the episode was meant to be a lesson for all...
...Narrator Roger Mudd was questioning a former Air Force public information officer about a network documentary on the aviators who were bombing the hell out of North Vietnam from a base in Danang in the late 1960s...
...Mudd asked...
...It was the one-voice concept," Tolbert said...
...Producer Alan Levin's PBL show went to the point of actually linking the Pentagon to the military-industrial complex...
...Thus it had about as much chance of success in the ratings war against Doc Welby as an ARVN patrol against the Vietcong--and did about as well, losing 38.3 to 8.1...
...The Selling of the Pentagon" is being widely acclaimed as a landmark in TV journalism, which I suppose it is...
...The Selling of the Pentagon" is a slap on the wrist, an example of TV reporting no more embarrassing to the Defense Department than NBC News' studies of chemical and biological warfare and snooping on civilians...
...On Television POWER TO THE PENTAGON BY MARVIN KITMAN One night in 1967, a friend of mine who then worked for cbs came home and told his wife to watch the CBS Eleven O'Clock News because the office grapevine had it that Haiti was going to be invaded...
...If the Defense Department could dupe a hardnosed reporter like Cronkite and a political analyst like John Wayne into making propaganda films, it must have something going for it...
...I can live with that...
...CBS News isn't taking any special precautions against a repetition of the Danang incident...
...This view is supported by the fact that, despite the current wave of firings at the networks, the producer who made the CBS bomb show is still employed by CBS News...
...How did it turn out...
...We couldn't have done it better if we had made the show ourselves...
...For all I know, the military may have duped young Davis and CBS into doing the expose to take CBS' mind off, say, the Lockheed mess...
...And sure enough, Haiti was invaded exclusively on the CBS Eleven O'clock News...
...Around the shop, however, it was known as "the invasion...
...Cynics say the network's executives probably felt guilty about all the big war stories they've killed in the past for being too controversial...
...Then it scheduled the program opposite Marcus Welby, M.D...
...He's a damn good man," Salant says...
...According to Peter Davis, who wrote and produced "The Selling of the Pentagon," the military pr apparatus spent $190 million last year making the sort of news that publishers like Hearst used to give the American people for nothing...
...One of the show's best examples of how military parajournalists make news sheds additional light on these speculations...
...It was CBS...
...At the time CBS refused to dignify the event by calling it an invasion, perhaps because the network only spent $150,000 on the project...
...And we bought it...
...The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee called it "one of the most horrible examples of antimilitary presentation"--and then admitted he hadn't even seen the show yet...
...The truth is that Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and a premature anti-Pentagon type, delivered a series of speeches covering much the same ground last year...
...And he was always lecturing us about the morality of good journalism...
...For in a way "The Selling of the Pentagon" is a terrific hour-long commercial for all the wonderful things the Pentagon is doing to make the nation strong--at least in the eyes of patriots who believe the military can do no wrong...
...It was just great," Tolbert replied...
...When Hebert finally gets around to seeing the show, he will probably calm down...
...Was this further proof that Salant has a death wish, a theory that I merely alluded to earlier...
...Government agencies, labor unions, students are all trying to do the same thing...
...Davis cites about 90 instances of the same basic crime...
...Since the Danang documentary was produced while Fred Friendly headed CBS News, Salant's action must be seen as less suicidal than homicidal...
...A number of theories come to mind...
...The only person I've heard of who was really stunned by the revelations--such as Green Berets showing kids in small-town parks how they kill VC, air power displays, VIP tours of military bases, the production of propaganda movies with Hollywood stars--seemed to be Representative F. Edward Hebert, Democrat of Louisiana...
...If so, his impulse is about as highly developed as that of the Kamikaze pilot who flew nine missions...
...Long pause...
...And in 1969 the Public Broadcast Laboratory ran an 80-minute segment titled "Defense and Domestic Decisions: The Contest for Tomorrow"--they really knew how to alarm people in the early days--that attacked the same nefarious activities...
...If there is any truth in the industry axiom that CBS News never does a documentary unless it doesn't matter, "The Selling of the Pentagon" may be the happiest thing we have seen on TV in years...
...The Selling of the Pentagon" qualifies CBS for an invitation to even the most radical block party on Madison Avenue once peace breaks out...
...Look what they put over on Friendly," the incident seems to say...
...when enough of them had bad dreams, they finally decided they should say something about the war...
...They have to live with themselves...
...When Walter Cronkite says at the end of the CBS Evening News, "That's the way it is," I'll just keep in mind he also could be saying, "That's the way the Pentagon says it is...
...Is the network trying to kill the news budget completely...
...Which one was it...
...Even more surprising, Haiti was invaded by the CBS Eleven O'Clock News...
...Just when we have finally assented to the winding-down theory of the Vietnam war--accepting TV's premise that what is really important today is the survival of endangered wildlife and the removal of phosphates from detergents--CBS drops this blockbuster...
...Rather than let the network film crew photograph any pilot who happened to drift into the day room, ex-Major Jack F. Tolbert explained, the Pentagon handpicked the aviators who were to be included...
...In Wayne's case, he may have duped the Pentagon...
...This kind of creative investigative reporting, which brought TV newscasting into the 1890s, is what I like to call the William Randolph Hearst school of journalism...
...Having shelled out the money for 11 months of digging by Davis, CBS acted responsibly in not even advertising the show in the New York Times...
...This will probably confirm the industry law that viewers don't want to hear about the war any more...
...Pundits are still trying to figure out why CBS put on this kind of show at a time when the Administration is watching TV like a hawk...
...While the Haitian whatever-it-was represented only an isolated case, a CBS News documentary on February 23 revealed that at least one other major news organization was really into such imaginative reporting...
...Besides, he still insists he wasn't had by the Pentagon...
...At a congressional probe two years later, CBS News President Richard Salant described it as "a network crew spending several months filming the clandestine gun-running activities of Haitian and Cuban exiles...
...The Vietnamese war may really be ending after all...
...But what did the documentary really accomplish, besides revealing that CBS News isn't perfect...
...Will you tell us which network that was...
...But even eyewitnesses at an accident can't agree on the facts...
...Sure we make mistakes in reporting...
...By supplying only pilots who looked and sounded like Steve Canyon, the Pentagon hoped to have a fighting chance of getting the documentary to appear favorable to the bombing...
...All of us will be had sooner or later by somebody," Salant said...
...The documentary does some duping of its own by neglecting to note media involvement in propaganda during World War II...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 6
