On Television

...The hell we are, Caliber TV viewers are guilty only by association with the medium, far less a crime than yours, or Huntley's, Benchley??s, Cronkite's, Sevareid's, Smith's, General Sarnoff's, or even Captain Kangaroo's Moreover, not everybody in the old-fashioned print medium was taken m by the government And a page who works in NBC studio 6-H always used to tell me that we should get out of Vietnam Caliber and Freed reminded me of the men who go to a synagogue on the Day of Atonement and say, "I have sinned But Sam sinned, Jack sinned, Bill sinned, Melvin sinned, Mark sinned, George sinned,Jonathan sinned, Sid sinned, Stan sinned ". It's become a fairly standard practice, one lately adopted by even the Vice President of the United States, to be hard on the television press Still, I would have thought that men like Freed and Caliber, being so close to the business, might have shown more insight into the problem No discussion of the causes of erroneous reporting is complete without mentioning the reporters themselves In that first minute of "Vietnam Hindsight" there was an air of soul-searching that is more common to a purge trial than a TV documentary It might have been useful for the TV viewer if Caliber and Freed had continued in the mood of recantation and remorse by naming a few names at their network who had been bilked by the government...

...The most striking thing about the Edward R Murrow Retrospective on New York's Channel 13 the week of January 3 was the way Murrow gave his conclusions about the injustices he had reported on He always said "Fred Friendly and I believe," never speaking for the CBS network or the news department Perhaps TV journalism's problems stem from the weight of the collective voice its reporting must bear If, say, Roger Mud in his "Selling of the Pentagon" could have said "Peter Davis [the writer], Perry Wolf [the producer] and I want to take the rap for this muckraking," the fear of and incidence of TV's getting lost m the government pocket might be reduced...

...M Jut all of that is hindsight Apparently the reason NBC is today telling us it was wrong about Vietnam all these years is that it has come around to believing we should get out of Southeast Asia Yet if the network wasn't telling us the truth in the 1960s, why should it suddenly be telling us the truth now' Maybe NBC really wants us to send the boys back In confessing past errors, those miserable wretches in Moscow often say the opposite of what they really believe Something will have to be done to rebuild the credibility of television news, which in my mind now ranks with that of the government...

...a period when Nielsen doesn't take ratings and the networks fill their schedules with serious, important programming—anod nobody was watching The average guy, who tells the pollsters that his most credible source of information is TV news,may not be ready for such a blow to his faith in the established order of things...

...The reason nothing is said about a problem is basically that the network doesn't want to make anybody unhappy Perhaps the only thing wrong with this system is that the TV people think they are actually saying something...

...Some observers believe that the purpose of ventilating an issue without offering a solution is to avoid making mistakes If no one points a finger ("You killed him, you sons-of itches in your Brooks Brothers suits"), no one can be called onto the carpet, the thinking goes In reality, the situation is more complicated The narrator on today's network documentary is speaking not for himself but for a large group (the network news department...

...Under the provisions of the doctrine of fairness in TV, I should point out that NBC is not the only network whose credibility has been undermined by this white paper Each network's viewpoint is supposed to be different in a free-enterprise system, that's what our boys are fighting for in Vietnam But as far as the naked eye has been able to see for the past 10 years, ABC and CBS have been reporting the government's position just as eloquently as NBC admits it has In the immortal words of nasal??s favor-item objective reporter, Walter Croon-kite, "And that's the way it is ".The government's credibility gap is something we have to learn to live with The best suggestion that I've heard about what can be done to cope with it came from New York University professor Neil Postman ' There is a requirement in broadcasting that goes something like this," he explained "When an actor is portraying a physician on a TV commercial, some indication of this fact must be given to the audience The usual form is to flash on the screen the words this is a dramatization...

...Now your ideal TV documentary would be a hard-hitting look at a subject like "Our Unhappy Cities," as seen through the penetrating eyes of a most ravishing young starlet who casts sidelong glances at rude cadavers, double-parking and loose leash laws At least we would remember the narrator's point of view But your average documentary tends to consist of a conservatively dressed man cautiously giving us 50-odd minutes of a problem followed by about 90 seconds of upbeat aphorisms...

...The remainder of Part I presented a unique kind of defense for TV journalism Caliber seemed to be asking us, "If distinguished men like Walt Rostov and Roswell Kilpatrick were wrong about Vietnam with all the best intelligence money could buy (the CIA's contribution to journalism), how could a mere TV network news department be expected to have any independent judgments7 Are we not all equally guilty7...

...What could have driven writer and producer Fred Freed to shatter an ancient tradition m so uncouth a manner in the opening moment of "Vietnam Hindsight"7 It might have been a sense of iconoclasm or desperation Or maybe it was a secret belief that the TV documentary hasn't long to live so he might just as well start breaking up the old institution right now In any event, until that night I had been spared the shock of seeing a network confess to error, though I've often suspected they weren't perfect I was enthralled by what Freed and Caliber did next...

...To have been most constructive, "Vietnam Hindsight" should have gone into the intrinsic limitations of TV journalism What the viewers have never been told about the business is that television newsmen are not out to get the truth, but to get on the air Their fees are based on air time Just as it was for the military, Vietnam was a place where a TV newsman could make a name and a bundle for himself...

...On Television CONFESSIONS OF A NETWORK NEWS DEPARTMENT BY MARVIN KITMAN T m he most memorable event in the history of the television documentary occurred the night of December 21, when an NBC narrator told the TV audience that his network's news department had been wrong in one of its judgments The story NBC said it blew was the Vietnam war mace 1961...

...The easiest way for the field hands in the Far East to move up was to be caught m "a shoot-'me-up," a fire-fight The competition was always keen The network brass sent over three or four young reporters One man went three miles into the bush, the next went five This led as often to death as to an understanding of what was really going on A famous cable in the archives of network journalism (CBS News branch) reads "nab just had x [a well-known correspondent] wounded why not us...

...Similarly, the FCC might require that whenever some newscaster was quoting information from a usually reliably informed source, like the Pentagon, there should be a warning superimposed this man is stating *s a fact only what has been alleged When the kill rate in Vietnam is five times the total population, it is reasonable on the face of it to use the word alleged ' ". Another of Postman's suggestions is that the government or its agencies be given separate time on every network news show, a kind of claims department where they can give their side of the war, the economy, and so forth Then the people can decide for themselves what's going on...

...This distinguished list would have started with former NBC President Robert Kintner, under whose hawk-eyed view the network's newsmen started disappearing into the government's pocket It also would have included Freed himself, whose landmark documentary, "American White Paper U S Foreign Policy" (September 7, 1965), was the first foreign policy show to occupy a full evening of prime time (7 30-11 00 P M ) and was the network's definitive statement on the war for the next six years Bringing up the rear on the list would have been the field hands like Caliber who did the actual reporting of the war Any network newsman could argue that he didn't know what he was doing while he was covering Vietnam because he was under the influence of money, in that drugged state, TV newsmen have been known to do or say anything that was popular with their bosses...

...In the first minute of the first hour of a two-hour, two-night study titled "An NBC White Paper Vietnam Hindsight," newsman Floyd Caliber confessed "To the degree that we m the media paid any attention at all to that small dirty war in those years, we almost wholly reported the position of the government We had no more foresight about what the war would become than the men m Washington who made the decisions We did not foresee and we did not understand ". Thank God it was Black Week...