News on Command
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television NEWS ON COMMAND BY MARVIN KITMAN There are three dangerous "isms" in this country today, it was explained on the TV special That Was the Year That Was (ABC, December 26)....
...Now that you've heard Walt's side of the news," Herb (Smiley) Klein, director of information for the Executive Branch, could then say, "here's the official news...
...By presenting only one side of the story, the networks left the TV viewers with the distinct impression that the North Vietnamese were disturbed by the attacks...
...Everything else is largess...
...That prospect is upsetting also...
...Anyway, the Vice President's criticism sounded like so much talk...
...But maybe a Communist father would have gone on camera and denounced his dead son as a deviationist long-haired pothead who didn't believe in Marx, Lenin and Uncle Ho, adding that the Party was undoubtedly better off without him...
...That, I'm sure Commander Whitehead would agree, is a reasonably impartial account of the day's major events...
...The reporting of art should not be concerned with values, but should confine itself to description...
...Goebbels...
...Congress should not be allowed to pass laws on such matters as TV programming because it doesn't share the experience of its constituents...
...Is it biased to the Left or to the Right...
...In that case taxpayers would not be getting their money's worth...
...Communism...
...280 ff...
...Frankly, I am not happy about being forced into this position...
...Now that Commander Whitehead is requesting legislation from this body of uninformed men, however, one might legitimately ask how balanced the reporting has been on the network news shows...
...Or perhaps Whitehead is merely after equal time (numerical): Cronkite would get 15 minutes to tell the CBS lies about Watergate, the grain deals and the war, and the White House would get 15 minutes to reply...
...As a believer in balanced reporting, Whitehead should have been blasting CBS, NBC and ABC for not interviewing, say, the mothers and fathers of kids killed in the Hanoi raids...
...He wanted to put the Federal Communications Commission in charge of seeing that the networks were fair and impartial, and the FCC, as everyone knows, is not exactly famous for its big stick...
...But this kind of objective journalism disturbs me because the networks wouldn't have told both sides of the story...
...Compared to a Clay Whitehead or Herb Klein, Walter Cronkite is Henry Thoreau...
...In that case an official wrote in Der Deutsche Schriftsteller, Jahr I, Heft 12 (1936), pp...
...But these telecasts are actually the least significant programs on the air...
...p. 30, n. 20: "Because this year has not brought an improvement in art criticism, I forbid once and for all the continuance of art criticism in its past form, effective as of today (November 27, 1936...
...Indeed, the reason Congressmen are always attacking the news is probably that John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite are the only shows they are familiar with and they watch them merely to find out if their proposals for building 15 new dams in their districts are being mentioned...
...There is nothing new about the threat of Journalism to the American way of life...
...Listening to his theories of journalism reminded me of the man who tells you there is a disease called cancer, and that it is caused by international Zionism...
...Over the years, I have found fault with network newsmen, but that speech the opening shot in the campaign to control electronic journalism-has made me realize I've been quibbling...
...She hated school anyway...
...The other side, the bombees', so to speak, the view of the people whose relatives were killed and whose homes were destroyed, went unpresented...
...Hell, I had come to the same conclusion myself...
...I suspect, though, that Commander Whitehead has something else in mind...
...For all we know, too, some little girl disfigured by napalm when her school was bombed one morning was elated that the building had been destroyed...
...Politicians have no idea what you are talking about when you discuss television...
...reprinted in Rolf Geissler, Dekadenz und Heroismus (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1964...
...The real figure, they might charge, was 2.5 million pounds...
...He's at a banquet eating chicken...
...And nowhere in his Indianapolis speech, or in the explanations of it on television or in the New York Times, did Commander Whitehead say: Fellows, dig harder to gel the truth...
...But they are, unfortunately, manning the barricades for us at the moment...
...The North Vietnamese might have denied, for example, the Pentagon's allegation that 5 million pounds of bombs were exploded on their military bases, factories, hospitals, homes, schools...
...Only Commander Whitehead isn't as talented a public speaker as Dr...
...First, the facts would be reported: "The Air Force yesterday announced it had dropped 5 million pounds of explosives on Hanoi and Haiphong...
...It was tied in to a call for legislation...
...This is one of the dangers of biased network reporting of Pentagon activities...
...Commander Whitehead's talk could not be taken as lightly as the Vice President's, and I resent this for a number of reasons, though primarily because Commander Whitehead himself may be illegal...
...For the fact is the major source of information for TV news is already the government...
...Say one of our three networksyou can take your pick, since they're all a like decided to run a story about the bombing in North Vietnam...
...And Journalism...
...By substituting the words "network news" for "art criticism," the speech could have been given at Indianapolis...
...His remedies weren't very serious...
...The critic is to be superseded by the art editor...
...The government may simply want the chance to balance off Chancellor's or Cronkite's falsehoods with falsehoods of its own...
...Such reporting should give the public a chance to make its own judgments, should stimulate it to form an opinion about artistic achievements through its own attitudes and feelings...
...Do you know what a Congressman does during prime time...
...Fascism...
...It's easy for those of us sitting in our living rooms automatically to assume that those North Vietnamese parents were grieving...
...Then a Department of Defense spokesman would be interviewed to explain the provocation for the air strikes: a build-up of Communist forces, a lack of seriousness on the part of the negotiators at the peace talks, whatever...
...The White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, of which he is the director, is seeking to regulate broadcasting...
...To give fair treatment, the news shows should have also allowed us to hear from some of the peasants who had napalm dropped on them...
...What's important to the American people is what Maude says, not Walter or Jack...
...Maybe the Office of Telecommunications is trying to encourage Walter Cronkite to amend his closing line?And that's the way it is . . ." ?to "And that's the way a few of us elite in the Eastern media Establishment feel about the news, based on our rampant biases as intellectual snobs and secret Democrats...
...would be damned sore to learn that my Air Force only dropped half of what we taxpayers were actually being billed for...
...What finally awakened me to the danger of the Nixon policy was reading of another government's attempt to improve the media...
...It's too late in the game to be picky about this minor flaw or snotty about that trivial fault...
...Somehow, at the time I didn't get alarmed when the nation's most powerful TV critic said network news was unbalanced and not objective...
...But Clay T. Whitehead's speech about TV news at Indianapolis last December 18 was something else...
...Not that I want Capitol Hill interfering...
...Every night during the 10 years of the Vietnam War, we basically got the Pentagon's version of things, or the bombers...
...His lecture on the old bugaboos, "elitist gossip" and "ideological plugola," scared me...
...I, for one...
...I don't have much faith in the will or determination of the TV people to defend their First Amendment rights or mine...
...I would like to think that Commander Whitehead was ignorant of the meaning of equal time, rather than deliberately being less than candid when he told the American people their TV networks were prejudiced against the Administration...
...From now on, the reporting of art will take the place of art criticism which has set itself up as a judge of art A complete perversion of the concept of 'criticism' which dates from the time of the Jewish domination of art...
...Yet as Sandor Vanocur has commented, the Broadcasting Act of 1934 makes this the business of Congress...
...The Vice President reminded us of the menace way back in 1969...
...Agnew was on his idea of objectivity...
...The average legislator's notion of good TV programming is Meet the Press or Face the Nation with him on it...
...one authority on the subject said to me...
...Where I disagreed with Mr...
Vol. 56 • February 1973 • No. 4
