On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television WESTY'S LAST STAND BY MARVIN KITMAN How stirring it was to see General William C. Westmoreland, commander of our Vietnam War forces, on all the local evening news shows February...
...In addition, there was the wear and tear the man suffered...
...Somehow, during the local coverage at the end of the trial and in all the subsequent discussion the focus shifted to the matter of who won...
...We have never learned whether or not a libel was committed...
...I'm only a reader who gets paid $875,000 a year for these pieces...
...There was the army of reporters writing those news stories every day, as well as the attorneys, whose kids were going to prep school on the fees...
...I mean the above average, actually...
...A successful defense, the legal kibbitzers said, would cost the network almost as much as it would have to pay if it lost...
...You can't simply twist and cut facts to prove someone is guilty—even if he is...
...I knew it was important, though, and I wasn't the only one who thought so...
...At the same time, in many eyes CBS has lost prestige and credibility...
...A study entitled, "Freud's Contributions to Science," for example, will have to quote psychiatrists saying he was a fruitcake...
...With the appeals and counterappeals, it was expected the case would last about as long as the Vietnam War itself...
...That saved him from having to explain that everything was Crile's fault: "Why blame me...
...After all, it was the major cultural event on the tube the week the libel case reached its nonclimax...
...The story is that Van Sauter merely wanted the house job to pin the problem on a previous president of CBS News, Bill Leonard...
...The price of honor and pride has been affected by inflation no less than the dollar...
...Its strategy was to wear down the General with a barrage of delaying tactics, the experts having known in advance that money would prevail...
...Ultimately, the networks will become wary of the whole genre...
...There should be a law school named after Van Gordon Sauter, whose handling of the affair in the early days made it all possible...
...It was so shabby and nasty and dumb...
...The great Mike Wallace, meanwhile, emerged'as a puppet who reads whatever questions he's handed...
...The whole legal battle was reminiscent of his experience in Vietnam, where he always seemed to be blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel...
...I continued reading the New York Times accounts long after I'd gotten fed up at not being able to tell who was lying...
...And the more evidence the 36 witnesses submitted, the more confusing this legal soap opera became...
...Trust me...
...and that Mary Crosby is such trash...
...What a great party the Contis had...
...Nevertheless, I hung in there until the surprising conclusion, which was like having a tied up baseball game called in the seventh inning because of darkness—although the sun is shining...
...In previewing a show, their minds will not be on art (pacing, camera work, dramatic tension) or on journalism (the courage and skill a writer brought to digging out a story somebody did not want told, the essence of investigative reporting), but on lawyer-ly concerns: Has anyone been neglected...
...I'm more amazed, though, by how Van managed to emerge with his fenders unscratched...
...It's too bad the General did not take George Aiken's ad vice during the War, too...
...I must say I did my duty as a critic during theTV journalism trial of the century...
...Isn't he the guy who does CBS' Sunday prefoot-ball show with Phyllis George...
...I still wish that CBS had preempted Scarecrow and Mrs...
...That leaves us with the question of who was telling the truth...
...He had to see himself castigated repeatedly on the videotapes, then he got it "live" for weeks in the courtroom...
...The late Republican Senator from Vermont, it will be recalled, suggested that the United States should simply declare itself the winner and go home...
...Maybe the network will do a docudrama on its trauma...
...I noticed none of them were dancing in Wall Street after Westy threw in the white towel...
...Westy certainly didn't win, whatever he may think...
...Van Sauter portrayed himself as the Hero of the Battle of Westmoreland...
...If Westmoreland's objective was to put a chill on TV news, he can say he did win his case...
...He's the one with the beard who was continually making statements in place of nominal CBS News President Ed Joyce, who at the moment is reportedly reading the pretrial deposition transcripts...
...Then he partially released the results of this private internal review, called the "Benjamin Report," in a move that amounted to saying, "Westmoreland is wrong...
...The average viewer must have found himself wondering, what was that all about...
...Now, inthelight of lawsuits supported by conservative foundations plus others of the lunatic fringe that keeps tabs on TV—and can keep a network in the legal rough for years—they are looked upon as a distinct liability...
...Perhaps most telling of all, there was not one word of praise for the production in the millions the suit engendered...
...The trial itself seemed to run longer than most of the new network shows this year...
...The rest probably haven't even heard of the case...
...Back in September 1982, when the Westmoreland fiasco began, it was said that CBS folded CBS Cable in preparing itself for combat...
...The public did not do very well, either...
...Both teams left the field to claim victory in the locker room, and I was still in the stands flapping my arms to keep warm while waiting for the true ending...
...Talk about humiliation...
...Whatever it is Van Gordon Sauter has, he should bottle it...
...Apparendy both sides won...
...The phrases "A Westmoreland documentary" and "uncounted enemy" may well follow "Wrong Way Corrigan" into our lexicon of terms of opprobrium...
...But I am not so sure this actually was true in what was the strangest case in the annals of journalism, if not jurisprudence...
...Thanks to his astute judgment in bringing a libel suit against a documentary virtually no one had watched, its allegedly defamatory portions were seen or heard or read about in the newspapers by millions...
...I really felt silly for having gotten involved...
...In case you haven't noticed, documentaries are already about as plentiful as honest TV executives...
...After 31 months of preliminary depositions amid thrilling legal maneuvering, and 19 weeks of trial sessions covered in great depth by hundreds of reporters, the $ 120 million suit ended too suddenly...
...It didn't help that the combatants now agreed their case would best be decided by the public at large...
...Docs were always considered more trouble than they were worth, failing to score high ratings back in the glory days ofEdwardR...
...Of course, CBS really won...
...Most of the time we—there I go exaggerating the size of the audience again...
...Let Barry Bostwick star as General Westmoreland and we'll get the truth...
...And since the new breed will take up entire evenings of prime time, we'll have to take our medicine all at once, so to speak...
...I couldn't believe they were leaving the final outcome to the American TV audience, the greatest bunch of "don't knows" and "undecideds" in Western civilization...
...make that "I"—did not understand what was going on...
...Kate Jackson on victory night and rerun the controversial documentary as part of the vindication party proceedings...
...He was luckv his day in court was scheduled the day after the trial ended...
...You would never realize that Van Sauter's deft handling of the General's original complaint against Uncounted Enemy was extremely instrumental in triggering the confrontation...
...Instead, we'll get hardhitting exposes like "You Should Live So Long," examining whether senior citizens are growing older...
...Both CBS and Westmoreland struck me as scoundrels...
...After getting his name dropped from the indictment, and costing the company millions in legal fees, he was promoted to number three man in the entire company...
...For the legacy of this legal contest will be fewer, albeit longer, documentaries...
...On Television WESTY'S LAST STAND BY MARVIN KITMAN How stirring it was to see General William C. Westmoreland, commander of our Vietnam War forces, on all the local evening news shows February 19claiming victory...
...It was lighting a match to a straw hut...
...But I suppose Westy would then have sued again...
...Yet CBS said, in effect, "We stand by the show, even though it's something we shouldn't have done...
...On important issues—the only kind appropriate for docs—an hour or more will be required by each nuance of the argument...
...I therefore predict that the post-Westmoreland documentary will run (when it does) nearly as long as Judith Krantz' Mistral'sDaughter(d$A hours...
...You had the feeling that somebody had pulled the plug on your TV set...
...That's the wonderful thing about television, nobody ever loses...
...According to them, ABC's Hollywood Wives won...
...He was trying to pass it off on Bill," one source explained to me...
...The old-fashioned one-hour, 90-minute or two-hour format opens the networks to the charge of presenting information out of context—a problem that has been inherent in information dispensing, including scholarly undertakings, at least since Gutenberg invented movable type in the 1430s...
...Everybody will be afraid to cover tough subjects...
...Rather than taking the standard approach with such protests by saying, "Thanks for calling it to our attention, we'll look into it," he made a big fuss, publicly promising a major investigation...
...Messmoreland...
...Or at least a folding chair of TV j ournalistic jurisprudence, given how much CBS moved around on issues of principle...
...Murrow...
...Not that they need much encouragement along these lines...
...By the time Westy got to ABC's Nightline he had me thinking it was V-J night all over again...
...I'dsay we lost big...
...Can this be defended in court...
...Literally tens or hundreds of people like myself would have watched it...
...The name of the game in TV is profits, not journalistic glory...
...From the outset this was a lose-lose situation for CBS stockholders...
...To this above average viewer, the bottom line is that everybody lost in the CBS I Westmoreland affair...
...To begin with, its chief investigative reporter, George Crile, producer of the now notorious program, came out looking like a kid who should be in j oumalism school...
...Equally stirring was the sight of CBS, in the person of Generalissimo of News Van Gordon Sauter, also claiming victory...
...Someday I would like to see Julia Child do an hour with General Westmoreland and Generalissimo Van Sauter giving their favorite recipes for making edible crow...
...If there is one thing CBS has it's money, and it was enough...
...Lawyers, moreover, will be the Big Brother creative powers of these excessive productions...
...Life is morecomplex than standing on a picket line in the '60s chanting "Hell, no, we won't go...
...Every channell turned to, there he was explaining how he'd won his suit against CBS charging that the documentary Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, first shown in January 1982, was libelous in accusing him of misrepresenting theVietCong's strength...
Vol. 68 • February 1985 • No. 2
