I SEE BY THE PAPERS'
Lasch, Robert
'I See by the Papers' By Robert Lasch Obstruction in the Pipeline WHEN Senate opponents of the offshore oil quitclaim bill began their extended debate (not to be confused with a filibuster), they...
...The Associated Press, for instance, carried a perfectly straight account of the speech, with fairly liberal direct quotes, yet this account managed to be inaccurate...
...The man with the microphone said, "Did he do it for torture or punishment...
...Nor were most newspapers inclined to be critical about the official Republican view of the debate, viz., that here was a nasty little piece of obstruction designed to keep important legislation off the Senate floor...
...The cameramen shouted: "Just lean into the mikes and say it's great to be back...
...The informant turned out to be a Turkish private who told a Turkish information officer who told the press...
...In fact, Attlee did not "find fault" with the American people or the Constitution at all, and if he "found fault" with the American government, in the sense of disagreeing with it, he also praised Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower quite generously...
...Emotional Orgy Ruth Newhall reported in the Ch" cago Sun-Times an enlightening description of the reception of prisoners at a California base...
...The Christian Science Monitor provided a notable example of honest reporting on this level...
...One aide to a Senator engaged in the fight reported that for three weeks it was nearly impossible to get a line into most newspapers on what the Senators were saying—and then the debate broke into print only because Taft charged a filibuster...
...The Times-Herald account said Attlee "found fault with the American people, the American Constitution, the American system of government, and the American government itself, past and present...
...Attlee Caught It Both Ways It is not often that editorial pages frankly confess error...
...In fact, Attlee stated rather more reservations about a conference than Churchill had, and, far from hinting that Eisenhower would not be welcome, urged instead that Eisenhower fortify himself with bipartisan support so that "whoever goes to this conference should go with full authority...
...They hoped that when the people learned what was at stake, a great upwelling of grass roots indignation would shame the Republican Party and the Eisenhower Administration into a show of conscience...
...His article, "For A Free Press," won the Atlantic Prize for 1944...
...A simple change in tenses thus accomplished wonders of inaccuracy...
...On the theory that conflict makes news, that controversial names make news, this was an excellent quote to place high in the story...
...Suckers for Fright Stuff One glory of the American press is its lack of central control, but sometimes I wonder whether, so far as the Cold War is concerned, the average newspaper would behave differently if it were an organ of official propaganda...
...The result, however, was to obscure the fact that Attlee had neither attacked McCarthy nor cast aspersions upon President Eisenhower, but had used their names, along with the names of Roosevelt, Truman, Vandenberg, and Connally, to illustrate his perceptive and quite accurate description of the difference between Britain's constitutional system and ours...
...At the very end, May 5, the News ran a United Press story (Tidelands Oiled Talking Machine) relating that more than a million words had been uttered, and summarizing in a nutshell the major points made on each side...
...It seems quite clear," said the Star, "that Attlee was not indulging in an anti-American tirade in an effort to gain some partisan political advantage in Britain...
...You can't win— except perhaps by combining the spirit of objectivity with the methods of accurate interpretation...
...Four Senators promptly wired Arthur Krock, chief of its Washington bureau, delicately observing that even the Times had given relatively little news space to the debate...
...that "calculated brutality" had occurred in individual cases, but hardly in enough cases to establish a general policy...
...The purpose of the band of Senators who opposed the giveaway was to alert the country to the issue...
...But the report was definite enough to go into the lead of a dispatch, and into the scare heads on top of the lead paragraph...
...Ned Russell, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, analyzed the Times-Herald dispatch and by comparing it with Attlee's text showed just how McCarthy was not merely once removed from the truth, as the AP was, but scarcely came within hailing distance...
...Finally, the Times-Herald interpreted Attlee as saying that "he welcomed Churchill's proposal for an immediate meeting of heads of state, but he doubted the wisdom of President Eisenhower's attendance...
...It was on the Chicago Tribune dispatch, published in the Washington Times-Herald, that McCarthy based his reply to Attlee...
...For the most part, the American press does not consider a Senate debate as news...
...The AP's second quote was: "One often wonders who is the more powerful, President Eisenhower or Sen...
...Americans do not want to have anything to do with Europe...
...rather general...
...Following the maxim that every story must have a lead, the AP led with Attlee's statement that "there are elements in the United States that do not want a settlement in Korea...
...Each of the AP's quotes taken severally was accurate...
...The soldier replied, "A Chinese doctor...
...At one stage, the New York Times, which was opposed to the giveaway, editorially deplored the lack of attention the subject was receiving...
...She told how a blond young airman lay on a bed under floodlights with a dozen motion picture and news cameras focused on him...
...In England, Lord Strabolgi told the House of Lords that "atrocity stories, apparently fabricated in the most shameful way," constituted "psychological warfare of a most damnable and despicable kind...
...Most editors and reporters seem to be bored with issues...
...Russell cited three examples...
...The soldier replied: "He did it to save my life...
...After Sen...
...When asked if the Americans died of malnutrition, the officer replied: "Not definitely...
...During those 10 days Sens...
...that the "semi-starvation" had been a result of a general food shortage at certain times...
...Another litter patient, Miss New-hall reported, was cornered by a man with a microphone...
...One of the handsomest of second thoughts was published during the uproar over Clement Attlee's speech in Parliament May 12—the speech that gave Sen...
...Indeed for the most part he was trying, as he said, to set forth certain facts about the American political system which may not be thoroughly understood in Britain...
...Just talk about the Communists and brutality...
...A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he served for a time as chief editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times before going to St...
...I greatly fear that with a few exceptions the News' performance was ROBERT LASCH, who was educated at the University of Nebraska, Oxford, and Harvard, is an editorial writer for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, widely regard' er as one of the best of the American dailies...
...It may have been filled with the spirit of the Lord from April 7 to April 17, but it was certainly not filled with news of the offshore oil debate...
...Louis...
...The man began to bite the dog about two weeks after the debate began...
...One prisoner, we read, reported that 100 Americans had died in the camps where he had been stationed...
...The offshore oil debate ran for about four weeks, beginning in earnest during the second week of April...
...I do not know whether Eugene C. Pulliam's Indianapolis Daily News can be called typical of the American evening newspaper...
...This may have been the liveliest snapper, but it was in fact an incidental remark (and incidentally a true one) which in context did not warrant the inflammatory headlines that it got...
...On April 18 the News treated its readers to what looked at first glance like a comprehensive story, but which turned out to be a light piece (Tide-lands Aweigh: Just a Little Fill-in Bluster Takes All Day) dwelling on the extraneous subjects that were being talked about...
...The News calls itself "the great Hoosier daily since 1869," and quotes on its masthead II Cor...
...The Times-Herald reported Attlee as saying: "The American Constitution was framed for an isolationist state...
...Malone introduced his amendment calling for a companion giveaway of public lands...
...This story contained not a word about the merits of the issue under debate...
...So there you have it—"objective reporting" in one case, "interpretation" in another, and both essentially inaccurate...
...Paul Douglas, Lister Hill, Estes Kefauver, and Herbert Lehman made long speeches against it, and Sen...
...When the first disabled prisoners were exchanged in Korea, the press wires overflowed with atrocity stories...
...McCarthy...
...Whether the grass roots would have responded we shall never know, for the tactics of the extended debaters (not to be confused with fili-busterers) were frustrated by the simple fact that few newspapers let their readers know in detail what the extended debate was all about...
...When a McCarthy attacks an Attlee on the Senate floor, or when a Morse breaks the endurance record for continuous speaking, he can count on some attention in the news columns, as would a flagpole-sitter or a psycopath threatening to leap from a hotel window...
...The headlines tell quite well what kind of fare the readers of the News received: Talkathon in Senate Begins 12-Hour Day All-Night Sessions Urged to End Filibuster Tidelands Test Vote Nearing Showdown on Tidelands Bill Postponed Tidelands Foes Lose Skirmish But Gab On Morse Ends Top Talkathon Night and Day Grind Ordered in Senate to Sink Tidelands Foes Taft Credited with Forcing Filibuster End Tidelands Oil Fight in Last Round During all this period I found just eight inches in the News attempting to explain (without much success) what the debate was actually about...
...Nobody can doubt that instances of brutality occurred in Korea, but the emotional orgy which most of the press allowed itself during the first prisoner exchange is a chapter nobody can be proud of...
...But the News had not mentioned those points while they were being made, and while there was still time for people to react to them...
...In fact, what Attlee said, in talking about the America of the founding fathers, was that the Americans of that day "did not" want to have anything to do with Europe...
...The wire service dispatches were full of hate words and half truths...
...One kind came about through "objective," or deadpan, reporting...
...Robert A. Taft and President Eisenhower had made statements to this effect, the Associated Press in a news summary dutifully reported that the debate had "been blocking consideration of other important legislation...
...The Detroit Free Press gave top Page One play to the President's comment under the headline "Ike Heavy-Hearted Over Atrocities...
...Coverage in the Times improved, but the same could not be said of the press generally...
...By contrast, other newspapers plunged into the atrocity tales without restraint...
...But for no special reason I read it over the period of the debate and was mildly astonished at the amount of news about offshore oil which the News managed not to give its readers...
...Tell us, Private Pizarro, who amputated your legs...
...3-17: "Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There is Liberty...
...After several embarrassed messages, the AP finally conceded in effect that there weren't any important delayed bills that it could think of...
...The first reports which misled so many people were of two kinds, each illustrating a different type of distortion but both coming to the same result in the end...
...Reading carefully all the way through, one gathered that the "Bataan-style death marches" were actually routine transfers of prisoners to rear camps, under conditions of undoubted hardship...
...In view of the fact that Army sources had put out some highly questionable atrocity reports at another critical point in the truce negotiations some 18 months previously, there was every ' reason to treat these stories with reserve...
...Price Daniel and Spessard Holland delivered their major speeches in favor of the quitclaim, Sens...
...But the notion that the content of a Congressional debate may illuminate an issue before the country and therefore should be fully reported is alien to the majority of newspapers today...
...In all of those 10 days the readers of the Indianapolis News got exactly one brief news story, on Page 3 in the issue of April 13, about what was going on in the Senate...
...I found no editorial comment whatsoever...
...I See by the Papers' By Robert Lasch Obstruction in the Pipeline WHEN Senate opponents of the offshore oil quitclaim bill began their extended debate (not to be confused with a filibuster), they reckoned without the American press...
...Some papers did take care to point out that many of the returned American prisoners were overwrought when questioned, that the "death marches" took place in the bitter winter of 1950 when many thousands on both sides died, that what was an atrocity in Western eyes might not seem so in terms of Asiatic warfare and living standards...
...Consequently anybody who sets out to educate the public through a Congressional debate as reported in the newspapers is licked before he starts...
...From then on the News usually carried a short daily story about offshore oil—not, however, about the content of the debate, but about the mechanics of it...
...In the lead of a dispatch one would read, "Accounts of Bataan-style death marches, semi-starvation, and calculated brutality came today from the second handful of Allied soldiers returned...
...they assume their readers are equally so...
...The Cleveland Plain Dealer handled President Eisenhower's comment exactly as it deserved to be handled—on Page 10, under a quiet and accurate headline, "Ike Cautious on Atrocities...
...Another kind of distortion was produced by the editorialized dispatches (sometimes called interpretive reporting) in the consciously anti-British McCormick press...
...The Washington Star, having joined in the initial criticism of Attlee on the basis of press reports of the speech, got hold of the full text a few days later, published it, and indicated that its first opinion had been mistaken...
...As a matter of fact, there was far more germaneness in this debate than in most...
...One editor along the line asked the AP to send a list of important bills which were being held up...
...Joseph R. McCarthy his prized opportunity to twist the lion's tail while simultaneously applying his trusty Red smear to the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition...
...all of them taken together, with the emphasis changed by arrangement, gave the American public a mistaken impression of what Attlee really talked about...
Vol. 17 • July 1953 • No. 7
