Reed Irvine - Editor
ERIC SEVAREID VS. ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN ON NEWS MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE HUE MASSACRES OF 1968
Did the American news media heavily report the massacre by Communist troops of some 3,000 civilians in the Vietnamese city of Hue during their 25-day occupation of that city in February 1968? Or was this bestial atrocity only lightly noticed?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning Soviet author and a courageous critic of the Soviet regime, published a 3,000-word letter in the Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, on September 11, 1973, in which he charged that the Hue atrocity "had been lightly noticed and almost immediately forgiven" in the West because "the sympathy of society was on the other side."
Solzhenitsyn added: "It was just too bad that the information did seep into the free press and for a time (very briefly) cause embarrassment (just a tiny bit) to the passionate defenders of that other social system."
This was but one example of several cited by Solzhenitsyn to demonstrate the existence of "a lopsided moral outlook" on the part of many Western intellectuals. Other examples he cited were the insensitivity of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to torture of American POW's in North Vietnam, British Labor Party leader Harold Wilson's forgiving visit to Czechoslovakia in 1972, the expressions of moral outrage over the sins of South Africa compared with the tolerance of the oppression perpetrated by the Soviet Union, and the fervent protests by Australia and New Zealand of French atomic tests, unmatched by equal protests against Chinese atomic tests.
This was too much for Eric Sevareid, the ace commnentator for CBS News. Sevareid discussed Solzhenitsyn's criticism in his commentary on CBS television and radio on the evening of September 12. After paying tribute to Solzhenitsyn for his courageous stand for civil liberties in the Soviet Union and describing him as "quite possibly the world's most important living writer," Sevareid said:
Solzhenitsyn, proposing Sakharov for the Nobel Peace Prize, now makes a detour, attacking the American Democratic Party, Senate investigators of Watergate, and those American critics of the Vietnam war who he thinks have been morally harder on South Vietnam than on the Communist North. And he suggests that the United States is in the same state that Russia was in the last days of the Czars. In all this he reveals that his profound understanding of his homeland is matched by a profound misunderstanding of this country. Like so many West European intellectuals, he sees America through the prism of European experience and social ethic. He makes the mistake of classifying the cancerous abuse of power revealed by Watergate as just another example of American political chicanery. He claims that American war critics were scarcely bothered by the frightful massacres committed during the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese. He criticizes Australia and New Zealand for criticizing the French nuclear tests in the Pacific but not the Chinese tests.
He is saying in general that Western liberals tend to excuse the profound inhumanity of communist regimes. Some do. But this theme of Solzhenitsyn requires some rebuttal. The Hue massacres were heavily reported. Many other brutalities by the North were missed or reported sketchily at second hand, simply because we could have no reporters or cameras with the enemy forces. Australia and New Zealand protested the French atomic tests because they took place in their neighborhood.
Were the Hue Massacres Heavily Reported; as Severeld Claims?
Sevareid's rebuttal of Solzhenitsyn was of particular interest to AIM because it raised the much-neglected question of how the American news media had reported the Hue massacres. Sevareid said they were heavily reported and this meant that Solzhenitsyn had simply been careless with his facts in stating the contrary.
Who is right, Sevareid or Solzhenitsyn?
On the very evening that Mr. Sevareid broadcast his rebuttal of Solzhenitsyn, AIM's chairman, Reed J. Irvine, sent a letter to Eric Sevareid, describing what his clipping file on Vietnam revealed about the reporting of the Hue massacres.
Here are some excerpts from Mr. Irvine's letter:
I have checked my clipping files on Vietnam for evidence of this heavy reporting of the Hue massacres. I am sorry to say that I cannot find it. The first clipping I find on the massacre was in The New York Times of February 12, 1968. The Times devoted all of 5-column inches on page one to a charge by the mayor of Hue that the enemy had executed 300 South Vietnamese civilians and buried them in a common grave.
On May 1, 1968, The Times had another page one story, headed: "U.S. Mission Says Enemy. Slaughtered 1,000 Hue Civilians." The story was given 4-column inches on page one and 19.5 column inches on the inside. The same day, The Washington Post put this story on page 22, giving it 11-column inches. The Post did follow this with a short, 150-word editorial on May 2, which condemned the slaughter. I could find no editorial comment in The New York Times. Neither of these papers carried any photos of the mass graves, corpses or coffins.
The next story I find on this subject was published in The Washington Post over a year and a half later, on December 7, 1969. In fact, The Post had two stories on the subject that day, one from Hue, saying that 2,750 bodies had been discovered so far, and the other from Hong Kong reporting on Douglas Pike's analysis of the massacre.
While I may have missed something in between, my file gives no indication that the Hue massacre story was subject to anything that could reasonably be called "heavy" reporting. On the contrary, I would consider it one of the most under-reported stories of the decade...Of course, you may consider two front page stories in The New York Times "heavy" coverage, but I suggest that you contrast this with the coverage The Times gave to the My Lai massacre, an atrocity which did not begin to compare with the Hue butchery. This story broke in November 1969. The New York Times Index for 1969 alone contains 3-1/2 pages of entries (over 50 entries per page) on My Lai plus one page of photos.
It is remarkable that Solzhenitsyn, lacking access to the American press, perceived so accurately the disproportion in the attention devoted to the massacre at Hue and that at My Lai, while you, with all the resources at your disposal, should have failed to note this glaring disparity. Surely on this point you owe Solzhenitsyn an apology and your audience a correction.
After some prodding, AIM received the following reply from Eric Sevareid:
When your organization was founded I took it to be what its title implied, an agency designed to focus a politically neutral, objective scrutiny of the media. I thought it might be helpful, to the press as well as the reading and listening public.
Since then it has become clear that AIM is, in fact, ideologically motivated. Its only interest lies in refuting inaccuracies or alleged inaccuracies that reflect adversely on the right wing philosophy, right wing interests and the military establishment.
This is why I have not replied to your queries about my broadcast piece on Solzhenitsyn, and why I shall not acknowledge your queries or protests in the future.
AIM Scores Sevareid for Refusing to Defend or Correct His Statement
Evidently, Eric Sevareid could not demonstrate that the news coverage of the Hue massacres had been "heavy." Nevertheless, he did not want to admit to a serious error and make a public correction of it. His escape was to make a totally unjustified attack on AIM, using that as an excuse for his refusal either to prove that he was right or admit he was wrong.
Abraham H. Kalish, AIM's Executive Secretary, immediately responded to Sevareid, making the following points:
- It is true that AIM has an ideology in the sense that we believe in freedom and democracy. We do not conceal that ideological bias, but we do not think that all believers in freedom and democracy should be labeled "right wing."
- Mr. Sevareid knows very little about AIM and how it operates, apparently not knowing that AIM does very little monitoring of TV news and depends almost entirely on complaints received about inaccuracies and bias. We have never refused to investigate any complaint of substance and would not do so on ideological grounds.
- It is surprising that Sevareid should refuse to accept criticism from those who might differ with him politically, even if it relates to questions of factual accuracy. This conflicts with the following statement by Walter Cronkite, Mr. Sevareid's colleague at CBS, on May 18, 1971:
No one doubts the right of anyone to seek to correct distortion, to right untruths. Newsgathering is not an exact science. We commit errors of fact and the offended always must have the right to bring us to task when such occurs by sloth or inadvertence. (Emphasis added).
- A Freedom House panel composed of distinguished scholars and journalists recently issued a report on the news media and government, which included the following statements that had been agreed upon unanimously:
The Constitutional freedom of the press includes the right of all news media to inform, but they must not resist legitimate inquiries by the public into their performance.
We urge that the press be sensitive to the complaint of any segment of the community which feels that it has insufficient access to the media.
Responsible journalism provides a balance so that adequate play is given to all sides of controversial news.
- AIM has the support of both liberals and conservatives, but even if it were all liberal or all conservative, it would still be a part of the community and would be entitled to make inquiries into media performance and would be entitled to be treated with politeness and respect, if not love and affection.
- Proven errors should be corrected, regardless of the source of the complaint, since the correction is not for the benefit of the complainant alone, but for the benefit of the audience.
- Unless Eric Sevareid can dispute the factual accuracy of the AIM criticism, he has an obligation to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and to his audience to make a correction.
CBS Refuses to Make a Correction
The above letter did not succeed in touching the conscience of Eric Severaid, as far as we know, but we did finally pry a comment out of a CBS official. Mr. David Klinger, a Vice President of CBS News, wrote to us on October 2, saying that the President of CBS News, Mr. Richard S. Salant, would not require Mr. Severeid to be responsive to AIM inquiries. He also informed us that CBS News would not broadcast any correction of Mr. Sevareid's statement about Solzhenitsyn "because we do not agree that the statement was factually incorrect."
Mr. Klinger, however, failed to provide any evidence to support his statement, including any record of the amount of coverage CBS News had given to the Hue massacres. We have therefore asked Mr. Klinger and Mr. Salant to furnish the evidence that will back up the claim that Sevareid was on sound ground. We have submitted to them additional evidence that press coverage of the Hue massacres was scanty, citing an article by James Jones in The New York Times Magazine of June 10, 1973, which fully confirms Mr. Solzhenitsyn's description of the paucity of news coverage of this terrible atrocity. Mr. Jones wrote:
The battle for Hue itself received enormous publicity in America in 1968, but the aftermath (the massacres) didn't...Some pieces were written about it in America but dropped from sight quickly. It was not until a year later that many of the mass graves were discovered. And it was not until November 1969, when a Nixon speech used Hue as a justification for slow withdrawal, that the subject got additional attention in the press. But at the timer few American reporters saw fit to take it on and go into it. Nobody tried to do a serious expose. Hue was no longer news. Anti-U.S. feeling was high at home. Why buck it in the cause of unpopular truths? Much better to concentrate on our own rottenness at My Lai.
Does it really matter whether Eric Sevareid was right or wrong? Is a correction of his misstatement of any importance?
We think it is important. The failure of the American news media to expose fully the Hue massacres and to arouse the American people to an awareness of what happened at Hue is a serious blot on American journalism. It is a reflection of the "lopsided moral outlook" that Alexander Solzhenitsya tried to call attention to in his letter to Aftenoosten. Since Eric Sevareid refuses to acknowledge its existence even when it is clearly demonstrated for him, and since he is one of television's most prestigious journalists, the attitude deserves to be called "the Sevareid Syndrome."
In an article in TV Guide of October 6, 1973, Edward Jay Epstein shows that TV reporting of the Tet offensive in 1968 played a decisive role in undermining popular support for the war in the United States. Tet was an enormous military defeat for the communists, and the unbelievable atrocities they committed at Hue, if reported with anything like the attention given to My Lai, would have produced an even more serious moral and psychological defeat.
In his memoirs, The Vantage Point, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote:
There was a great deal of emotional and exaggerated reporting of the Tet offensive in our press and on television. The media seemed to be in competition as to who could provide the most lurid and depressing accounts. (Popular Library Edition, p. 384)
In his TV Guide article, Epstein writes:
In late 1968, Jack Fern, a field producer for NBC, suggested to Robert J. Northshield a three-part series showing that Tet had indeed been a decisive military victory for America and that the media had exaggerated greatly the view that it was a defeat for South Vietnam. After some consideration the idea was rejected because, Northshield said later, Tet was already "established in the public's mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat."
Epstein adds: "In a very real sense, he was correct."
But what is important is that it was not a military defeat, but a defeat inflicted by America's own news media, which behaved with incredible perversity to convey a false impression of what had really happened in Vietnam.
The best explanation for that perverse conduct would appear to be the prevalence of the Sevareid Syndrome, which leads even distinguished and veteran journalists to mistake fiction for fact.
The Sevareid Syndrome is dangerous and can result in great harm. But it can be cured if only those afflicted with it can be brought to recognize that they have a problem. They must first overcome their arrogance.
You can help bring home an awareness of the problem by writing to Eric Severeid, CBS News, 2020 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. You might suggest to Mr. Severeid that the record seems to suggest that he was in error in his rebuttal of the Solzhenitsyn broadcast on September 12. Ask him either to demonstrate that he was correct or that he is big enough to correct his error on the air.
Send copies of your letter to AIM and to Richard S. Salant, President, CBS News, 524 West 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10019. We would be interested in any replies that you may receive.
PRESS COVERAGE OF SOLZHENITSYN'S LETTER TO AFTENPOSTEN
The most sensational part of the Solzhenitsyn letter to Aftenposten was his outspoken criticism of the "lopsided moral outlook" of many people in the West, a theme Solzhenitsyn had also touched upon in his famous Nobel Prize lecture.
The purpose of this 3,000-word essay, however, was to nominate the noted Soviet physicist and civil libertarian, Andrei D. Sakharov, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Solzhenitsyn made a case for Sakharov by showing that war is not the only manifestation of violence that inflicts injury and death on mankind. The violence of states against their own citizens, he argues, has caused more deaths than the belligerent countries suffered in both world wars. He argued that it was necessary to fight this kind of violence, and that all too often those who proclaimed themselves "peace partisans" were not at all concerned about this struggle. It was in this context that he criticized the lopsided moral outlook of those who were not outraged by such crimes as the Hue massacres or by the torture and imprisonment of General Pyotr Grigorenko, but who were outraged by lesser misdeeds on the part of Western countries.
Solzhenitsyn nominated Sakharov for the Nobel Prize as one who had made "a supreme contribution to the cause of universal peace, not an ostentatious or illusory contribution, but a contribution of the most fundamental kind, in which a mighty violence is being contained heroically by one's own little individual strength, thus bolstering universal peace." He was referring to Sakharov's courageous stand for basic civil liberties in the Soviet Union.
One has to read the letter, which was published in full in The New York Times on September 15, (also in Human Events on September 29) in order to understand this. The AP report of the letter, as published in The Washington Post and other papers we have seen, focused almost entirely on Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Western liberals in general and the U.S. Democrats in particular. The New York Times' report from its: correspondent in Moscow published on September 12, was the most complete and balanced report that we found.
It is interesting to note that while The Times placed this story on p.3, The Washington Post relegated it to page A-37, and The Washington Star-News put it back on A-11. The Baltimore Sun devoted a mere three column inches to the story on p. 1 of its September 12 editions, saying almost nothing.
COLUMNIST ROBIN ADAMS SLOAN MAKES CORRECTION ON MA0'S MURDERS
In our October issue we reported the incredible statement by gossip columnist, Robin Adams Sloan to the effect that Mao Tse-tung, unlike Stalin, did not kill his opponents. Thanks to a letter, which AIM sent to several newspapers and to the Kind Features Syndicate, which distributes the Sloan column, a correction was carried in the Sloan column issued for release on October 21, 1973. The correction stated:
RED FACE OVER RED CHINA: Recently we said that Mao Tse-tung rarely killed his enemies in the manner of the late Joseph Stalin. We should have said that while the Chinese seldom executed nationally known figures, they killed at least 1,000,000 people, including 350 Roman Catholic priests, most Taoist priests, and 200,000 Moslems. We regret the error.
These figures were based on estimates supplied by ALM in one of the two letters we wrote on this subject. In the letter we reprinted in our October AIM REPORT, we cited the much higher numbers used in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee study, The Human Cost of Communism in China, which put the range of those killed by the Chinese Communists at 17 million to 36 million. The estimate of at least one million was made by British historian Henry Macleavy in his book, The Modern History of China.
While the columnist chose to use the most conservative numbers rather than giving the full range, we congratulate Robin Adams Sloan and the King Features Syndicate for seeing that this correction was made.
RUNDOWN OF SOME RECENT AIM ACTIVITIES
Hiss Case Ruling Appealed to F.C.C.
As promised in the AIM REPORT for August-September, AIM filed an appeal with the F.C.C. of the adverse ruling of the Commission's Broadcast Bureau on our fairness doctrine complaint against WNBC of New York. Our 4-page appeal stressed the great importance of a correct understanding of important events of the past as a guide for the future. We concluded with this plea:
We appeal to the Members of the Commission to weigh our appeal with the greatest of care. This is a case of historical importance. We ask that you confirm the wisdom of the ages and reverse the ruling that states that history is of no importance and that its mutilation by broadcast licensees is of no public concern.
If you are particularly interested, in this case, we will be happy to send you a copy of the appeal letter. Letters to your Senators and Congressmen asking them to show their interest in this case might be helpful. It is unusual for the Commission to overturn rulings of the Broadcast Bureau, but this is a strong case, and we intend to take it to court if the Commission finds against us.
"A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is chaste or not." Ernest Hemingway
WILL YOU HELP US COMBAT ADVOCACY IN JOURNALISM ?
F.C.C. Ruling on Pensions Case Appeal Still Pending
Although AIM was promised that the Commission would consider the NBC appeal in the case of "Pensions: The Broken Promise" in early September, mid-October has passed with no sign of action on the part of the Commission. In the meantime the legislation which was influenced by the unfair NBC documentary will soon be disposed of by Congress. Thus there is almost no possibility that NBC will be required by the Commission to present the other side of the issue in time for it to have any influence on the legislative debate. In the one case in which the Broadcast Bureau has made a significant ruling of unfairness in a network documentary, the Commission has succeeded in negating the effect of the ruling simply by delaying action on the appeal until it was too late for it to have any significant impact on the current controversy.
We still hope that the Commission will uphold the Broadcast Bureau ruling, but it is obvious that the procedures for handling fairness doctrine complaints by the F.C.C. need a drastic overhauling. A Congressional investigation of the handling of fairness doctrine complaints might be a good beginning.