Reed Irvine - Editor
The Cambodian genocide began five years ago immediately after the communist seizure of Phnom Penh. Even though there had been ample evidence of the massive brutality of the Khmer Rouge prior to their ultimate triumph, evidence that was powerfully reinforced when the communists cruelly drove the entire population of Phnom Penh out of the city immediately after taking it over the Western news media were slow to recognize and report the genocidal conduct of Pol Pot.
William Shawcross, the English author of Sideshow, a book which tries to place much of the blame for what happened in Cambodia on the United States, is one of those journalists who admits quite frankly that he did not believe the early reports of communist atrocities in Cambodia. "I thought at first they probably weren't true," he recently told a journalism class in Washington, D.C. "They seemed too easy a vindication of the blood- bath theory..." Shawcross gave three reasons for his disbelief. First, he said they were too "extraordinary" to be believed. Second, the Khmer Rouge was a left-wing revolutionary movement, which in the minds of some made it incapable of such black deeds. This point was buttressed by the comment of Karen DeYoung, deputy foreign editor of the Washington Post, who told the same class, "Most journalists now, most Western journalists, at least, are very eager to seek out guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they must be the good guys." Third. Shawcross said, "There was a feeling that anything the U.S. Government said against a communist government in Indochina had to be wrong."
Shawcross acknowledged that a document dealing with the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in an area they occupied had been submitted to a Congressional committee in the summer of 1974. It gave an excellent preview of what the Cambodian people could expect under communist rule. He said the report was generally honored by the Western media, and that no one paid much attention to it. Some of the members of the Congressional committee that received the report helped seal the doom of the Cambodian people by opposing aid to the Lon Nol government in its dying days.
Shawcross observed that the Western left did not begin to admit that Pol Pot was committing massive atrocities in Cambodia until the Vietnamese began to make accusations in 1978 and 1979. Shawcross said that even now there were those on the left who still refused to acknowledge that Pol Pot was guilty of such monstrous crimes. He cited the anti-war activist, Professor Noam Chomsky, as an example.
Shawcross claimed that he personally became convinced that something terrible was going on in Cambodia when he talked to refugees on the Thai border in 1975. He said that he began to write about it but if he did his words on this subject were drowned out by his articles and his book, which proclaim that Cambodia's troubles are traceable back to the "secret" bombing of Cambodia during the Nixon years.
It was left to others, notably John Barron and Anthony Paul of Reader's Digest, authors of Murder of a Gentle Land, to bring those refugee accounts to the attention of the American people. They didn't get much help from the media, the Washington Post, for example, delayed reviewing this book until the summer of 1978, a year and a half after it was first published.
Most of our journalists arrived late at an appreciation of the enormity of the crimes of the communists in Cambodia. However, this does not seem to have sharpened their interest in new reports of communist atrocities in other parts of the world. Today there is a story of atrocities and human rights violations unfolding in Afghanistan which might in the end rival the Cambodian tragedy. But for the same reasons that led our media to ignore what was happening in Cambodia for so long, this story is not making the front pages of our newspapers or being featured on the evening TV news shows. Like the news that filtered out of Cambodia after the communist takeover, the news out of Afghanistan is being met with skepticism and indifference. Top officials of the U.S. Government, with access to the best intelligence data on what is happening in that country are unable to get the story out to the people.
Consider the Kerala massacre. According to the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek, last July about 200 Marxist Afghan soldiers together with 20 Soviet advisors surrounded the Afghan village of Kerala with tanks and armored personnel carriers. The communists suspected that the villagers had been sheltering and aiding anti-communist freedom fighters. Nearly all of the men and boys in the village were rounded up and taken to a field, ostensibly for a town meeting. The women were herded into the village mosque, the men and boys were ordered to pledge their allegiance to the Marxist regime, but instead they shouted. "Allah o akbar" (God is great).
At that point, a blond Soviet officer, wearing an Afghan uniform gave an order to fire. More than 1,000 villagers were said to have been shot. While some of the bodies were still writhing, they were bulldozed into a mass grave in the open field. The report stated that the women ran screaming from the mosque, pleading for mercy from the Soviet officer. He turned to them and said. "You can be sure that next year's potato crop will be a good one."
"Numerous rumors of mass shootings have previously been circulated among anti-government troops." the Monitor reported," but no corroborating, eyewitness evidence has up till now been forthcoming." The Monitor added that "far more people were killed in this Afghanistan massacre than when the entire male population of Lidice. Czechoslovakia was slaughtered during World War II by the Nazis or when American troops killed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in March. 1968."
But Kerala has not become nearly as well known as either of those atrocities. Recently Cliff Kincaid, assistant editor of Accuracy in Media, asked an audience of journalism students at Rutgers University how many had heard of My Lai--an event that happened when they were ten years old or less. About 80 percent raised their hands. He asked how many had heard of Kerala, an atrocity where ten times as many died less than one year ago. Not a single hand went up.
The Washington Post had run a story on Kerala--back on page 15. The Washington Star carried a small story on page 3. The New York Times gave the story three tiny paragraphs on page 12 but it followed up with a more detailed account the following day on page 9. The Times story reported a Soviet commentator as denouncing the story as "monstrous misinformation." and it also reported that the State Department had refused to confirm the story. A State Department official was quoted as saying: "We had numerous reports of atrocities in villages last year, but I don't recall anything on that order." For some reason, the State Department was unable to interview the refugees in Pakistan who had been the source of the stories carried in the Monitor and Newsweek.
Two weeks later, the Times ran a long story on the Kerala massacre by Barry Schlachler of the Associated Press. This account, Schlachler acknowledged, differed from previous stories. Schlachter said he found no evidence of Soviet involvement in the killings. He placed the number killed at 640. He also reported that local communist party workers were those killed. He placed implication of Schlachter's account was that the massacre was the work of a renegade Afghan army unit.
The Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the Washington Star all pointed out in editorials that this horrible atrocity should be investigated by an international body. The Monitor said: "Moscow no doubt will seek to avoid responsibility for the Kerala murders as it did for the Katyn massacre. The world should have a full accounting before the grim tale grows cold."
It is appropriate that Kerala should evoke comparison with Katyn, where about 10,000 Polish officers were murdered and buried in mass graves by the Soviets in 1940, soon after their invasion of Poland. The American and British Governments collaborated in obscuring Soviet responsibility for that atrocity after the graves were discovered by the Germans. Although the evidence of Soviet responsibility is conclusive, the U.S. Government has never issued an official statement to that effect. In June 1978, the Voice of America even doctored a report of a speech by a brave Polish writer, Andzrei Braun, who accused Polish censorship of preventing mention of the fact that the officers were massacred by the Soviet Union. The VOA deleted "by the Soviet Union" from its report. When the State Department was asked if they would issue a statement making it clear to the VOA and others that we consider the Soviets responsible for the Katyn massacre, they refused to do so.
The only reason the Katyn massacre was discovered and a Red Cross investigation made was because the Germans overran the area when they invaded the Soviet Union. The Soviets will not permit international investigating teams or even foreign journalists to visit Kerala. That in itself is evidence of their complicity in the crime. All accounts of the massacre are based on testimony of refugees. The Monitor reporter says that he discovered about 400 families, survivors of the massacre, in refugee camps in Pakistan. Schlachter did not say how many of these he interviewed. He said the Afghans he talked to did not say that Soviet troops had taken part in the killings." However, he also reported that a former Afghan officer who defected to the side of the freedom fighters last year had said that the Soviet military men wore Afghan uniforms and would have been hard to distinguish.
Schlachter and the Monitor reporter evidently talked to different Afghans, because the Monitor said that there was a general consensus that Soviet advisers, "some of whom were known by sight to the people of Kerala," had taken part in the massacre. Given their record, there is nothing out of character in the Soviet's ordering the slaughter of hundreds of Afghans at Kerala.
Given the Shawcross and De Young assessments of the attitudes of our journalists, it is shocking, but not surprising, that this story has not been given a fraction of the attention in our media that was given to My Lat. That, too, is an old story.
Kerala is by no means the only case of Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan. On March 26, Michael Barry of the International Federation of Human Rights told a Paris news conference of information he had gleaned from interviews with 100 Afghan refugees in Pakistan. He said that at a prison near Kabul, executions of political prisoners are being carried out in a "manner reminiscent of Auschwitz." One of the most horrible tales concerned an enormous cesspool at the prison where some of the prisoners have been drowned. Barry said that wives who came to look for their loved ones were told to look in the cesspool. They searched for the bodies with long sticks, while they wept.
Barry described torture, the use of poison gas, starvation and burying prisoners alive. Barry said the refugees had claimed that thousands had been buried alive. In language reminiscent of Pol Pot's Cambodia, the former warden of that prison near Kabul was reported to have said, "One million Afghans are sufficient in order for us to build socialism. All others are infected with the old thoughts and must no longer live." Barry's statements were reported on the UPI wire, but they were ignored by our major media, including the Times, the Washington Post and the Washington Star.
Two days later Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher told the Overseas Writers Club that the Soviets hold about 15,000 Afghan political prisoners and are executing 50 of them each night. He said Afghan villages are being destroyed by napalm and harsh explosives and that there was mounting evidence that the Soviets are using poison gas. He noted that more than 500,000 Afghans had already fled their homeland.
This authoritative statement by the Deputy Secretary of State, the first official description of the horrors of Afghanistan, actually made the evening TV news shows. CBS and NBC gave Christopher's remarks about 20 seconds and ABC gave him 24 seconds. That was less than what they devoted to a potato farmer protest in Maine. The Washington Post put the story on page 6. The Star put it on page 12, and the New York Times ran a small story at the bottom of page 10 in its city edition and then dropped it entirely from the late city edition.
Apparently concerned that the Afghanistan story was not getting the attention it deserved. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Deputy Secretary W. Graham Clayton gave speeches on April 7, again laying out the gruesome realities. Again what they had to say was given little attention by our media.
The New York Daily News, no longer the conservative paper of old, carried a story by its State department correspondent, Lars-Erik Nelson, attacking some of Warren Christopher's charges. Making heavy use of unidentified sources, Nelson said that anonymous officials "knew of no basis" for Christopher's charge that the Soviets were killing 50 prisoners a night. These same sources also were reported to be skeptical of reports that the Soviets had used nerve gas in Afghanistan. The editors of the communist (Trotskyite) paper, the Militant, liked Nelson's story so well that they reprinted it under the headline. "White House Trips over its Lies on Afghanistan."
Nelson told AIM he was unaware of the Militant's use of his article and commented that it might be a violation of copyright. When we noted that his article filled into the Militant's propaganda line (the Militant defends the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Nelson retorted that "a lot of people claim the reports of poison gas are false, not only the Militant." he said that what was needed was an autopsy of a victim, a captured gas canister, or reports from "disinterested persons" to confirm such use. Survivors of gas attacks are apparently not disinterested in Mr. Nelson's view.
Nelson's article did not delve into the question of why the Soviets refuse to permit "disinterested persons" from entering Afghanistan to investigate charges of poison gas use, as well as other atrocities. Articles such as his which discount the reports of our only good source of information, the refugees, play into the hands of the Soviets. The Soviets block access to the best sources of information. This enables reporters to say that we should not accuse them of wrong doing because we lack the kind of proof obtainable only if inspection teams were given access. It is precisely that attitude that enabled Pol Pot to wipe out two or three million Cambodians while the Western press uttered hardly a word of protest.
However. Nelson's unidentified sources are apparently not motivated solely by love of truth and accuracy. In an April 20 article in the Daily News. Nelson reported that "officials" fear a propaganda "overkill" on the Afghanistan invasion. Nelson wrote. "The fear in some quarters is that Carter will create an anti-Soviet atmosphere that he will not be able to tone down when it serves the U.S. interests to do so." Nothing that the Administration is still committed to the SALT II treaty. Nelson added. "That becomes all the more difficult as the exaggerated horror stories pile up, one former official said."
If that is the thinking of the large "dove" contingent in the State Department, we can also assume that it is the thinking of the equally large 'dove" contingent in the media--those who, according to William Shawcross, think that left-wing revolutionary movements are in- capable of wicked deeds and who are more willing to believe the communists than the U.S. Government.
On May 12, the Public Broadcasting Service will televise a movie called "Death of a Princess." This is based on the execution of a Saudi Arabian princess for the crime of adultery. The film was shown on British television last month. It was considered highly offensive by the Saudis and other Moslems. The Saudis sent the British ambassador home and have threatened to apply economic sanctions.
They have protested that showing of the film by our public television, and several public television stations have announced that they will not air it. However David Fanning of WGBH-TV of Boston, who is responsible for the movie, has urged all public TV stations in both carry the film and to advertise it, utilizing advertising funds provided by the Public Broadcasting Service.
The State Department is concerned about the possible negative effect this will have on our relations with Saudi Arabia, but it says that it is powerless to do anything about it. The Saudis may find it difficult to accept the argument that the U.S. Government is unable to influence the conduct of the Public Broadcasting Service, which is financed out of the public treasury. This movie is part of a series produced by WGBH-TV called "World." "World" has been financed with appropriated federal funds to the tune of $625,000. It has received an additional $257,000 in non-federal funds from the Station Program Cooperative, which derives a substantial portion of its support from state and local tax dollars. A balance of $460,000 comes from grants from the Ford Foundation, the Polaroid Corporation, and the German Marshall Plan Fund--all tax exempt.
In an excellent article in the Spring 1980 issue of Washington Quarterly, Michael Ledeen and William Lewis point out that one of the important factors in the weakening of the shah's government in Iran was the welter off conflicting signals coming out of Washington. On the one hand, high officials--and Rosalynn Carter-- were pledging their unswerving support, while on the other the shah was being bombarded with criticism of his government's human rights policies. Ledeen and Lewis note that the falter greatly encouraged the shah's enemies.
Now that lran has been converted into a bitter enemy of the United States, Saudi Arabia has become an even more important friend. The Saudis have increased their oil production well above the level they consider optimal in order to help make up for the loss of Iranian supplies. This cooperation has helped restrain the rise in the price of oil and has enabled us to avoid the long gas lines that afflicted us in 1974. It is in the interest of every American that Saudi Arabia not go the way of Iran, a fate that is by no means impossible. The country does not pretend to be a democracy, and it adheres to traditional Islamic law, which by our standards pro- vides for a number of cruel and unusual punishments. They cut off the hands of thieves and execute adulterers. Nevertheless, the State Department has muted its criticism of human rights policies in Saudi Arabia, not wishing to contribute to the destabilization of the government of a country of such great economic and strategic importance to us.
Such concerns apparently are of no interest to David Fanning, WGBH-TV, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We were not able to find any evidence that they had ever sought the advice of the State Department on the wisdom of making "Death of a Princess." Indeed, we could find no evidence that they had sought State Department advice even after the furor that erupted after the film was shown in the U.K.
We had some questions we wanted to ask David Fanning about his decision to go full steam ahead with this project in the face of the evidence that it might cause serious problems with Saudi Arabia. We noted that he had previously aired on the "World" series programs that were laudatory of North Korea and Castro's Cuba. We recalled that he had also given us a program called "Blacks Britannica" that provided a Marxist view of racial policies in the U.K. That program was offensive to many of our British friends. We would have liked to have asked Mr. Fanning if it mattered to him if what he was doing produced serious strains in U.S.--Saudi relations. Was that perhaps an outcome that he might even welcome? Mr. Fanning did not return our calls. The officials we talked to at PBS. CPB and WGBH all refrained from making any comment on the question, saying that it was something that only Mr. Fanning could answer.
An official of PBS told us that he was concerned about the possible consequences of the airing of this film but was powerless to do anything about it. He said it was like watching a man run down your street torching houses. You hoped he wouldn't torch yours. Given this analogy, a CPB official said that while he personally might want to restrain the torcher, there was nothing he could do officially.
AIM believes that Congress has made a brave error in appropriating funds for public broadcasting without assuming any responsibility for the way in which the funds are used. We have written to members of both the House and Senate suggesting that they join in issuing a statement informing both the Public Broadcasting Service and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that Congress cannot approve the continued appropriation of huge sums to public television if it does not show a greater sense of responsibility in matters that may endanger the well being of the people and the safety of the nation.
If you agree with this statement, we suggest that you write to your two senators and your congressman on this matter. The date for the showing of the film will have passed by the time this AIM Report reaches you, but your letters may help focus the attention of your representatives in Congress on a serious problem that has been ignored for too long.
Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson has bee hit with as $8 million libel suit filed by John Trotter of Houston, Texas. Trotter, who owns the Coca Cola bottling company in Guatemala, has charged that two Anderson columns alleging that he has been "at the center of anti-union violence in Guatemala" and that there is a "reign of terror at Trotter's plant" in Guatemala are false and malicious.
Trotter's complaint, filed in the District Court of Harris County, Texas, charges that these statements by Anderson were published with reckless disregard of the truth and were deliberately calculated to interfere with Trotter's contractual relationship with his customers and with the coca cola Co. One of the Anderson columns had brought President Carter's name into the controversy, charging that he had been indifferent to "the violence that has been wreaked on workers" by Trotter's company which is franchised by coca Cola, many of whose executives are Carter supporters. Trotter is suing Anderson for $3 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. He is also suing Brazoport Facts, one of the newspapers that carried the Anderson columns for $3 million. The first column was published on March 20, 1979, and the second on October 15, 1979.
THE LEAD STORY IN THIS ISSUE OF THE AIM REPORT EXPLAINS THE PERPLEXING BEHAVIOR of much of our media from the point of view of a couple of young journalists on the left. The remarks of William Shawcross and Karen DeYoung which we quote in this story were made in Miss DeYoung's class in journalism at the Institute for Policy Studies. This is a far left "think tank" in Washington which has been described in the Village Voice as "an intellectual headquarters for the left since 1962." In his excellent book, The Alternative Media, Francis M. Watson, Jr. observes that the IPS has been involved in promoting demonstrations, draft resistance, anti-defense and anti-intelligence activities and that it has enrolled as "fellows" "known revolutionaries and terrorists." One of its co-directors, Marcus Raskin, was a member of the radical group that started Counterspy, the publication dedicated to publicizing the identities of our intelligence agents. Karen DeYoung is the deputy foreign editor of the Washington Post. She was responsible for most of the Post's coverage of the revolution in Nicaragua last year, and she was recently awarded a prize by the Society of Professional Journalists for her stories on Nicaragua.
KAREN DE YOUNG'S COVERAGE OF NICARAGUA LEADS ONE TO BELIEVE THAT SHE WAS INCLUDING herself among those Western journalists who she said were "very eager to seek out guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they must be the good guys." She had visited a secret Sandinista training camp in Costa Pica during the Nicaraguan rebellion, where she interviewed a female guerrilla named Nora. Nora was described as a heroine who had helped assassinate one of the Nicaraguan generals. What Miss DeYoung spared her readers was the description of the torture and mutilation of the general that Nora and her comrades perpetrated. The Nicaraguan Government offered photos of the mutilated corpse to the Washington Post, but it showed no interest in revealing that side of Nora. Nora now holds the post of special prosecutor in the new regime in Nicaragua, where she is busy seeing that the 7,000 plus political prisoners held by the Sandinistas are properly processed through the kangaroo courts that have been established there.
THOSE WHO DEPENDED ON KAREN DE YOUNG'S PRIZE-WINNING REPORTS FROM NICARAGUA WERE ill-prepared for the discovery that the revolution has brought to power puppets of Castro and the Kremlin who have no intention of permitting Nicaraguans to enjoy the degree of freedom that they had under Somoza. A typical DeYoung report on the ideology of the Sandinistas read: "As for the politics of the Sandinistas, while some of the leadership avows Marxist beliefs, others describe themselves as 'democratic pluralists'... Moises Hasan Morales, one of five members of a proposed provisional government of the Sandinistas named over the weekend, described himself in an interview as a socialist who does not adhere to the 'Marxist mold.'" Hasan recently led an official Nicaraguan mission to Moscow where he signed several important agreements, including one pledging cooperation between the Soviet Communist Party and the Sandinista National Liberation Front. On June 24, 1979, the New York Times described another junta member, Daniel Ortega, as "a long-time guerrilla leader known to have been trained in Cuba." On July 6, Miss DeYoung described this same man as a member of "the most moderate faction which advocates pluralistic democracy."
WE HAVE SAID IT BEFORE AND WE WILL SAY IT AGAIN: THE WAY IN WHICH JOURNALISM prizes are awarded is a scandal. In those cases which we have investigated, the judges have almost no way of telling whether the stories they are judging are accurate. They are not presented with the criticisms of the nominated articles--only with the plugs submitted by the papers nominating their own stories. We will have more on this later.
This ad was run in the May 5, 1980 issue of Broadcasting magazine. We also ran it in Washington Weekly, of which 1000 copies were distributed headquarters in New York.
ACCURACY IN MEDIA'S HIGHHANDED HYPOCRITE AWARD Goes to William S. Paley Chairman of the Board of CBS, Inc.
Mr Paler, the winner or the Stellar Stonewall Award in 1979 for his skill in refusing to answer shareholder questions, rose to a higher level in this year's competition. Mr. Paley displayed consummate hypocrisy in banning TV camera coverage of the CBS Annual Meeting, even though the meeting was open to the print media. Mr. Paley said that several years ago when cameras had been permitted, they had been "disruptive." CBS does not accept that as a valid reason for other individuals or organizations to bar TV cameras from covering events open to the press. Having won the hypocrisy contest hands down. Mr. Paley went on to give a masterful display of haughty high- handedness. Abandoning the stonewalling tactic which he used so effectively at the 1979 CBS Annual Meeting. Mr. Paley simply adjourned the meeting to avoid having to respond to most of the questions that Accuracy in Media had come prepared to ask. Mr. Paley had taken all the CBS directors and a large number of CBS officials all the way to New Orleans at considerable expense for this meeting. The meeting was convened at 10:00 A.M. It was abruptly adjourned at 11:00 A.M. over the protests of Reed Irvine, Chairman of Accuracy in Media, who still had several questions he wanted to ask about serious uncorrected errors in CBS programs. The abrupt termination of the meeting was obviously engineered to spare Mr. Paley the ordeal of having to respond to additional embarrassing questions about badly flawed CBS programs. But before that happened, Mr. Paler displayed his awesome arrogance by categorically rejecting the Kemeny Commission recommendation that the media employ knowledgeable experts to advise in coverage of such serious technical matters as nuclear accidents. Mr. Paley said that CBS "did not consider it right or fruitful for us to have this kind of expert advice available to us." He said "it would be a waste of money, a waste of time to have special scientists of the type you refer to come in and try to interfere with the way CBS is conducting its news." CBS had refused to submit a resolution favoring implementation of the Kemeny Commission recommendation to a vote of the shareholders. Among the questions which Accuracy in Media was pre- vented from asking, and which Mr Paley curtly declined to even discuss after the meeting, were these: Why did the CBS docu-drama. "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones." ignore the incontrovertible evidence that Jones had been a dedicated Stalinist-Maoist communist for many years, not the well-meaning believing Christian portrayed by CBS? (Mr. Paley had refused to deal with a similar question at the 1979 annual meeting when he was asked why CBS News had avoiding reporting the evidence of Jones's dedication to the communist cause) Since CBS claims that the Illinois Power Company's videotape. "60 Minutes/Our Reply." inaccurately charges CBS with serious errors that have not been corrected on the air, why had CBS refused to send a representative to showings of this highly damaging expose of CBS errors to debate the issues raised? "60 Minutes" aired a segment on an obscure legal case in Utah in an effort to show that the legal profession and the judges in Utah were intimidated by the Mormon Church. The theme was that it was difficult for a person suing the church to obtain competent legal counsel or justice in the courts in Utah. CBS subsequently admitted that the plaintiff in this case Garn Baum, had hired numerous lawyers to pursue his case a fact not revealed in the "60 Minutes" program CBS also admitted that it was wrong to imply that Baum's appeal of his suit to the Circuit Court of Appeals in Colorado after it was dismissed for lack of evidence in the Federal District Court in Utah reflected on the integrity of the Federal District judge in Utah. In light of those admissions, why hasn't CBS publicly apologized for airing this slanderous program, as well as correcting the other serious errors in the program? It is too bad that Mr. Paley closed the meeting before those questions could be asked.
Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org