Reed Irvine - Editor
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ABC News shows signs of trying to follow in the footsteps of CBS News in more ways than winning the ratings race. Consider these programs.
1. On May 12, ABC's "20/20" aired a program that sought to demonstrate that there is no credible evidence that the KGB end its Bulgarian puppets were behind the attempt to murder Pope John Paul II. This program was highly praised in two separate columns in the Daily World, the organ of the Communist Party, USA, on May 27 end 28. The columns, written by Victor Perlo, head of the Economics Section of the Communist Party, said the ABC program "largely debunked the charges of a Bulgarian-Soviet plot to kill Pope John Paul." Perlo had held positions in several federal agencies from 1933 until after World War II when he was exposed as a Soviet agent. Perlo used the ABC program as the basis for his claim that allegations of KGB-Bulgarian complicity in the attack on the pope were simply an "imperialist plot" invented by Reagan, the CIA, the Vatican and the Italian government.
2. On June 13, 14 and 15 the ABC World News Tonight aired segments by correspondent Richard Threlkeld from Havana, Cuba. A prominent Cuban journalist in this country characterized Threlkeld's reports as "chapter and verse the communist line." For example, after showing President Reagan telling displaced Cubans in Miami that communism had failed in Cuba. Threlkeld said: "Cubans look around and see they've spent a generation being alone, communist and embargoed in the Western Hemisphere, and they've survived. The way the Cubans see it, that's success-- especially compared to what used to be--the brutal, corrupt Batista regime bankrolled by the American mafia and casinos." Threlkeld concluded by suggesting that Cuba is useful to Washington. He said, "Imagine if Cuba weren't here. We'd have nobody to Name for Nicaragua and El Salvador. We'd have to admit that those revolutions may be home grown .... "
3. Sam Donaldson, ABC's abrasive White House correspondent, has taken the lead among the White House reporters in trying to convert the leak of the Carter debate briefing book to the Reagan campaign into another Watergate. On the evening news programs, on ABC's Sunday morning program, "This Week," and on "Nightline," Sam Donaldson has been suggesting that this leak has the potential to do to Reagan what Watergate did to Nixon. To magnify the importance of the briefing-book leak. Donaldson said on "Nightline" that Carter had "bombed" in his 1980 debate with Reagan, something which totally escaped the notice of the commentators at the time. To prove this, Donaldson cited the response to ABC's call-in survey the night of the debate. Viewers had been invited to call one number if they thought Reagan had won the debate and a different number if they thought Carter had won. Each call cost 50 cents. The majority of the calls were for Reagan, but all the commentators, including those on ABC News itself, gave little weight to these results, saying the method was not scientific, It was not until after the election that most analysts concluded that Reagan had won the debate. Donaldson has now rewritten history in his effort to recreate Watergate.
4. On June 23, ABC News aired a documentary titled "McCarthyism: The American Inquisition." This was produced by Marshall Frady, who had done a hatchet job on J. Edgar Hoover on ABC a year earlier. The program, which is discussed in some detail below, appears to have been designed to combat efforts by the Reagan administration to repair some of the damage that has been done to our internal security programs over the past decade. It was intended to demonstrate that thousands of innocent people had suffered as a result of the security programs adopted in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In attacking "McCarthyism," which has come to mean making serious charges supported by little or no evidence, ABC engaged in that practice itself. It implicated author Victor Lasky in one of the two cases it took up on the program, and it has now agreed that it was wrong to have done so. A correction and an apology to Mr. Lasky is to be aired on the night of July 16.
Write to Roone Arledge, President, ABC News, 7 West 66th Street, New York, N.Y. 10023. Ask him to personally investigate what lies behind this rash of unfair, inaccurate and misleading reporting by ABC News. Thank Mr. Arledge for agreeing to run an apology to Victor Lasky, but ask what disciplinary action he intends to take against the ABC News personnel that were responsible for the smear of Mr. Lasky.
We are also listing in the Notes from the Editor's Cuff the advertisers that helped pay for the ABC program, "McCarthyism: The American Inquisition." We suggest that you write to these advertisers and tell them how you feel about their having helped pay for this misleading and unfair program. Ask them if they were aware of the nature of this program when they contracted to advertise on it.
ABC SMEARS INTERNAL SECURITY PROGRAMS
One of the great myths of the present day is that the 1950s were a period of terror in the United States presided over by the grand inquisitor, Senator Joseph McCarthy. This is an idea that has been spread by the media, and it has been accepted without question by many people who had no personal knowledge of that period. On June 23, ABC News added to the myth by airing an hour-long program titled "McCarthyism: 'The American Inquisition.'"
The ads for the program said: "Senator Joe McCarthy claimed he was saving our society from Communism. But thousands of ordinary Americans lost their livelihoods and their homes. Without real evidence, without hard proof, without ever knowing their accusers. It's thirty years later. And still they suffer. The survivors of a time of fear and suspicion, each still serving the sentence of a disrupted life."
That's a good summary of the myth. ABC failed in its program to demonstrate that it was a fact. It produced no data that would show that thousands of innocent people lost their livelihoods and their homes as a result of false accusations that they were communists or security risks, it came up with just two cases of individuals who were supposed to represent those thousands. Neither case had anything whatever to do with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. One involved an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission who was denied a security clearance under the federal loyalty program that had been instituted by President Truman long before McCarthy appeared on the national scene as the scourge of the communists. The other involved a school teacher in a small West Virginia town, who appears to have lost her job more because of the unpopularity of her views on religion and sex than anything else. Both individuals lost jobs, but both went on to get new jobs in their chosen professions and therefore did not lose their livelihoods.
ABC failed to discuss the specific charges that led to the firing of these two individuals. Neither did it discuss the truth or falsity of those charges except from the point of view of the affected individuals and their friends and family. Nor did the program present any evidence that these individuals could not find jobs in their chosen fields and are suffering even today from the alleged injustice done to them over thirty years ago.
It would be foolish to claim that no mistakes were made and no injustices were done in the administration of the loyalty and security programs, but ABC ought to have been able to find two better cases than the ones it presented if there really were thousands who were unjustly denied security clearances. And since the program was labeled "McCarthyism," it would not have been unreasonable to ask that they produce someone who was actually unjustly accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
It would also have been reasonable to expect ABC to put these cases in proper perspective by discussing some of the many cases of genuine security risks who were removed from government service as a result of the Truman and Eisenhower security programs.
Instead, ABC demonstrated again that the news media are the most reckless practitioners of "McCarthyism." ABC not only presented a one-sided attack on the loyalty-security program, but it also smeared Victor Lasky, the veteran journalist, best selling author and a member of Accuracy in Media's Speakers' Bureau.
In presenting the case of Luella Mundel, an art teacher at Fairmont College in Fairmont, West Virginia. ABC gave the impression that Victor Lasky had been one of the accusers who had caused her to lose her job. Laskv was lured into giving ABC News an interview on the pretext that it wanted to talk to him about fighting communism in the 1950s and about the Americanism lectures that he gave for the American Legion. It also wanted to talk about the little people who were caught up in the controversy, such as Luella Mundel, who had been the subject of an article published in Harper's magazine.
That was mostly a smokescreen. The only thing the ABC was really interested in was Luella Mundel, because she was one of two people it had selected to illustrate the plight of those thousands who had allegedly lost their livelihoods as a result of McCarthyism. Victor Lasky's connection with Miss Mundel consisted of a brief encounter at an American Legion Americanism seminar in Fairmont, West Virginia in 1951. He was one of several speakers at the seminar. Miss Mundel took the floor and sharply criticized the speakers.
Asked about this incident by the ABC interviewer, Helen Whitney, Lasky said that he recalled that a hysterical woman had assailed him and the other speakers. He said, "I had to respond to try to calm her down." But that was not the way ABC had scripted the story. It immediately put on a man who said, "As I recall, Mr. Lasky called her a communist. This seemed to agitate her very much, and she called him a Nazi. And...he became very angry, and she became very angry also."
Some time after this, Miss Mundel was dismissed from her job "for the good of the college." The people of Fairmont had many reasons to dislike Luella Mundel. ABC pointed out that they considered her an atheist: they were suspicious of her surrealistic painting; and they were shocked by the casual way she talked about sex. ABC managed to tie all this in with the allegation that she had been accused of being a communist. Author William Manchester, who had written about her in Harper's, was shown saying, "Tagged as a Red, she couldn't find a job anywhere." Who had called her a Red? ABC had attributed that to Victor Lasky, followed by the president of the school board, who called Mundel a security risk.
The producer of the program, Helen Whitney, asked Lasky if he was not sorry about what he had done to Miss Mundel. That question was not aired, but Lasky's answer was. Right after Miss Mundel was shown saying that she feared that she would never find another job, Lasky was shown, his face occupying the entire screen, reacting indignantly. He said: "I have no feeling one way or the other. I'd feel sorry for her, I'd feel sorry for her very much. I mean, I didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't ask her to come to the meeting. I didn't ask her to shoot off her mouth. I have no idea why she was there. She was there with a claque, and she rather enjoyed being Joan of Arc. I didn't set fire to Joan of Arc."
When Victor Lasky gave that indignant reaction, he had no idea that he had been set up. He didn't know that he had been accused of having called Luella Mundel a communist, thus setting off the whole train of events that led to her firing. He had no idea that his indignant denial of any responsibility for Miss Mundel's fate would be juxtaposed with her telling of her fear that she would never find another job. He was not told that he had been accused of causing all Miss Mundel's troubles, nor was he given any opportunity on camera to deny that he had called her a communist.
ABC Agrees to Apologize to Lasky
However, ABC's Helen Whitney had good reason to believe that Lasky's recollection of what had transpired was more accurate than that of the man who said Lasky had called Miss Mundel a communist and she had called him a Nazi. Miss Whitney had in her possession a copy of a letter that one of Miss Mundel's close friends had written to Lasky after Mundel lost her job. The writer said that Lasky had impressed her as a compassionate man, and she wondered if he would not help Miss Mundel in her time of trouble. It was not the kind of letter that would have been written had Miss Mundel considered Lasky to be the villain of the piece who had gotten her into trouble by calling her a communist.
George Watson, a vice president of ABC News who serves as ombudsman, investigated the charges lodged by both Victor Lasky and Accuracy in Media that this program had improperly portrayed Leaky as the villain of the piece. Mr. Watson has informed us that he agrees that an injustice was done to Mr. Lasky. He has informed us that a correction and apology will be aired on the evening of July 16, when ABC will air another documentary.
ABC should make other apologies and corrections in connection with "McCarthyism: The American Inquisition." The fact is that neither of the two case studies that they presented had anything to do with Senator Joseph McCarthy. It doesn't appear that Luella Mundel's problems had much, if anything, to do with communism. She was an artist in a small West Virginia town that was more offended by her views on religion and sex than her politics. The only way ABC could make Miss Mundel a victim of McCarthyism was by falsely airing the charge that Victor Lasky had called her a communist. Nor did ABC show that Luella Mundel lost her livelihood. On the contrary, it reported that she had moved to North Dakota, where she taught school for 17 years before retiring in California. Victor Lasky was right. She compounded her problems in Fairmont by suing the president of the board of education for slander for having called her a security risk. The trial that ensued proved to be more of an ordeal than Miss Mundel had bargained for, since the defense made the most of her unorthodox views and conduct. The defense attorney was U.S. Senator Matthew Neely, a liberal and a foe of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The other case study presented in this program concerned a man named Paul McCarty, who was denied a security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953. McCarty, an electrical construction worker, was dismissed from his job on an AEC project. ABC gave the impression that McCarty was never again able to hold a job for long because of this blot on his record. He was fired again and again, ABC said. He insisted that he was innocent of the charges of involvement with the Communist Party, and he has demanded that the FBI apologize for having passed reports of such involvement to the AEC. He has for many years been writing letters to the FBI and the president of the U.S. demanding that he be exonerated.
McCarty told AIM that for about six months in 1941 he worked for and rented an apartment from a grocer named W.L. Smith in Los Angeles who was very active in distributing Communist Party literature. He said he took the Communist paper, People's World, but he thinks the subscription was given to him by Smith. He also acknowledges having attended a communist meeting on shipping in San Francisco in 1945, but he says he didn't stay when he saw what it was. He denies a charge in his FBI file that he worked for a communist- front group called the International Workers Organization in Los Angeles in 1949, saying that he had left Los Angeles in 1946. He said that he never joined the Communist Party, but he had told the AEC when they save him a loyalty hearing that had he known about the Communist Party before the war he might have joined because they would get you a job.
It was the AEC, not the FBI, that decided that McCarty was a security risk on the basis of the information provided by the FBI and McCarty's performance at his hearing. That may have been an unjust decision, but it is not an incredible one in view of the great sensitivity to security that attached to atomic energy matters in 1953. ABC did not tell its viewers any of the specific charges against McCarty, including those that he acknowledged were correct, i.e., his association with W.L. Smith and his receiving a communist newspaper.
McCarty, by his own account, held numerous jobs in construction after he was fired by the AEC. The first four jobs he had after his dismissal were all completed or he quit of his own volition. The fifth job was at a missile plant in Colorado, where he obtained a security clearance. He was fired after five months. He thinks that was for security reasons, but a lawyer he hired at the time could find no evidence that it was. He next went to work on an AEC job in Grand Junction, Colorado. No security clearance was then required. He said he got nervous and quit after two years because he thought they had a man following him around and asking questions about him of the other workers. He then got a job working on missile sites. He said they laid off the "agitators," and he was laid off even though he was not an agitator. This job didn't require any security clearance either. McCarty held several other jobs in the construction industry, both on government and private projects. In 1975, he got a job as an electrical inspector for the State of Utah, and he retired after 4 years and 7 months on that job. He now lives on Social Security and union and contractor pension income in Cedar City, Utah.
McCarty is quick to blame the 1953 AEC denial of a security clearance for any subsequent dismissal from a job, but he has no evidence to support his suspicious. He says that an entry in his FBI file dated 1965 says that he worked on numerous jobs but never stayed long, getting laid off for poor work. That he vigorously denies. ABC chose to portray him as a man hounded by his security problem all his life, but by his own account he voluntarily quit more jobs than he was fired from.
On the program, McCarthy's wife described him as "a prisoner in his own mind," and his son said he was "tilting at windmills that had long since fallen down." He is clearly obsessed with what he perceives to be an injustice done him 30 years ago, but the denied security clearance did not deny him his livelihood.
Nor did Seater McCarthy have anything at all to do with McCarty's security problem. His case was processed under the program introduced by President Harry Truman in 1947, long before Joe Mccarthy appeared on the national scene. ABC misrepresented that program as product of hysteria created by Senator McCarthy. It even threw in a film clip of a hens by the House Un-American Activities Committee to create the impression that some crazy hysteria was behind the federal government's loyalty program. Most viewers would not have known it, but the clip showed the committee questioning John Howard Lawson, the Communist Party's cultural commissar in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Lawson's influence over the content of our motion pictures was tremendous. His exposure by HUAC was badly needed. That clip was followed by one showing Gary Cooper appearing before the committee. The viewer was presumably supposed to conclude that Cooper was being harassed by HUAC. The truth is that he was a friendly witness who helped expose communist influence in the film industry.
The ABC program said that the government loyalty-security program cost 11,500 people their jobs. The ads promoting the program said that thousands of these were denied clearances unjustly. Of the two cases ABC chose to ventilate, one had nothing to do with the federal loyalty program. The other was not shown to have been a miscarriage of justice save by the assertions of the individual denied a security clearance and members of his family.
What was conspicuously missing from the ABC program was any mention of those who were separated from their government jobs who were unquestionably serious security risks. ABC would have had no difficulty finding many such cases. For example, Victor Peris, mentioned above as having praised ABC in two columns in the Daily World, the newspaper of the Communist Party, USA, was named as a Soviet spy within the U.S. Government by both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. Both Chambers and Bentley were admitted former Soviet spymasters who had under their control several key employees of the U.S. Government.
Perlo, Elizabeth Bentley revealed, headed a spy ring in Washington that included Allan Rosenberg of the Board of Economic Warfare, Donald Wheeler of the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA), Charles Kramer, Senate committee staffer, Edward Fitzgerald of the War Production Board, Harry Magdoff of the War Production Board and later the Department of Commerce. Harold Glasser of the Treasury Department, and Sol Lischinsky of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
However, the Perlo group was the lesser of the two rings Bentley managed. The other was the Silvermaster group, headed by Nathan Gregory Silvermaster of the Board of Economic Warfare. This group included Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, Solomon Adler, Treasury attache in China during the war, Laughlin Currie, White House, Frank Coe, Treasury, William Ullman, Treasury, and George Silverman, Air Force.
Those who say that the security program was so severe that it victimized the innocent by the thousands might well consider the case of Solomon Adler. Even though he had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of the Soviet agents who was feeding her information through Silvermaster, Adler was cleared by several Treasury Department loyalty hearings. Advised by a friend in Treasury that his future in the Department did not look bright, Adler resigned and went to Communist China, where he has been ever since.
Harry Dexter White, the most powerful member of the ring, got a new presidential appointment two months after the FBI told the White House of the espionage charges against him. Some 16 months later, he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and denied the charges. He died three days later, perhaps from a heart attack, perhaps a suicide, or perhaps murdered.
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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
I HAVE TENDED TO GIVE ABC NEWS HIGHER HARKS THAN THE OTHER TWO NETWORKS IN THE past, but we are taking ABC to task in this issue. As in many news organizations, there is evidence of a split personality at ABC. Ted Koppel, the host of "Nightline," usually makes a genuine effort to be fair. The documentary division, on the other hand, has been observed making every effort to be unfair in some cases. When Marshall Frady's hatchet job on J. Edgar Hoover was being produced last year, one of his staff told a former FBI official that she was interested only in unfavorable comments on Hoover. And it was only unfavorable material that was aired, with very few exceptions. Mr. Frady, who was formerly with Playboy and Newsweek, appears to have a very low regard for those who have tried to defend this country against internal subversion. That came through in his attack on Hoover, and it shows up again in his attack on the federal loyalty and security programs that is discussed in this issue. This documentary was given the wholly misleading title of "McCarthyism: The American Inquisition." The content of the program has nothing to do with Joe McCarthy, and its only connection with McCarthyism is its reckless attack on Victor Lasky, which might be cited as a good example of what has come to be called McCarthyism.
BUT WHILE WE ARE CRITICIZING ABC, LET US ALSO GIVE THEM CREDIT FOR HAVING IN THE person of George Watson an ombudsman who doesn't think that his job is to serve as a knee-jerk apologist and defender of everything ABC News does. I had a long telephone conversation with Mr. Watson about the unfair attack on Vic Lasky and other aspects of this documentary. Unlike Emerson Stone, his counterpart at CBS, he was willing to listen and to discuss my criticisms in a rational manner. Vic Lasky subsequently went to see Watson personally, with his lawyer, and Watson ended up agreeing that an injustice had been done. He has promised to have it rectified. That is a tremendous contrast with the stonewalling attitude of CBS News.
NEVERTHELESS, THIS PROGRAM WAS A STINKER FOR MANY REASONS, NOT JUST BECAUSE OF ITS unfair treatment of Lasky. It was an attack on the concept of weeding security risks out of sensitive government jobs. Our government's security program has been reduced to a shambles, and some efforts are now being made to rebuild it. I presume that this is why Mr. Frady and his friends at ABC decided to put on a program that would stir up public sentiment against such an effort. I think that it would be a good idea for AIM members to let those companies that advertised on this program know what they think about it. Here is a list of the companies whose ads appeared during the program.
I WOULD SUGGEST TO THESE GENTLEMEN THAT THEY INSIST THAT ABC PROVIDE THEM WITH a complete and accurate description of the documentaries they are invited to support with their advertising. They should compare the description they were given of the "McCarthyism" program with AIM's analysis of the program and judge whether or not they were misled.
THERE IS GOOD EVIDENCE THAT OUR PROGRAM OF INFORMING THE COMPANIES OF THE UNFAIR and inaccurate programs they have helped pay for is having an effect. The August issue of the radical magazine, Mother Jones, features an article about media coverage of the Soviet Union in which Howard Stringer, executive producer of the CBS Evening News, says: "I frankly believe that we as a nation and a people are naive about the Soviet Union and that they are naive about us. But put that on the Evening News and we'd have groups like Accuracy in Media all over our asses." Mr. Stringer was responsible for the five part series CBS aired two years ago called "The Defense of the United States." I would say that the program exhibited considerable naivete about the Soviet Union. The Mother Jones article, written by Eric Nadler, reveals that Mr. Stringer was surprised and disappointed that they were not able to get top Soviet officials to be interviewed for that program even though they sent Walter Cronkite himself to do the interviewing. They had to settle for a couple of lower level disinformation agents--Gen. Milshtein and Alexander Bobin.
NADLER SAYS: "THE PRESS IS ONLY TOO AWARE THAT ITS SOVIET PIECES ARE UNDER CLOSER- than-average scrutiny by the right-minded. Cries of Soviet 'disinformation' crop up every time the Soviets are dealt with seriously."
WHILE I'M ON THE SUBJECT OF MOTHER JONES, LET ME SHARE WITH YOU A PARAGRAPH FROM its June issue, part of an article following up on its interview with NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. They say: "We predicted that Brokaw would anger conservative media watch- dogs by talking to us, but we didn't foresee the extent of the heat that he would have to take. We didn't expect that conservatives close to the Reagan administration would call Brokaw's boss, Thornton Bradshaw, on the carpet. We didn't foresee that Reed Irvine, head of a nasty little outfit called Accuracy in Media, would then badger Bradshaw at considerable length at an RCA stockholders' meeting (RCA owns NBC) until Bradshaw gave in and agreed that the interview had been 'a mistake,' asserting that Brokaw himself had come to regret talking to Mother Jones." To set the record straight, I did not "badger" Mr. Bradshaw. I asked him if he thought it was intelligent for Brokaw to have given the interview to Mother Jones, revealing his leftist tilt. Mr. Bradshaw replied very straightforwardly, saying: "I think Mr. Brokaw made a mistake in holding that interview. He recognizes the mistake. He's sorry for it."
IN OUR LAST ISSUE I REPORTED THAT I HAD WRITTEN TO VAX GORDON SAUTER, PRESIDENT of CBS News, offering to debate him, since he was said to be unhappy about the fact that ABC had me on "Nightline" without putting on a CBS representative for balance. I also asked Mr. Sauter to provide some evidence to support his charge that AIM "is in the business of propaganda," pointing out that I would not make such a charge against CBS without facts to back it up. Gene Mater, one of Mr. Sauter's vice presidents, has now replied. He says Mr. Sauter does not want to debate me, since he doesn't want to give AIM any additional publicity. He provides no evidence to support the propaganda charge. Mr. Mater is unhappy about the fact that I said on an appearance on Cable News Network that AIM had helped CBS develop its News Standards. He denies that we gave them any help. I had thought we gave them quite a bit by criticizing the programs flawed by unethical editing and by asking, in shareholder resolutions, that they adopt a workable code of ethics. In 1976, they said in their proxy statement that they already had such a code. When we asked to see it, they didn't reply. We then threatened to complain to the SEC that their proxy statement was inaccurate. A few days before their annual meeting they hand-delivered to AIM's office their newly published "News Standards'" Mr. Mater says that was of no significance, because he had been working on them for years.