Reed Irvine - Editor
|
|
|
There is an old story about the corporation executive who issued orders to his officers to quit drinking vodka martinis and stick to gin, because it was better that clients realize that the officers had over-imbibed at lunch than to think that they were fools.
The heads of the news operations at ABC and CBS face a similar dilemma. Confronted with complaints about segments they aired recently on the foreigners who fought for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, they have to decide whether to defend the dissemination of pro-communist disinformation or blame what they have done on the ignorance and gullibility of their correspondents. This is a difficult choice, since the ABC broadcast on October 22 was the responsibility of the distinguished Pierre Salinger; and veteran CBS correspondents George Herman and Fred Graham were responsible for that network's two segments on this subject on November 9 and 1O.
This focus on ancient history came about because a few of the Americans who had gone to Spain to fight as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had recently returned there to take part in a reunion that marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. ABC decided this merited attention on its evening news program. The segment was introduced by anchorman Peter Jennings saying, "Fifty years ago, to be a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fight against fascism was regarded by some Americans as a romantic and important adventure."
Salinger's Sentimental Journey
Pierre Salinger, the former press secretary to President John F. Kennedy and now a correspondent for ABC proceeded to tell us about that "romantic and important adventure," utilizing interviews with a few of the men who made that sentimental journey to Spain. Prominent among them was a veteran former Communist Party official, Steve Nelson. Without being identified as a long-time Communist, Nelson was shown saying, "To me, the Spanish Civil War and the fight there was the most important thing in my life- time, not because I was in it, but because it was the first major fight against fascism."
That was followed by Pierre Salinsor saying, "And fight they did, against the wishes of the American government, outmanned and outgunned. Nearly a third of them died and were buried on Spanish soil. It was here at Bruneti, on the road to Madrid, that the Americans were plunged into one of the bloodiest battles of the war. For some, the return brought back strong memories, buried for half a century .... They fought for almost two years. Ernest Hemingway wrote of their exploits, glorifying them in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But in January 1938, with defeat a certainty, the remainder of the Lincoln battalion marched out of Barcelona, going home to the cheers of those they had tried to help. But once stateside, their passports were seized, their records blackened .... But their friends still consider them heroes. Without U.S. or official Spanish government support, a committee arranged this week's reunion to honor the veterans, from the left, to be sure, but not in every case .... There were no brass bands, no parades for the survivors of the Abraham Lincoln battalion. The reunion was today as it was 80 years ago, a private journey, made of convictions, supported by belief, and ending in the personal satisfaction of knowing they showed the world the race of its enemy and sounded the alert."
AIM's Correction
In a letter to ABC News President Roone Arledge, AIM Chairman Reed Irvine observed that ABC News should have informed its viewers that the international brigades, including the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade, were organized and run by the Communists and that many of those who joined were profoundly disillusioned when they discovered that the Stalinists in Spain were imprisoning, torturing and even summarily executing their ideological rivals on the left--the Anarchists, the POUMists, and anyone suspected of Trotskyism. We pointed out that this had been exposed many years ago by the British writer, George Orwell, in his great book, Homage to Catalonia, which was based on what Orwell had personally seen and heard as a volunteer in Spain.
Recognizing that network news departments are not strong on historical research, Irvine told Roone Arledge that he assumed that no one at ABC News was familiar with Orwell's book. But he expressed surprise that no one on his staff had read an excel- lent article about William Herrick, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, that appeared in the left- wing Village Voice only last July, written by Paul Berman. Berman wrote:
"Herrick, the 'red hot,' the Bolshevik, was horrified by what he saw in Spain. He was horrified by precisely the same things that astounded and shocked Orwell, who was fighting in those early months of 1937 with one of the non-Communist left-wing militia. There was a liberal view of the Spanish Civil War, according to which honest republican anti- fascists aided by heroic and efficient Communists from around the world were holding off the fascist threat. But that wasn't what Orwell and Herrick saw. The workers and peasants, led by Anarchists, Socialists, and independent Marxists, had risen up against Franco. And these forces were now under double attack. Fascists were attacking at the front, and Communists were undermining in the rear. The Communists were spreading a Soviet police net- work across the anti-fascist zones. They were discreetly murdering authentic leaders of the Spanish working class. They were imprisoning militants from the other factions. Gradually they were establishing a dictatorship all their own, and they were doing it under the cover of a fantastic propaganda barrage about democracy."
Berman described the trouble George Orwell encountered when he tried to inform the world of the true situation, saying: "The liberal press wouldn't publish his reports, the liberal intellectuals despised him as a heretic, his own publisher wouldn't handle his book." Orwell had said of this, "The most terrible things were happening even when I left (Spain}, wholesale arrests, wounded men dragged out of hospitals and thrown into jail, people crammed together in filthy dens where they have hardly room to lie down, prisoners beaten and half starved, etc., etc. Meanwhile, it is impossible to get a word about this mentioned in the English press."
Another member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Sandor Voros, in his 1961 book, American Commissar, confirmed all this. He said the men felt betrayed by the Communist Party and that many of those who complained "were ultimately made to pay for it with their lives in the jails of SIM (Servicio de Investigacion Militar)." Historian Hugh Thomas has written that SIM was led by Communists and "employed all the odious tortures of the NKVD (now the KGB)." He said SIM was responsible for the murder of many conscripts who were "not merely cowardly or inefficient, but also unwilling to follow the orders of Communist commanders."
In the Village Voice article, William Herrick described the execution of three young Spaniards by a "Comrade Neumann" which he personally witnessed. He said: "One of them had to be practically dragged he was so frightened. One of them spat. They could have been Anarchists, they could have been POUMists. And they were shot. They were shot in the head. And it just absolutely devastated me .... I became ill. When we went back I had to vomit outside that car .... Neumann made some crack about Trotskyite fascists, or something like that. They were no more fascist than I was."
Perpetuating the Grand Deception
There is a grand deception that runs through Salinger's presentation on ABC's "World News Tonight," George Herman's segment on CBS's "Sunday Morning" on November 9, and Fred Graham's long inter- view of three Abraham Lincoln Brigade members on CBS's "Nightwatch" on November 10. It is the idea that these men were fighting for freedom for the Spanish people, for democracy. Salinger concluded saying, "(T)hey showed the world the face of its enemy and sounded the alert." He had shown Steve Nelson saying "it was the first major fight against fascism." Charles Kuralt had introduced Herman's segment on CBS's "Sunday Morning" with this eloquent statement: "But the ideals that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was dedicated to-- freedom and the struggle against tyranny--made them comrades of a world that found itself at war with those same tyrants just a few years later." That theme ran throughout the Herman piece, which ended with Steve Nelson vehemently denying that they had fought in vain because, "It brought about the world alliance which put Hitler in his grave and all of his ideas. And we helped."
Fred Graham in his lengthy interview on "Night- watch" was the only correspondent who even indicated that there was less than unanimous agreement that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had been fighting for freedom and against tyranny. Early in the inter- view, he asked one of his three guests who admitted having been a Communist about "some revisionist writing lately that says that you were used, you were used by the Communists, and that the image of fighting the fascists was really a cover to carry out Communist ideas." The answer was first laughter and ridicule, and then this:
"That, to us, was the most sacred type of a battle, you know, to fight fascism. And where else in this world would we have an opportunity to take on the fascists and try to prevent the Second World War? So while we were proclaiming that this was the type of a fight, that if we could beat the Nazis, beat the fascists in Spain, you know, the chances are great that we could have prevented the Second World War. We would have weakened these characters so damned much that they wouldn't dare attack Poland or Czechoslovakia or any place else. But the fact that we lost, and three, four months later, bang, the Second World War started. That was the best indication of what was really taking place."
Fred Graham's question was probably stimulated by an article by Ronald Radosh in The Washington Post about his uncle who had died fighting in Spain. Radosh, a professor of history and co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, had concluded that the truth was contrary to what the Left had been saying about the Spanish Civil War. Radosh wrote:
"The reality of Spanish events did not conform to the image personified in the Comintern's interpretations.
The soldiers went to fight for democracy--but only a few realized that their battalions were put together for a greater purpose in which they served only as pawns: to fashion Spain in the manner desired by Joseph Stalin, who needed to create a situation in Europe that would serve his foreign policy ends."
Radosh discussed how Stalin had traded military aid to the Loyalist government for political and military control and how his agents had cemented that control by inflicting a reign of terror directed against rival leftist parties. This was what lay behind the jailings, torture and executions that so angered Orwell, Sandor Voros and many others who had gone to fight in Spain.
An Old Story
Apparently this view of what happened in Spain was new to Fred Graham. He referred to it as "revisionist writing lately." Actually it was laid out 45 years ago by Eugene Lyons in his book, The Red Decade. Lyons, who had learned to view the Soviet Union and Stalin realistically during his years as United Press correspondent in Moscow, told how Stalin had hijacked the Loyalist government and doomed it to defeat. He quoted the Loyalist ambassador to France, Luis Araquistan, as saying, "The inner-line Communist tactics of winning the upper hand paralyzed the military and political efforts necessary to beat the strong enemy." Araquistan said that the Communists "wanted complete control--the exclusion of all other political groups .... Democracy was only one of their political tools to unite the absolute power in their hands."
Lyons pointed out that the Spanish Communists numbered only 10,000 when the Civil War began, but on December 17, 1936, Pravda announced that the purging of the Trotskyites and anarcho-syndicalists was underway in Catalonia and would be carried out with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR. "Already Russia was speaking of Spain as though it were just another Soviet province!" Lyons exclaimed.
"Stalinist agents by the thousand descended on bleeding and prostrate Spain from all directions, but chiefly from Russia," Lyons said. "They deliberately battered down the organizations of Spanish labor, ousted and murdered leaders whom they could not flatter or buy into stooging, and started an open and secret terror that did as much damage to the Loyalists as Franco himself," he added.
Just as Orwell found his efforts to expose this situation being blocked in England, others in this country ran into hostility when they tried to get the truth published. Lyons wrote: "The reports of Spaniards and Americans like Araquistan, John Dos Passos, Largo Caballero, Sam Baron (the brother of AIM President Murray Baron), Liston Oak, Anita Brenner-- people whose deep loathing for fascism is beyond possible question--simply have not registered. They have been unable to break through the great falsehood about Russia's role 'sold' to the world by a powerful government operating a vast agitational machine and disposing of unlimited fiscal and moral resources."
Lyons was hopeful that the facts would eventually work their way into public consciousness. A member of Accuracy in Media's national advisory board until his death, Gene Lyons would be disheartened but not surprised that on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, two of our three television networks were still spreading the same communist propaganda line that he and others had exposed as false as early as 1937. In explaining the reason why it was so difficult to get the truth known then, Lyons said: "News out of Loyalist Spain was filtered through communist sieves, rigidly controlled and in part lavishly subsidized. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went through the hands of a single alleged 'independent' American writer actually on the Loyalist payroll-- this according to affidavits from Loyalist leaders on file in official quarters here. In addition to paid journalistic agents, the totalitarian propaganda set- up enjoyed the fatuous and enthusiastic help of neutral reporters too childish politically to see through the game. Excited literati from many countries had rushed to the scene. They failed to distinguish between the Loyalist masses --predominantly anarcho-syndicalist and socialist and plain democratic-- and the Communist bureaucracy that had blackjacked its way to control."
Blotting Out The Hitler-Stalin Pact
Within months after the surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade returned home, where those who had not strayed from the party line were treated as heroes by the Communist party cadres, they were put to a severe test. Hitler and Stalin, in August 1939, agreed to live in peace with each other and to partition Poland between them. This led to World War II, and those who had risked their lives ostensibly in the cause of fighting fascism in Spain were now required by the party line to side with Stalin's new found friend, Hitler, against the British and French.
The Communist Party had provided an organization for the returning veterans called Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB). The VALB promptly passed a resolution declaring that the war against Germany was an "imperialist war" and pledging to do its best to prevent the involvement of the United States. This was identical to the Communist Party line. One veteran, Robert Gladnick, has testified that he was told that anyone who did not agree to the new position would not be permitted to attend VALB meetings. (SACB Report on the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, December 21, 1955, p. 59)
The Communist Party and the VALB continued their strong opposition to the war and fought American aid to the Allies until June 22, 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR. After aiding Hitler for nearly two years, they once again became anti-fascists. This ought to pose something of a problem for those who now try to glorify these individuals as principled idealists who risked their lives in Spain because of their deep hatred of fascism and love of freedom. But it was no problem at all for Pierre Salinger, Charles Kuralt, George Herman and Fred Graham. They simply blotted out the embarrassing Hitler-Stalin pact. The anti-fascist fighters in Spain were portrayed by ABC and CBS as having been in the vanguard of the fight to stop Hitler, but the truth was that their organization worked for nearly two years to block assistance to countries that had taken up arms against Hitler.
None of the correspondents raised this question with the veterans they were interviewing. George Herman came the closest. He recalled that six months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. He didn't mention that the USSR invaded Poland at the same time. Fred Graham was oblivious to the history of that time. When one of the veterans he was interviewing launched into a recital of Hitler's crimes, culminating in a Hitler quote saying, "First we're going to take Europe, then we're going to conquer the world," Graham didn't ask him if he had supported the VALB's condemnation of the war against Hitler in 1939. Graham's only comment was: "It is true that in those days, many people who became Communists were essentially anti-fascists."
No Dissident Voices
One of the characteristics of a propaganda campaign is the exclusion of facts or opinions contrary to the message of the campaign. The 22 pages of transcripts of the three programs about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade included interviews with a dozen veterans of the Spanish Civil War. All were enthusiastic about their participation in that conflict. Not one critical comment was made about the kinds of things that had disillusioned people like Orwell and Herrick. There was not even any indication that any of the interviewers, except Fred Graham, were even aware that there are veterans who feel differently.
Nor was it made clear in most cases whether the individual being interviewed had been or still was a member of the Communist Party. Steve Nelson, long a party official, was interviewed by both Salinger on ABC and Herman on CBS. Salinger did not even identify him as a party member. Herman identified him as "a labor organizer and a Communist" who "became a political commissar and sometime commander in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade." Subsequently he mentioned that Nelson had been convicted of sedition in Pennsylvania and that he "subsequently left the Communist Party because of its slavish devotion to Moscow." He neglected to mention that this break came only after Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 condemning Stalin for having killed or imprisoned so many good Bolsheviks without cause. Like some others who broke at that time, Nelson appears to have broken with the party, not with communism. His rejection of slavish devotion to Moscow came late in life after decades of slavish devotion to Moscow.
Fred Graham made a half-hearted effort to discuss Communist Party ties of the three individuals he interviewed--Irving Weissman, Albert Prago and Bill Bailey. He asked if all three of them had been Communists. Bailey and Prago acknowledged that they had. Weissman wouldn't be pinned down, even when Graham said bluntly, "But you were a Communist." When Graham asked why all three had quit being Communists, Weissman replied, "That's another matter." The subject was promptly dropped. However, Graham did note that they always seemed to line up with the Communists.
Persecution Alleged
In all three programs some of those interviewed asserted that they had experienced difficulty finding work because they had fought in Spain. In the ABC program Milton Wolff, who was the national commander of the VALB from its inception, said: "We were hounded out of every job. I worked as a furrier at $20 a week or something like that. It was the best I could get." Albert Prago, replying to a Fred Graham question, said they were blacklisted on jobs and had passports lifted. Steve Nelson told George Herman that the VALB was put on the list of subversive organizations, which meant "that you couldn't go any- where to get a job without something popping up, 'Oh, he's a subversive because he went to Spain.'"
According to the Report on the VALB of the Subversive Activities Control Board, witnesses testified that the Communist Party sought to find jobs for the veterans returning from Spain. Milton Wolff was made national organizer of the Civil Rights Congress and Albert Prago was put on the staff of the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist Party school. Irving Weissman was made party organizer for the Buffalo-Niagara area and later district organizer in West Virginia. On the other hand, Bill Herrick and Sandor Voros, who got jobs as furrier workers, were both hounded out of those jobs when they became critical of the Communist Party. The International Fur and Leather Goods Workers Union was totally Communist controlled at that time.
These programs by ABC and CBS have again demonstrated how easily TV network news can be used to disseminate propaganda favorable to the Communists. Rather than do even superficial research and seek out knowledgeable individuals who could tell the story, of the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades from a non-communist viewpoint, ABC and CBS re- lied exclusively on Communists or former Communists who still appear to follow the party line, misleading their audiences by perpetuating old myths.
What You Can Do
We have listed in the Notes from the Editor's Cuff some of the advertisers on these programs. Please write to them and tell them how you feel about their helping to finance this kind of propaganda.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1275 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005, and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $15 a year and 1st class to those contributing $30 a year or more. Non-members subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail).
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
THE LEFT HAS WON AN ENORMOUS VICTORY IN BRINGING ABOUT THE RESIGNATION OF VICE Admiral John Poindexter and the dismissal of Lt. Col. Oliver North from the National Security Council. The media hammered away until they had laid bare a bold and complicated scheme that was intended to achieve some desirable objectives:
(1) to secure the release of American hostages seized in Lebanon, including the CIA station chief, William Buckley;
(2) to build bridges to moderates in Iran who might be able to steer that important country toward more normal relations with us; and
(3) to generate funding for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters to keep them alive and functioning until appropriations could be obtained from Congress. These are all goals that can be defended, although not everyone will. This operation had been wrapped in the tightest secrecy. That secrecy was essential to its success. It unraveled as soon as the secrecy was breached. As far as we know, every objective was being attained, although no one could say for sure that the cultivation of moderate elements in Iran would ultimately succeed. We did secure the release of three hostages and we would probably have had two more freed if the breach of security had been delayed a little longer. The Nicaraguan freedom fighters were funded. An ancillary benefit may have been that the emigration of Jews from Iran may have been facilitated.
WHO HAS BENEFITED FROM HAVING THIS OPERATION EXPOSED AND HALTED? THE SOVIETS, the Sandinistas, and the extremists in Iran and in other Middle Eastern countries. Who has been hurt? The United States, the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, the hostages who were not freed, the moderates in Iran and other Middle East countries known to be friendly to the United States. Twenty-five years ago in a talk to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, President Kennedy warned that irresponsible actions on the part of the media were helping the Soviet Union extend its sway. He said of this implacable enemy of freedom: "Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned. No rumor is printed, no secret revealed." He said our efforts to counter the enemy's covert operations were made readily available to every newspaper reader. He pleaded with the publishers to be more responsible, to give greater weight to national security in making their news decisions. That plea has had no long-term effect. One had only to watch the hostile, unprofessional conduct of the White House press corps in questioning President Reagan to see how little thought the journalists give to the consequences of their actions.
WE SEE THIS ALSO IN THE WILLINGNESS OF OUR NETWORKS TO AIR BLATANT COMMUNIST propaganda of the type discussed in this AIM Report. We show that both ABC and CBS in recent reports on the Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade showed that they lack the knowledge, skill or will to filter out communist propaganda.
PIERRE SALINGER HAS DISPUTED THIS IN A REPLY TO MY LETTER TO ABC CRITICIZING HIS story of October 22 about the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Salinger correctly points out that he had noted that the Republican government in Spain had been backed by Russia and that the Communist parties around the world had offered help, forming the international brigades. He had mentioned that many who joined the brigades were Communists. Salinger said this was enough "to clearly establish the Soviet and Communist participation in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion." He claimed that Steve Nelson had been adequately identified as a Communist. Superimposed over his picture on the screen were the words, "Steve Nelson, Commissar, Lincoln Battalion." Salinger thought that was enough to inform viewers that Nelson was a Communist Party leader.
THE COMMUNISTS DID NOT MERELY "PARTICIPATE" IN THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE; THEY organized it and ran it. The "many" Communists who were mixed in with those "adventurers, political activists and some pacifists" actually comprised 80 percent of the total. To suggest that the average viewer would catch the words "Commissar, Lincoln Battalion" superimposed on Nelson's picture and immediately understand that this man was a high official of the Communist Party for most of his life is fatuous. Salinger, who said he was well acquainted with the history of the Spanish Civil War, did not dispute the charge that his piece had given the Communist version of the war and the role of the international brigades. He didn't dispute our refutation of that version. He said only that it was not possible to tell the whole story in three-and-a-half minutes. No one would deny that, but it leaves unanswered the question of why it was considered appropriate to mislead viewers with the Communist version rather than telling them as much of the truth as could be fitted into the available time.
CBS DEVOTED FAR MORE TIME TO THIS SUBJECT THAN ABC, GIVING IT SOME 20 MINUTES on "Sunday Morning" and twice that on "Nightwatch." Historian Ronald Radosh wrote to the new president of CBS News, Howard Stringer, saying: "I was simply shocked to see how Steve Nelson and his friends got to use your network in their effort to rewrite their own discredited history. One can only conclude that CBS either is completely ignorant of the many writers, from George Orwell on, who have pointed to the role played in Spain by Stalinists like Steve Nelson, or they simply think now is the time to repeat the 'fantastic propaganda barrage' about the Lincoln Brigade to which Paul Berman alluded in his interview with Herrick." Radosh added that it was ironic that "when CBS is under attack from people like Reed Irvine and Accuracy in Media, that the network lends itself to such a sloppy report that reflects exclusively the Communist Party's false picture of the Spanish events." When he wrote that, Radosh didn't know that even more time had been given to the Communist Party view on the CBS early morning "Nightwatch" program.
HERE IS A LIST OF SOME OF THE COMPANIES THAT ADVERTISED ON THE ABC AND CBS PROGRAMS. I suggest that you write to them. They will tell you that they have no control over the content of programs of this type, which is true. You should point out that they have the right and the duty to let the network know that they don't like to see their ads on news programs that are used to disseminate blatant propaganda of this type.
THE TELEVISION NETWORKS ARE NOT THE ONLY MEDIA VULNERABLE TO THIS KIND OF PROPAGANDA. On October 19, The New York Times published a long story by David Binder about a Greek Communist named Markos Vafiadis, a founder of the Greek Communist Party, who had returned to Greece in 1983 after spending 34 years in the Soviet Union. Binder's story was an account of Vafiadis's career as a radical revolutionary through the eyes of Vafiadis himself. Needless to say, it was a very heroic picture of both the man and the Communists. Nicholas Gage, a former New York Times correspondent and author of the book, Eleni, responded with a scorching letter which The Times printed on November 19. Gage said he was astounded that Vafiadis was allowed to falsify the history of the Greek civil war, since David Binder was well acquainted with Balkan history.
VAFIADIS HAD CHARGED THAT THE COMMUNISTS WERE PROVOKED TO TAKE UP ARMS BY THE BRITISH when their forces entered Greece at the end of 1944. He had said that under the British, 1300 resistance fighters were murdered by Government police. Gage pointed out that "the winter of 1944-45 was noted for an unprecedented bloodbath by the Communists that dwarfed any excesses by Government security forces. As the Stalinists had done in Spain, in Greece they slaughtered those they labeled "Mensheviks, Trotskyists and 'social traitors.'" The French Marxist historian, Dominique Eudes, who was sympathetic to the guerrillas, wrote that they executed 13,500 people, ten times the number allegedly killed by the security forces. Gage, whose mother was one of the victims of the Communist terror and whose story is told in Eleni, was found buried with twelve others, all but one civilians. He said that in every village occupied by Vafiadis's army, men, women and children were executed to terrorize the peasants into following orders.
NICHOLAS GAGE SAID A JOURNALIST'S FIRST RESPONSIBILITY IS TO THE TRUTH AND THAT TRUTH was not served by David Binder's interview with Vafiadis. He said: "It is a gross distortion of history to romanticize such a criminal and mass murderer." David Binder is the New York Times reporter who in December 1976 was asked by AIM if he was going to do a story about the papers found in the briefcase of Orlando Letelier, the former member of the Allende cabinet who had recently been assassinated in Washington, D.C. Letters found in his briefcase had revealed that he was being paid by Cuba while posing in Washing- ton as a human rights activist. Mr. Binder replied, "Don't expect any Christmas presents from the New York Times." It took several years for this story to find its way into The Times, no thanks to David Binder.
IT IS LATE, BUT NOT TOO LATE TO GIVE THE AIM REPORT AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT TO A LOVED relative or friend. To make it more attractive, we are offering the special rate for gifts of $12.95 for a single one-year subscription or $25.00 for two subscriptions. This is a value that is hard to beat, and it is a gift that will be appreciated through- out the entire year. Use the Christmas Gift coupon on the other side.
YOU MIGHT ALSO GIVE A FRIEND--OR EVEN YOURSELF--A GIFT OF AN UNUSUAL BOOK. WE have recommended Armando Valladares's moving book about his experiences as a prisoner of Castro for 22 years. It is titled Against All Hope. We are offering it postpaid for $18.00.
THERE IS A TERRIFIC NEW BOOK JUST OUT THAT WILL APPEAL TO ALL VOCIFEROUS CRITICS of the media. It is The Media Elite by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter. You have heard of the Lichter-Rothman survey which proved that the reporters and editors who work for our elite media are overwhelmingly liberal in their political and social views. The Lichters and Rothman have expanded on this with another careful study which demonstrates how those views influence the way the news is reported. They analyzed the reporting on nuclear power, forced busing to achieve school integration and the oil industry's role in the energy crisis. In each case they show that the reporting in the elite media reflected the liberal views of the reporters and editors far more closely than it reflected what experts in the field had to say.
THE LIBERALS IN THE MEDIA HAVE PRETTY MUCH GIVEN UP ARGUING THAT THEY AREN'T REALLY liberal. Now they say that it doesn't matter, because they don't let their biases influence the way they report. This book knocks that argument into a cocked hat. It is scholarly, but it is also very readable, and it will provide you with valuable ammunition that you can use in friendly discussions, debates, letters to the editor and remarks on radio talk shows. It lists at $19.95. You can get it from AIM for only $16.95 postpaid. This will make a great gift, especially if you have any friends who aren't quite convinced that there is a serious problem of media bias.