Reed Irvine - Editor
At a time of deepening Federal budget problems, the Americans who provide public broadcasting with $229.39 million tax dollars a year saw how their money is squandered on far-left nonsense on October 29 during a PBS Frontline program, "The War We Left Behind." PBS suited up two of its heaviest leftists for the project, the husband/wife team of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. After viewing an incessant series of pictures of starving children and destroyed homes, TV critic Walter Goodman of The New York Times felt compelled to stress the Cockburns' "political slant" and their "underlying animus" against an administration that won a war they opposed.
PBS and Frontline executives knew what they were buying when they signed the Cockburns. Both are notorious in the journalistic community for their far-left views. Andrew's father, Claud Cockbum, was a longtime British communist who wrote for the communist press. Leslie did outlandish stories for PBS and CBS trying to link the CIA and the Nicaraguan democratic resistance with drug trafficking. Andrew helped her write a book, Out of Control, outlining these fantasies, which drew from a crazy lawsuit the Christie Institute filed against supporters of the Nicaraguan resistance. [Another brother, Alexander, spews his leftist nonsense in The Nation and The L.A. Times.]
The thrust of the Cockburn PBS show was "the devastating effect of the war on the people of Iraq." They claimed wanton destruction of civilian facilities such as electrical power plants. They claimed, "Anywhere between 75,000 and 175,000 children could die due to the public health conditions that we caused." Douglas Bredcrick of Catholic Relief Services stated, "We have been having a disaster in slow motion for the last four months." The Cockburns blamed U.S. bombing for these conditions.
Post, N.Y. Times Say Otherwise
Yet accounts in The New York Times and Washington Post beginning last spring put the blame for the misery squarely on Saddam Hussein. This viewpoint was available to the Cockburns; they chose to ignore it because it clashed with tile blame-America theme of their program. The very same Broderick who was interviewed by the Cockburns detailed an entirely different story for The New York Times on November 2. Broderick told Patrick Tyler of the Times that Saddam's regime is blocking food distribution by foreign organizations in an effort to build international pressure to force the U.N. to lift economic sanctions and the U.S. to release frozen Iraqi assets. Broderick gave specific locations where Saddam's henchmen are refusing to let private relief workers take food out of warehouses. In the Basra area alone, Broderick said, 250 tons of food are being withheld, putting 3,000 pregnant women "at risk."
In the same Times article, the Iraqi under secretary for health, Dr. Shawki Murqus, took sharp issue with a widely-publicized report last May by a group of Harvard-related health workers that the war's aftermath could cause 170,000 deaths of children beyond the normal mortality rate. (The Harvard claim was apparently the basis for the Cockburn estimate cited above.) Actually, Murqus told the Times that total deaths of children under five since August 1990 were 19,863 -- far below the estimates by outside "experts" such as the Harvard bunch, and not significantly greater than pre-war rates. Murqus's account knocks much of the props from under the Cockburns' story; unsurprisingly, they did not put him on their show.
The Iraqi strategy of accusing Washington of waging economic war was no secret to objective, honest correspondents. Caryle Murphy of the Washington Post wrote on July 5 that this was the "message the government wishes to see carried by the Western press, which is being given unusually open access here in the hope that its reporting of economic hardships will generate sympathy in the West for the lifting or easing of sanctions." The Cockburns eagerly swallowed this propaganda line. The Cockbums did not seek out Iraqis such as Dr. Murqus who were willing to tell the truth to reporters.
So who is suffering in Iraq? Alan Cowell of The New York Times reported on June 9 that the shortages aren't hurting Saddam loyalists in the military or the ruling Bath party. Imported foods, beers, cars and high-ticket consumer items flow to the country's elite, Cowell wrote, but the regime deliberately keeps food from the masses.
Another Cowell article from Baghdad on June 10 reported that "residents here say electric power has returned from up to 16 hours a day, water runs from faucets, gas stations pump gas and, sometimes, even a telephone rings." Cowell described how engineers have cannibalized plants to restore many of the country's power plants. Unlike the Cockbums, Cowell reported "little evidence of what allied spokesmen called 'collateral damage' to places nearby," a finding repeated by Erika Munk in The Nation on May 6.
The Frontline segment suggests that the Cockburns formed their conclusion before doing they're reporting -- that they slanted facts to fit their politics. Air Force Col. John A. Warden III, a key architect of U.S. bombing policy, spoke with Andrew Cockburn for half an hour. Warden told us that the Cockburns ignored an important point he made. Fewer Iraqis died, either civilian or military, than in any other major war in modern history in which one side suffered such a calamitous defeat. Planning from the outset was to minimize civilian casualties. The United States did not want to permanently alienate either the Iraqi people or the Arabic world. Warden feels--and he told Cockburn --that the strategy worked; that only "about 2,000 civilians give or take a hundred," died in the bombing. (Brent Sadler, who covered the air war from Baghdad for ITN, a British TV agency, estimated the civilian death tell at less than a thousand at an AIM conference on the media and the military last spring.)
The Pentagon has avoided making any on-the-record estimate of deaths among the half-million-man Iraqi military, hoping to avoid the "body count" syndrome that the media exploited in Vietnam. However, one figure bandied about informally is in the 40,000-50,000 deaths range. If accurate, this is an astoundingly low figure for an army that caught the full force of allied air and ground power.
Predictably, the Cockbums tried to make an atrocity of the bombing of a communications bunker in Baghdad, which Leslie Cockburn says killed more than 200 women and children. She called it a "mistake," displaying what she said were "the original blueprints, scorched and waterlogged." She claimed they proved "what the Pentagon apparently did not know," that "before the war, this shelter was reserved for the exclusive use of civilians." She didn't say it was not a communications center.
Warden disputed the word "mistake" because the bombing was no such thing. He explained to Andrew Cockbum that the installation was a "very important" military target and "we just plain did not know that there were civilians in there." These remarks got on the air.
But the Cockburns censored the most important part of Warden's statement. Camouflage paint covered the bunker roof. ITN's Brent Sadler transmitted close-up pictures of the roof showing the camouflage. As Warden told Andrew Cockburn, under the Geneva Convention, a camouflaged building is a legitimate military target. Warden said that civilians must have entered and left the shelter at dusk and dawn, when they were invisible to U.S. reconnaissance.
Warden, who is now a policy adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle, told us he had no idea of Andrew Cockbum's politics when he agreed to the interview. "I would have talked to him anyway," he said, "because the Air Force has nothing to hide about what we did in Iraq. But I just wish he had given the whole story and not these selected parts."
PBS gets away with such outrages because its managers operate without any effective oversight from either Congress or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Congress created CPB to channel tax dollars to PBS and its affiliated stations, plus National Public Radio. Section 396(g)(1)(A) of the Communications Act creating the present public broadcasting system specified that CPB must insure "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature" which receive public funds. CPB is in seeming violation of the law of the land with the Cockburns' one- sided presentation on Iraq.
Remember the Congressional fuss in the late 1980s about the Reagan White House's supposed violations of the Boland Amendment, which forbade assistance to the Nicaraguan democratic resistance? PBS-Gate is a much more visible scandal; seldom does a week pass without another crime being displayed on your television screen. Congress should demand that CPB follow the law -- and hold its managers accountable if it doesn't. Congress has sleuths of the General Accounting Office at its service, although no particular investigative skills should be required to find biased PBS "documentaries." (Hint: Look for programs carrying Leslie Cockburn's name in the credits.) Perhaps Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-contra special prosecutor, should be called upon to ferret out violators of a law that seems every bit as important as the Boland Amendment.
60 MINUTES' NEW FOOD SCARE FLOPS
A press officer at the Food and Drug Administration asked AIM's Joe Goulden recently what "clout" AIM had with Don Hewitt, the stormy executive producer of the CBS show 60 Minutes. Puzzled, Goulden told him AIM's influence on Hewitt "ranged from meager to negative." The press officer laughed and then explained something unusual that had happened in early autumn.
60 Minutes producer Grace Diekhaus had demanded an on-camera interview with an FDA spokesman on the food additive monosodium glutamate, or MSG, widely used to enhance the flavor of canned and frozen foods. FDA had heard reports that 60 Minutes was preparing an Alar-style segment denouncing MSG as a health- threatening chemical -- decades of contrary scientific evidence notwithstanding. CBS wouldn't give FDA advance word of the nature of its questions. Not wishing to be sandbagged by what is arguably America's most dishonest TV news show, FDA refused. So, too, did spokesmen for the Glutamate Association and for companies, which manufacture and use MSG.
We heard of the controversy and wrote to Hewitt reminding him of previous 60 Minutes scare stories that had crashed in flames. "We hope that you will not subject the nation to another mindless scare," we wrote; "the credibility of 60 Minutes is not going to survive many more fiascoes such as Alar and amalgams."
Hewitt called a few days later to complain about our letter and to defend almost everything 60 Minutes has ever aired. At least we think that's what he said; when excited, Hewitt's voice resembles an angry Donald Duck, and his exact phrases are not always distinguishable. The Wall Street Journal on October 17 ran a story about the MSG fuss under the headline, "Food Industry Awaits With Queasy Stomach A 60 Minutes Show." Reporter Bruce Ingersoll quoted our letter to Hewitt, who responded, "A lot of pressure is being brought on us." Hewitt continued, "Chances are we will finally air it. If we don't, it will have nothing to do with Accuracy in Media or the Glutamate Association." (Hewitt read something into our letter, which did not exist; we never asked him not to air an MSG segment, only to do an honest job of reporting.)
It was in this context that a relatively contrite 60 Minutes returned to the FDA with its request for an interview. This time producer Diekhaus agreed to discuss in advance the questions she intended to ask, and she talked to deputy commissioner Michael Taylor for an on-camera interview.
Officials at FDA who monitor MSG and other food scares trace the impetus for the 60 Minutes segment to Santa Fe, New Mexico physician Dr. George Schwartz, who runs a group called "NO MSG," which wants an outright ban on use of the substance in food. 60 Minutes signaled its viewpoint in using the "NO MSG" title for its segment.
In 1989 Schwartz published a book, MSG: In Bad Taste, which he publicized widely on television and radio appearances. Immediately phone queries about MSG began coming into an FDA unit, the Adverse Reaction Monitoring System, or ARMS, created in 1985 to record and assess consumer reports of adverse reactions related to food. By June 1990 FDA had received 285 reports describing adverse reactions to MSG, most of them generated by Schwartz and Jack Samuels, an associate in NO MSG.
According to an analysis by Dr. Linda Tollefson, an FDA scientist, "The majority of the reports described a myriad of symptoms, including those which are very common in the general population such as headaches (19.8%) and nausea (8.3%)." Much of the material "consisted of editorials, letters to the editor, commentaries, and other forms of non-peer-reviewed information which expressed personal opinions or experience without providing factual documentation." As Tollefson commented somewhat dryly, from the scientific viewpoint "letters to the editor seldom provide us with the quality of information we prefer."
Tollefson concluded, "There was nothing in the package of literature submitted by Schwartz/Samuels to suggest that MSG is a human health hazard. The adverse reaction reports.... do not refute these conclusions."
According to FDA press officer Chris Lecos, the NO MSG group responded by trying to get Dr. Tollefson fired, a demand her superiors dismissed as preposterous. Nonetheless, 60 Minutes used the NO MSG group as a major source for its segment, and Schwartz was a featured live interviewee. Ed Bradley, the same correspondent who did the Alar nonsense, introduced NO MSG by stating, "Food companies which use it say it is safe, and for most people it is. But millions are suffering a host of symptoms and some get violently sick." He introduced Schwartz: "He says that contrary to what we are being led to believe, MSG is not simply a seasoning that makes food taste better." Schwartz said of MSG, "The difficulty is that it goes into peoples' systems and it has tremendous effects throughout their body."
Bradley says Schwartz is a "thorn in the side of the food industry and the FDA. But he is not alone. There have been many published studies about adverse effects of MSG." And at this point 60 Minutes went into what we have come to recognize as a familiar drill in pseudo- journalism: what is shown viewers is not exactly wrong, but images, words and concepts manage to twist truth beyond recognition.
#1. Cite "scientific reports," regardless of what they actually prove. CBS showed us flash images of perhaps half a dozen studies. Tollefson and FDA colleague Dr. Robert J. Barnard, who "could find no evidence that MSG is a health hazard to large segments of the general population", have studied all. Bradley in one instance took his commentary beyond what a report actually said. Referring to a study by three Australian physicians, he said the report "says it [MSG] provokes asthma." Viewers who read the actual text flashed on the screen learned that the report said MSG "can provoke asthma." (The Food and Agricultural Organization, a United Nations agency never accused of being a toady for the U.S. food industry, published a study in the 1980s in which it found no connection between use of MSG and broncho-constriction in asthmatics.)
#2. Charge that the government is in bed with the industry it regulates. During the interview with FDA's Taylor, Bradley interjected, "The FDA continues to agree with the food industry that MSG poses no health problem. They have no plans to take it off the list of safe ingredients." The statement is true; it also would have been accurate to state, "The FDA continues to agree with the overwhelming majority of the scientific community that..."
#3. Assign fringe figures equivalent or greater stature than the consensus of scientific opinion. Bradley asked Taylor, "The FDA has been aware of studies written by doctors and scientists around the country saying that MSG causes all sorts of adverse reactions. Yet the agency has chosen to believe studies that say the contrary, that MSG is OK, and disregard the body of work that says just the opposite. Why is that?"
Taylor replied, "Well, your question suggests there is some equal balance in the scientific literature on this subject. That just isn't the case. There is a very large volume of evidence, of studies conducted around the world, that demonstrates these very broad reactions are not attributable to MSG...There could be any number of reasons for the reactions that are reported." 60 Minutes did not flash onto the screen excerpts from the hundreds of studies supportive of MSG, as it had done with the anti-MSG material.
#4. When science is lagging, toss in emotional anecdotal evidence. A middle-aged woman claimed she lost her gall bladder and other organs before a physician decided MSG caused her problems. A mother blamed her son's hyperactivity on MSG. Another boy who suffered from asthma shopped in a supermarket with his grandfather, looking at food labels to check for MSG. Previously, Bradley said, "Almost everything he'd been eating had MSG in it."
This is true, but in a much different context than 60 Minutes suggested. Dr. Thomas Jukes of the University of California at Berkeley, a member of AIM's national advisory board, wrote Hewitt on October 17: "One simple fact seems to be omitted from all discussions on MSG. This is that glutamate is present normally in every cell in our body, in all our proteins, and all our food...Bread contains 12 to 15 grams (almost half an ounce) per pound; milk about 4 grams per pint, and chicken breast about half an ounce per pound. No system of food labeling could be used that would scientifically exclude glutamate." Jukes' input was not mentioned on the program.
#5. If no other motive can be established, blame evil profits. Why would manufacturers use MSG if it makes people that use their product ill? Dr. Schwartz offered this explanation to Ed Bradley: "Suppose you make soup. You might have used 20 chickens in the past. But with MSG, you can kick up the flavor by using only 10 chickens. Look at all the money you save." Bradley accepted that without question, but it is not that simple. The soup maker tries to develop a product that will satisfy the consumer with respect to taste, nutrition and price. In a free market it is the consumer who determines his success or failure. A more appealing product based on a secret recipe, such as Coca Cola, will bring higher sales and higher profits. But the magical ability of MSG to enhance flavor is no secret. If it is used to reduce costs, in a competitive market the savings will be passed on to the consumers, other things being equal.
The food industry feared 60 Minutes might touch off an MSG scare comparable to what followed its Alar "expose" in 1989. Panicked by 60 Minutes, mothers poured apple juice down the drain. Apple growers, many of them mom- and-pop operators, counted their loses in the hundreds-of- millions of dollars. Alar now stands as one of the most discredited pieces of investigative journalism in recent
The industry did a hurried public opinion poll the night of the broadcast. "In terms of public reaction, the segment was a yawner," reported Nick Nichols, a Washington public relations consultant for the industry. Hewitt and others should heed the public indifference at 60 Minutes. We warned Hewitt that continued unfounded health-scare stories put his program's credibility at risk. 60 Minutes said "BOO!" and no one jumped.
Send the enclosed postcards, or your own letters, to your Congressman and two Senators requesting that they have the General Accounting Office investigate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's failure to enforce Section 396 (g) (1) (A) of the Communications Act, which specifies "objectivity and balance" in programs funded by tax dollars.
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AIM Report, NOTES FROM THE EDIOTR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine, November-B 1991
THE LEAD STORY IN THIS AIM REPORT SHOWS HOW TAXPAYER-SUPPORTED PBS IS LENDING its support to Saddam Hussein's current propaganda campaign to pressure the U.S. and its allies into lifting the freeze of Iraq's foreign exchange assets. The freeze, which permits the assets to be used for humanitarian purposes such as the purchase of food and medicine, has given us the leverage to obtain Iraqi cooperation in such things as inspection of their nuclear and chemical weapons projects. Saddam is not a great military strategist, but he is adept at psychological warfare. He made good use of Peter Arnett to appeal to the emotions of people throughout the world with his misleading reports on civilian casualties during the air war. He is now mining that same lode with the stories about the tragic aftermath of the war, especially its impact on children. Leftists such as Leslie and Andrew Cockbum have been very willing to cooperate. They are not alone. A1 Boehnlein of Garden City, Michigan has just sent me a column from the Detroit Free Press by James Ricci.
RICCI WRITES: "TRY TO IMAGINE 900,000 PRESCHOOL KIDS...EVERY ONE OF THEM ravaged by malnourishment. Imagine a tenth of them dead by spring and the rest physically and intellectually stunted for life. Finally, imagine that you and I are responsible for this. Take a few moments this morning and consider the plight of the children of Iraq, nine months after our military devastated the underpinnings of modem civilization in their land." And who has impressed this touching picture on columnist Ricci? He says it was "a leftist journalist named Larry Everest," who has returned from a trip to Iraq and has been showing student, church and Arab-American groups a video of "children killed in our bombings, of small kids in puffed and bloodied repose.... It goes into Iraq's prostrate hospitals where doomed, birdlike infants keen while doctors gesture helplessly before the camera." Ricci says Everest wasn't sure that the estimate that "170,000 small children will perish by May...will bear out," but he thought that infant mortality was running nearly 40,000 a year above normal. Jim Ricci says, "We have no right to forget."
COMPARE THIS WITH THE FACTS WE CITE IN THIS REPORT THAT ARE LARGELY DERIVED from reports from Iraq by the correspondents of The New York Times and The Washington Post. These show that Saddam is deliberately interfering with distribution of food and medicine that would alleviate the situation. Patrick Tyler in The Times of Nov. 11 paints the same sad picture of malnourished children in a hospital, but he points out that less than a mile away the shops and stalls in the market are overflowing with local and imported food, which is priced beyond the means of the poor. Tyler says, "Some relief officials argue that as part of a campaign for the lifting of the sanctions, Iraq is cynically holding up the distribution of about $4 million in food relief from international organizations, including infant formula and high- protein food packages for children under 5." Nevertheless, the Iraqi under secretary for health told The Times that infant mortality in the past year is under 20,000, not much above the rate for the previous year.
I HAVE A CONFESSION. I UNDERESTIMATED THE STUPIDITY OF THE DEMOCRATIC leadership in Congress. We have been pointing out for months that the case for Gary Sick's so-called "October Surprise" has been exposed as a collection of lies. We have shown that the sources Sick relied upon are proven liars and that the Reagan campaign people who were supposed to have met with the Iranians to negotiate the delay in the release of the hostages were not in Paris and Madrid when the meetings were alleged to have taken place. We have reported the denials of the Iranians that any such meetings took place, including the statement of Mehdi Karrubi, allegedly the Iranian William J. Casey met in Madrid and Paris, that he had never set foot outside Iran before 1982. I couldn't believe that any rational person would want to waste time and money on an official investigation of a case that had already imploded. But the Democrats in both the House and Senate have now approved separate investigations over the objections of the Republicans. This was decided shortly after both Newsweek and The New Republic had run long articles on the matter. They both concluded that the allegations lacked any credible foundation and were fraudulent. Both had reported proof that Casey was in London when Sick claimed he was meeting with Karrubi in Madrid--July 27-29, 1980.
WE REPORTED MONTHS AGO THAT CASEY WAS ATYENDING A CONFERENCE ON THE history of World War II in London on July 28-29. We said that while it was theoretically possible for him to have stopped in Madrid to meet the Iranians for a few hours on his way to London, it was beyond belief that he would have handled complicated negotiations to settle the fate of the hostages so casually. But it has now been established that Casey actually spent the night of July 27 in London and was at the conference the next morning. Democratic Congressman Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut, arguing in a committee meeting televised by C-SPAN, claimed that Casey's presence in London strengthened the case for his having negotiated with the Iranians. He said Casey's friends had denied that Casey was in Europe in late July. Now it was proven that he was. That, Sam said, proved that Gary Sick's sources were more correct than Casey's friends. Gejdenson apparently believes that Casey could have slipped out of the London conference, made the 90-minute flight to Madrid, negotiated the delay of the release of the hostages, and flown back to London before he was missed. Gejdenson was the only Democrat who even tried to respond to Congressman Bob Livingston's forceful statement that there was no justification for any further investigation in view of the findings of Newsweek and The New Republic. Livingston quoted from both at length. Gejdenson replied that the investigation was justified because three former presidents and eight former hostages had asked for one.
ROONE ARLEDGE, THE PRESIDENT OF ABC NEWS, IS PROUD OF "THE AMERICAN AGENDA" segments that is part of "World News Tonight." He told a TV trade publication recently that "The American Agenda" lets the network explore "important subjects that are not news stories in the usual sense." So far as we can determine, it deals with whatever happens to strike the fancy of an ABC producer on any given evening. Despite Arledge's disclaimer that the segments are conventional news, some of them don't begin to meet accepted standards of reporting. On Nov. 6, correspondent Ned Potter reported on a "national study" which purported to show that three of five blacks and Hispanics live in an area near a toxic waste dump. He spoke of the "link between race and pollution" as if toxic dumps are yet another burden that must be borne by American minorities. We wanted to see the study, but we haven't even been able to find out who made it. The bulk of the segment was carried by a black Louisianan named Amos Favorite, who claimed that many of his relatives died from cancer caused by petrochemical plants in the Baton Rouge area. Potter offered no proof of the statement that the plants caused the cancer deaths, and we noticed that Mr. Favorite had a pack of cigarettes on the table in front of him when he was being interviewed. Ned Potter didn't ask him if by any chance his relatives who had died of cancer were also cigarette smokers.
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