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events could conceivably have taken
a different turn.
When All Else Falls
Blot Out Reallty
When it is no looger possible to pre–
serve a popular myth by aoy of the
above methods, the best thiog todo is
to totally ignore reality. A classiccase
in point is the media-created image of
Camelot that surrounded the Ken–
nedy Administration. The cold real–
ity of history eventually painted a
picture that is in stark contrast to the
glowing ÍllJ.ages portrayed by the
press. History rather than imagery
revealed an Administration that fta–
grantly abused its power by engaging
in illegal electronic surveillance of
journalists and civil rights leaders;
that used the IRS and FCC to conduct
polít ica! vendettas; that knowingly
plotted the assassination and over–
throw of foreign leaders.
The ambivalence of t\le press in
reporting the Kennedy misdeeds
was never more apparent than when
the subject centered around Central
lntelligence Agency abuses. One
leading Washington columnist sup–
ported public hearings on the CIA
in
1975,
but noted that "assassina–
tion can be left out for the mo–
ment." It was rather apparent that
the columnist was referring to plots
ha tched during the Kennedy Ad–
ministration, because, as she noted,
" the unspoken threat in a ll this is
that [Senator] Church [head of the
Senate committee investigating the
CIA), a faithful ally of John Ken–
nedy, might find himself in the end
pointing himself at the Democrats'
beloved victim of assassination"
(Víctor Lasky,
lt Didn't Start With
Watergate,
Dell Publishing Com–
pany, Inc.,
1977,
p.
95).
Apparently
it was all too much for the image to
bear.
Other journalists were equally cir–
cumspect when the Kennedy Ad–
ministration was linked wi th the
assassination of Generalissimo Ra–
fael Truj illo of the Dominican
Republic. Although American in–
volvement was duly noted, the fact
36
that the Kennedy White House had
been aware of the assassination plot
was conveniently deleted in a story
carried by a prominent political
joumal. Nor was there much outcry
from the press when the Kennedy
Administration was discovered to
have either passively or actively
conspired in the
as~assination
at–
tempt or overthrow of Fidel Castro,
President D iem of South Vietnam,
and tbe president of Guatemala.
The role of the Kennedy Admin–
istration in Vietnam also seemed to
get conveniently buried. After the
fall of Saigoo in
1975,
one network
did a
2~-hour
special on
Vietnam:
A War That l s Finished,
wbich
chronicled American involvement
through fi ve Presidents: Trumao,
Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and
Ford . Either the producers of the
program forgot to consult their al–
manacs and overlooked the exis–
te nce of a Preside n t between
Eisenhower and Johnson, or else
they boped that this small omission
would help everyone forget tha t the
Kennedy Administrat ion also did its
part to further involve the nation in
the Vie tnam quagmire.
Clearly in such matters the media
must admit to the truth, or else be–
lieve in a double standard. Tbe
press in large part chose the latter
option. Wry political commentator
Nicholas von Hoffman undoubtedly
sensed this when he wrote the fol–
lowing piece of rather penetrating
prose: "Tell us, all you folks who've
written so many, many books about
those golden one thousand days when
you all swarmed out of Harvard,
Madison Avenue and Stamford,
Connecticut, to electrify us with your
good taste. Tell us again, please, but
now put in about the gangsters and
whatever else was corrupt, ruthless,
cruel and illegal but which really
happened. Nomore Camelot, please"
(ibid.,
p.
117).
A Need for More
Objectlve Detachment
Part of the problem wi th the major
organs ofthe press is that they are too
well integrated into the mainstream
of society. The days of the detached
independence of the fourth estate
envisioned by our Founding Fathers
seem to be fast vanishing. As Ralph
McGill, publisheroftheA t/anta
Con–
stitution,
remarked in
1965:
"A dis–
turbing number ofnewspapers today
see nothing wrong in publicly stating
tha t they conceive their highest duty
to be tha t offi tting themselves into the
life ofthe community.This means, of
course, that if a community is gov–
erned by a corrupt and corrupting
group, the paper will fit in with it"
(Robert Cirino,
Don't Blame the
People,
Random House,
1971 ,
p.
234).
The desire to establish and main–
tain an "objective consensus" is an–
other reason the press tends to
follow ra ther stereotypical and un–
original formulas in its reporting
habits. The object is to take a posi–
tion that the newsman fe.els is "re–
spectable." lnevitably this process
filters out of the public conscious–
ness events, trends, or cbanges that
may be tinged or colored with
shades of unorthodoxy. Coupled
with this are the ever present pres–
sures from advertisers, who become
very skittish when contemplating as–
sociating themselves with topics or
views which migbt j eopardize a
healthy profit margin.
Vitality is then sapped from the
leading opinion shapers, the system
becomes intellectually inbred and
incestuous, and in the end a Frank–
enstein type of groupthink is unwit–
tingly c r eated. News a n alyst
Howard K. Smith put his. finger on
this problem sorne time ago when
he commented: "Our liberal friends
have become dogmatic.... They
have a set of automatic reactions.
Th ey react the way political car–
toonists do- with oversimpl ification.
They're pleasing the
Washington
Post,
they're pleasing the editors of
the
New York Times,
they're pleas–
ing one another"
(lt Didn't Start
With Watergate,
p.
299).
Humans as a whole seem to crave
the comfort of conformity. This urge
is often satisfied by the creation of
p leasant-sounding myths which
have just enough of a ring of truth
about them to allow us to justify
their existence. Once created, these
myths die hard. In this respect the
press is not all that ditferent from
the rest of us.
o
The
PLAIN TRUTH October-November 1978