ABC DEBUNKS CONSPIRACY THEORIES

DISSECTOR DEBUNKS DEBUNKERS

FAIR FINDS FAULT

The crime of the century has been solved. AP reports that ABC News has solved the Kennedy Assassination. At last, we learn, for the umpteenth time that the Warren Commission was right. Lee Harvey Oswald done it! There can be no doubt. This comes on top of books like “Case Closed” that made the same claim. Then there’s a whole library of TV shows and magazine articles that have reached similar conclusions. Yet none of them has been able to come up with answers that satisfy the continuing questions.

Here’s the AP story about ABC’s upcoming special:

ABC News has conducted an exhaustive investigation of the Kennedy assassination, complete with a computer-generated reconstruction, which irrefutably confirms that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the network said Monday. A two-hour special on the event is scheduled to air Nov. 20, two days before the 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s killing. [DS: Note the phrase “the network said.”]

“NO ROOM FOR DOUBT”

“It leaves no room for doubt,” said Tom Yellin, executive producer of the special, narrated by Peter Jennings. He called the results of ABC’s study “enormously powerful. It’s irrefutable.’”

And yet, even in his moment of glory and national visibility, with visions of Emmy Awards dancing in his head and the power of the Mouse House at Disney behind him, this network producer seems to have imbibed a fatalistic attitude. He has a sense that we dumb Americans, who for forty years have suspected that Oswald was not the only one involved, won’t believe it. They “admit that no matter what evidence ABC News lays out, it’s not likely to quiet people who believe otherwise.”

(www.msnbc.com/news/985781.asp?0si=-&cp1=1#BODY)

As a former ABC producer I have to say I have my doubts too that this film will “quiet” people. By the way, is that what network news is supposed to do — quiet people? But I digress.

DUELING DOCUMENTARIES

It just so happens that in this same week that ABC’s promotional campaign gets underway my own film about the Kennedy Assassination has come out on DVD. That documentary is called “Beyond JFK” and examines the issues and arguments advanced in Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK,” which was just replayed this week on HBO.

My film, made with two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple and director Marc Levin, is packaged with the Director’s cut of Stone’s stunning movie that offers the “faction” behind his fiction. Stone cooperated with us but did not interfere in our project, which is subtitled “A question of Conspiracy.” Warner Brothers has now released it. No network is behind it and it has still not been on the air. Why? You tell me. You will see why when you see it.

I haven’t seen the ABC film. I respect Tom Yellin and Peter Jennings, but as I am sure they know, the effort to sell the Warren Commission’s conclusions has been underway on every network ever since Kennedy was killed. Debunking critics and “quieting” critics is not new. It can be safely said that the media has been part of the cover-up — in some cases working with the government, in others working independently but with the same worldview. This film seems to be part of this ongoing effort by Big Media to persuade the rest of us that “Lee done it.”

As someone with 8 years at ABC, I know about and have written about fudged news and flawed programming. You can read my ABC story in “The More You Watch the Less You Know.” In 1999 I spoke about the role that the media played in miscovering the JFK assassination. My speech to an assassination researchers’ conference in Minneapolis appears in my book “News Dissector.” Here’s an excerpt, which I dredge up because it is clearly still relevant:

THE KENNEDY ASSASINATION AND US

The Kennedy Assassination for many of us also represented the death of our belief in America the beneficent, the innocent. It marked the beginning of a disillusion with government that has driven my political life since then, through the credibility gaps of the Pentagon Papers, the CIA disclosures, Watergate, Iran Contra, up until the present day with its desert storms and NATO bombing for human rights. As secret documents surfaced, it became clear that parts of the government consciously and covertly deceived the American people with lies and doublespeak..

Big Journalism, no particular friend of coherence itself, went into action after JFK appeared, unleashing its biggest debunking guns to blast away at Stone’s movie as a “Hollywood happening,” and a “conspiracy against reason.” Oddly critics loved the film while most editorial writers and columnists hated it.

THE NEWSWORLD HATED “JFK”

TV News coverage imbibed its hostile attitude towards Stone from the N.Y.Times and Washington Post, the Establishment press organs with whom they usually march in lock step. Soon, TV news shows were denouncing Stone as if he had violated the “fairness and balance” doctrines that allegedly govern their news coverage–i.e., disclaimers, separation of invented footage and real footage, labeled dramatizations, showing “both sides” etc. etc, as if their standards of so-called objectivity are routinely practiced. Clearly, the controversy spurred ticket sales.

Most of these attacks seemed to miss the fact that Stone is a dramatist, not a journalist, a moviemaker not a TV news producer. Stone never claimed to be offering the whole truth: he always referred to “JFK,” perhaps disingenuously, as an exploration of one “theory.” But the journalists bent on exposing his approach never reported his own doubts and modest claims. In setting up a CBS Evening News story on “JFK, ” Dan Rather could barely conceal his own enmity asking, “Is it an outright rewrite of history?” From his tone, there was no question that he thought it was.

Rather’s attitude proved to rather accurately reflect that hostility that swept through TV newsrooms. ABC’s Nightline was first off the TV block with a full scale, one-sided blast at “JFK.” Fully half the program was devoted to exposing Stone’s various “tricks” in the editing room. He was given only a short period of time to respond to this slickly edited video assault on his thesis, peppered with sound bites from pro-Warren Commission “experts” all questioning his credibility.

NIGHTLINE SKEWERS STONE

Nightline returned to the subject a few weeks later after Stone’s calls to open still suppressed government files on the subject began to be taken seriously. Suddenly, his case appeared to deserve more respectful treatment and he was given it.

Nightline was no stranger to the subject. Ted Koppel and Co. had spent an hour investigating the KGB’s files on Lee Harvey Oswald in late November, a month before the movie opened. That show — which drew their largest audience of that season — never mentioned that our own CIA had many more files, nearly half a million documents on the subject, then locked away. When our company Globalvision asked the CIA to give our cameras the same access to their Oswald files that the KGB gave ABC, we were turned down flatly.

INTERESTING “48 HOURS”

We tried to interest CBS in airing our own film of the issues raised in JFK–. When we read that they would be airing a special on the subject, my Partner Rory who had worked for CBS, sent a copy of “Beyond JFK” over to Rather’s producer at “48 Hours.” We never heard from them, but then we saw their show, a “48 Hours” Special, starring Dan Rather, we knew why.

Just coincidentally, I’m sure, “48 Hours” spoke with many of the same people we did, and featured so many similar segments that I suspected we had been ripped off. To my not inexperienced eyes, many of the elements and footage in their show look amazingly like the elements in ours. This is not to say that we don’t offer a different interpretation. There is a vast content gap but……..

Anyone who lines those two programs up against each other will see the similarities (and the differences.) At first I flirted with the suspicion that there may have been a bit of “creative borrowing,” but you need hard evidence to make such a charge stick, and all I have is a gut instinct based on twenty years in the business.

As I thought about it further–(Would they? Did they? Is this sour grapes or network envy on my part?)– I was reminded of some Texas folk wisdom that Dan Rather himself used to spice his testimony in a trial that grew out of one of his 60 Minutes stories: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck — what is it?”

Quack.

COPYCATS AT CBS

Would they? You bet. Back then, CBS had already been caught copycatting. According the Village Voice of June 25, l991, the CBS newsmagazine was accused by HBO of attempting to rip them off after illegally obtaining a rough cut of a documentary on a rape crisis center and then attempting to producing a similar show before it aired. In that case, a 48 Hours producer actually apologized to HBO. I have been told of a similar incident involving another HBO project cloned by 48 Hours. A former CBS producer suggested that cutbacks of research staffs and pressure for “hot stories” may be leading to “cutting corners” on W. 57th Street. If you watch TV today, you know much, much sameness there is.

As you would expect, CBS’s approach was conventional; a centrist “on the one hand, on the other” approach with a predictable conclusion. We offer the view that there is more to conspiracy theories than meet the eye. They think that conspiracy theories clog the brain.

The press claims to be committed to just the facts ma’am. Yet when confronted with the “fact” that no one agrees on the “facts,” that every bit of “evidence” in this case has spawned counter-evidence, that many documents may still be suppressed and hidden, honest media has had to take a second look and admit how little we know. As public opinion began to coalesce around the notion of opening the government’s files, many of the journalists and public figures who had been so dismissive of Stone began to jump on the disclosure bandwagon, somewhat narrowing the gap between “news” and truth.

After all, what’s a journalist to do when no one believes his or her spin on “the truth,” when other interpretations of history start becoming acceptable, when the paradigm of official and “legitimate” reality begins to slip away? What to do? Do what Dan Rather does: lurch back and forth, embrace the theoretical plausibility of conspiracy while demolishing any practical possibility. And all the while practice that polished politeness by treating Oliver Stone respectfully while producing a program that sought to undermine his every premise. What a web we weave!

“JUST THE FACTS M’AAM”

Rather ended that 48 Hours JFK Special by proclaiming a pumped up faith in facts and evidence over theories and beliefs, as if anyone really disagrees. But is this the case in most TV news coverage? Was it the practice during the coverage of the Gulf War when CBS and the other networks put jingoism ahead of journalism, when the Pentagon’s “facts” were all the only news all the time? Was it always “just the facts ma’am” over the years in CBS’s embarrassing boosterism of the Warren Commission? And is it just facts that is driving today’s coverage of Kosovo. [I wrote this before this latest war. CBS won the top prize from a right-wing media group for best pro-war coverage.]

In our documentary, “Beyond JFK,” Walter Cronkite reveals that CBS News censored a comment by President Lyndon Johnson expressing his doubts about the lone assassin theory. The comment was deleted after our late President pressured CBS’s late President with a fabricated concern about national security. For years Cronkite believed in the Warren Report. I was surprised then that he seemed to be changing his tune when I interviewed him in his office at CBS.

“Well I hold the view that he was a lone gun man, yes. I’m not sure as to whether it was part of a conspiracy or not, however any longer.” So here you have Cronkite himself wavering.

TOM WICKER HAD QUESTIONS

Tom Wicker of the New York Times was in Dallas when President Kennedy was shot and, like Dan Rather came to national attention on the strength of his reports. At the time, he reported that the President was shot in the front. He later said he was mistaken. He was a sharp critic of Stone. Yet when I pressed him on the issue in his office at the Times just before he retired, Wicker confessed that he too lost his certainty.

He told me: “For a long time I felt strongly that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. I think there’s evidence now that there certainly are doubts about that and I’m willing to concede those doubts. I don’t know what happened.”

MCNEIL: THEY BELIEVE IT ALL WORKS

Former PBS anchorman Robin MacNeil was there too, covering the event for NBC. He was the only journalist traveling with the President to get off the press bus after hearing shots in Dealey Plaza. Hardly a conspiracy “nut,” MacNeil feels that Big Journalism may not be able to handle all the possibilities. “There is a predisposition still on the part of the mainstream media to believe it all works,” he told me for Beyond JFK, “the system works. And it’s only the crazies on the fringes who want to keep saying, no, it doesn’t work, no it doesn’t work, there’s a conspiracy at work. And the two are converging all the time because the evidence has brought them together.”

So when pushed, Cronkite, MacNeil and Wicker, leading lights of the journalistic establishment, all critics of Stone’s, admit to doubts, but those doubts rarely surface in major media coverage. Why? Most Big journalists seem to make a fetish of facts, casting themselves in the pose of objectivity, often projecting deep-voiced expertise based on the skimpiest of detailed knowledge. More often than not, their interpretation of events, and their “facts” are open to question. So is their point of view — an outlook that, above all, takes pride in denying its own existence.

CBS has been challenged over the years on its coverage of any number of issues — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — and it should be scrutinized for its honesty and integrity on the JFK Assassination, the defining story of its news division, including this most recent 48 Hours mishmash. After all, this is the issue on which Rather and CBS News built their reputations. (Dan Rather was in Dallas that day but misrepresented the angle of the shot that killed Kennedy.)

Big Journalism itself has to this day not explained the Kennedy Assassination to anyone’s satisfaction including its own.

IRAQ: IS MEDIA BIAS FILTERING OUT GOOD NEWS?

“No” say the media watchers at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. They ask, are the media ignoring the good news in Iraq?

From pundits to White House officials, that’s what many critics are saying. According to George W. Bush (10/6/03), “We’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.” While these complaints have sparked extensive discussion and debate in the media, an examination of coverage finds very little substance to this critique of media treatment of Iraq.

But are these critics complaining about bad press, or simply bad news? As the Associated Press (10/17/03) explained: “The schools, for example, need rehabilitation in large part because of the chaotic looting touched off by the U.S. military’s entry into Baghdad in April. And many schools have not been rehabilitated, particularly in poorer neighborhoods and the south.”

Newsweek (10/27/03) pointed out that “reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war.”

But some reporters are still grappling with the criticism that their coverage has been too “negative.” ABC’s Baghdad correspondent Neal Karlinsky told Nightline (10/15/03) that “there’s a lot of good news stories here that we are trying to get out. And, quite frankly, news events sometimes get in the way of that. It’s hard to work on a feature story about life in Baghdad getting back to normal when there is suddenly a car bombing that kills a half dozen people nearby

Whether they are based in Baghdad or in Washington, journalists are obliged to report the news on the ground, not as “good” or “bad” but as news, regardless of how it fits with the vision the administration would like Americans to see.

THE MIDDLE EAST

I found a new source of interest: www.americantaskforce.org. They offer a compilation of global coverage of the region. Here’s a summary of today’s articles.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on attempts by Palestinian legislators to further financial transparency in the Palestinian Authority. . . . In a New York Times opinion, Paul Krugman takes a critical look at the “perception gap” existing between the U.S. and moderate Muslim leaders. . . . In the Jewish periodical Tikkun, Jim Wallis addresses an open letter to Lt. Gen. Boykin. . . . In the Guardian (UK) Brian Whitaker reports on Syrian reform attempts. . . . The Independent (UK) looks at the latest Israeli settlement expansion. . . . A Jordan Times (Jordan) opinion urges reform in the Arab information and media fields. . . . In Haaretz (Israel), Akiva Eldar takes a skeptical look at the public statements of Shaul Mofaz, Israeli commander-in-chief of the Occupied Territories, on the Palestinians. . . . BitterLemons, a joint Israeli-Palestinian online collaboration, offers an Israeli and a Palestinian view on the ‘Geneva Accord.

YOUR LETTERS

Jackie Newberry writes,

After the bombings in Baghdad, including the International Red Cross headquarters, resulting in at least 42 dead, cowboy says, ” We will find them.” This is one of his stock pat phrases that heretofore has proved fruitless when referring to the forgotten Osama and not-quite-so-forgotten Saddam, both props to his theatrical performance in Iraq that has resulted in tens of thousands of lost human lives, be they from Iraq, the US, Britain or elsewhere, places who he swore would see life improved because of his unilateral, get-out-of-our-way Texas swaggering approach to save the world. And further, the Crawford, Texas pig ranch White House bring-’em-on war enthusiast says that today’s events proved even further the success of his efforts. “The more success we have on the ground, the more these killers will react.” Who said passing an IQ test was a requirement for running for president.”

MOGUL HUNTING

I am on the road today in Washington doing some interviews on the film on the media coverage of the war that I am struggling to make. So I had to write the night before. Here’s hoping I don’t miss any really big stories. If I do, I am sure you will let me know.

I will let you know as well about Michael Wolff of New York Magazine’s new book “Autumn of the Moguls.” Who knows — maybe I will meet some moguls.

Let me hear from you. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org.