Columnist’s defense of journalism rings hollow Joseph...

Columnist’s defense of journalism rings hollow

Joseph Bell, in the article “Accuracy is our rock” published Nov.

13, uses the occasion of associate editor Stephen Glass’ dishonest

reporting in New Republic, buttressed by the lying of Jayson Blair in

the New York Times, to tell us that journalism is an eminently

honorable and trustworthy source of information, in contrast to the

stew of ignorance and deceit that is, for example, talk radio.

To convince us that Glass and Blair couldn’t happen, he assures us

that his own work is flawless and that publishers relentlessly check

reporters’ work before printing it. But he can’t think that there are

no other examples of dishonest reporting, or that publishers have no

interest other than truth. A less recent example is that of Janet

Cooke, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her “work” in the

Washington Post, a politically correct sob-story of a poor boy’s

struggles, which happened to be entirely fictitious.

Older, but far more significant, is the story of Walter Duranty,

star foreign correspondent for the New York Times -- and, again, a

winner of journalism’s highest award -- who was assigned to Moscow in

the 1930s. Duranty, as reporter for the Times, covered up the

deliberate, systematic starvation of millions of peasant farmers,

their families, and entire villages in the Ukraine under orders of

Josef Stalin. He was there, he saw it happen, and he used the New

York Times to lie about it, and to tell lies that discredited

truthful accounts of it, because he did not want the great Communist

experiment, as he imagined to be, exposed by the truth as a murderous

failure.

Are we to imagine that Duranty, was also lying to his publisher,

and that no one at New York Times learned of this calculated

slaughter -- as hideous and even larger than the Holocaust -- until

after he retired, with honors, three decades later? This was not one

man’s deception; his publishers were complicit in it, and,

considering the pretensions of the New York Times and the

significance of the free press in a democratic nation, it comes close

to being a crime against civilization. It should befoul the

reputation of the entire management of the Times, and of those who,

even today, try to use this wretched accessory to mass murder as an

example of professional journalism.

But Bell still brags about his association with this paper, and it

is the reputation of this unapologetic source of tendentious

misinformation that it is his self-appointed task to defend.

What Bell doesn’t recognize is that the real game of much

journalism is not news; it is political king making. Both Blair and

Cooke were black reporters; their success was sought by their

employers in order to make a political point. Duranty would never

have been allowed freedom to lie about events in the Soviet Union had

not the publishers of New York Times been sympathetic to the cover-up

he was engaged in; and the recent episode of the Los Angeles Times’

frantic search for anti-Schwarzenegger news, both among Hollywood

groupies and in highly eccentric polling data, are evidence -- hardly

unexpected -- of its preference for Democratic political leadership.

Bell sees no bias in print journalism not because it isn’t there,

but because he shares it, and feels that his own source of prideful

identity would suffer should the purity of journalism be questioned.

It’s nice to know, at least, that when Bell gets bought, he stays

bought.

DOUGLAS TOOHEY

Tustin

Striking worker needs a reality check

The insulting attacks against striking supermarket workers by

Elayne Carver cannot be left unanswered.

First, the strikers are not “unskilled workers” but the bedrock of

the middle class, which is under siege by corporate executives and

upper management as it has never been before. Carver insists they

join the “real world,” along with her, and obligingly shell out

hundreds of dollars each month for health insurance premiums.

No, Carver, it is not all of us who need to join the “real world”

that every industrialized nation presently belongs to, except the

United States. The “real world” of universal health care for all.

It is the supermarket chain store workers who are struggling

today. Who will it be tomorrow?

KAREN MCKENNA-JUERGENS

Costa Mesa

Pugilism over publication should take back seat

It’s Thanksgiving time -- with plenty of feel-good stories out

there -- and you have to lead your newspaper with an article on two

homeless people fighting over a “lad mag?” Sure, pictures of

half-naked women and stories about drinking and gadgets are sometimes

worth fighting for (I hope my wife isn’t reading this today) but

couldn’t that have been relegated to Page 2 and replaced with some

real news?

MIKE McNIFF

Costa Mesa