Press Critic George Seldes Leaves a Legacy of Courage (7/12/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon America's greatest press critic died this month. He lived to a ripe old age, 104, before his last breath on July 2. Yet, we're still in mourning for George Seldes. ''The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself,'' Seldes said. And he knew just how harmful media self-worship could be. Born in 1890, George Seldes was a young reporter in Europe at the close of World War I. When Armistice Day came, he broke ranks with the obedient press corps and drove behind the lines of retreating German troops. For the rest of his life, he remained haunted by what took place next. Seldes and three colleagues secured an interview with Paul von Hindenburg, the German field marshal. Seldes asked what had ended the war. ''The American infantry in the Argonne won the war,'' Hindenburg responded, and elaborated before breaking into sobs. It was an enormous scoop. But allied military censors blocked Hindenburg's admission, which he never repeated in public. The story could have seriously undermined later Nazi claims that Germany had lost the war due to a ''stab in the back'' by Jews and leftists. Seldes came to believe that the interview, if published, ''would have destroyed the main planks of the platform on which Hitler rose to power.'' But the reporters involved ''did not think it worthwhile to give up our number-one positions in journalism'' by disobeying military censors ''in order to be free to publish.'' Seldes went on to cover many historic figures firsthand, from Lenin and Trotsky to Mussolini. When Seldes wrote about them, he pulled no punches. As a result, in 1923, Bolshevik leaders banished him from the fledgling Soviet Union. Two years later, he barely made it out of Italy alive; Mussolini sent Black Shirt thugs to murder the diminutive Seldes, small in stature but towering with clarity. Decade after decade, Seldes offended dictators and demagogues, press moguls and industrialists. His career began in the mainstream press. During the 1920s, he reported from Europe for the Chicago Tribune. But Seldes went independent in 1929 and proceeded to write a torrent of books -- including ''You Can't Print That'' and ''Lords of the Press'' -- warning of threats to the free flow of information. The press lords, he showed, were slanting and censoring the news to suit those with economic power and political clout. Like few other journalists in the 1930s, Seldes shined a fierce light on fascism in Europe -- and its allies in the United States. Seldes repeatedly attacked press barons such as William Randolph Hearst and groups like the National Association of Manufacturers for assisting Hitler, Mussolini and Spain's Gen. Francisco Franco. George Seldes and his wife, Helen, covered the war between Franco's fascists and the coalition of loyalists supporting the elected Spanish government. A chain of East Coast daily newspapers carried the pair's front-line news dispatches -- until pressure from U.S. supporters of Franco caused the chain to drop their reports. After three years in war-torn Spain, with fascism spreading across much of Europe, Seldes returned to the United States nearly blind due to extreme malnutrition. (His eyesight gradually returned.) From 1940 to 1950, he edited the nation's first periodical of media criticism -- named In Fact -- a weekly that reached a circulation of 176,000 copies. Many of his stands, lonely at the time, were prophetic. Beginning in the late 1930s, for example, Seldes excoriated the American press for covering up the known dangers of smoking while making millions from cigarette ads. What happened to In Fact? The New York Times obituary about Seldes simply reported that it ''ceased publication in 1950, when his warnings about Fascism seemed out of tune with rising public concern about Communism.'' In fact, however, In Fact fell victim to an official vendetta. One FBI tactic was to intimidate readers by having agents in numerous post offices compile the names of In Fact subscribers. As Seldes explained in his autobiography, ''Witness to a Century,'' such tactics were pivotal to the newsletter's demise. Also crucial was the sustained barrage of smears against In Fact in the country's most powerful newspapers. Seven years ago, during a delightful spring afternoon with George Seldes at his modest house in a small Vermont town, we asked how he'd found the emotional strength to persevere despite so many setbacks. Seldes replied, matter-of-factly, that uphill battles were intrinsic to doing good journalistic work. We will always be indebted to George Seldes. The best way to repay him is to live up to the standards he set for himself. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' Bombing on A-Bomb Coverage (7/5/95) By Jeff Cohen & Jeff Cohen Fifty years ago, the world's first atomic explosion shattered the desert dawn in New Mexico, just an hour's drive from a town called Truth or Consequences. The date was July 16, 1945. The world has never been the same. At first, an official smoke screen surrounded that nuclear detonation; code-named ''Trinity,'' it was part of the super-secret Manhattan Project. The government's cover story moved on the wires of Associated Press: ''An ammunition magazine, containing high-explosives and pyrotechnics, exploded early today in a remote area of the Alamogordo air base reservation, producing a brilliant flash and blast which were reported to have been observed as far away as Gallup, 235 miles northwest.'' But three weeks later, when a U.S. plane dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, humanity learned that it had gained the ability to destroy itself. The unfathomable power of a single warhead shook a routine assumption: that despite the mortality of each individual, the human race would endure. The image of a mushroom cloud evoked unprecedented horror. Yet, nuclear weapons quickly became part of America's political, cultural and economic landscape. By July 1946 -- when the United States began peacetime testing of A-bombs in the Pacific -- the media spin had settled into nuclear boosterism. Newsweek provided advance coverage under headlines like ''Atomic Bomb: Greatest Show on Earth'' and ''Significance: The Good That May Come From the Tests at Bikini.'' Forty-two thousand U.S. military personnel were within a few miles of the first two explosions at the Bikini atolls. The American press downplayed the bomb's impact. ''Awful as it was,'' Time magazine reported, ''it was less than the expectations of many onlookers.'' During the next 16 years, more than 200 mushroom clouds rose over test sites in the Pacific Ocean and the Nevada desert. The fallout ravaged the health of downwind residents from the Marshall Islands to Utah, Nevada and northern sections of Arizona. Opponents of nuclear tests didn't get much ink or air time in the 1950s -- while baby boomers grew up with radioactive isotopes in their bodies, courtesy of American and Soviet nuclear tests spewing fallout to the global winds. The 1963 Limited Test Ban treaty pushed tests underground. It was a major victory for public health. But bomb testing -- and the nuclear arms race -- continued out of sight and out of public mind. Beginning in the late 1970s, some of the 300,000 U.S. veterans who had been exposed to above-ground nuclear tests at close range -- ''atomic veterans'' -- stepped forward to talk about unusually high rates of cancer as well as birth defects among their children. Similar evidence has come from nuclear industry workers and people living downwind and down river of nuclear facilities. In 1988, a major scandal rocked the Department of Energy, the federal agency in charge of atomic weapons plants emitting extensive radioactive pollution. But rather than widening debate over nuclear arms policy options, the media focus was narrow: How could the country clean up and modernize its weapons assembly line? These days, with bipartisan support, the White House is implementing new multibillion-dollar programs to ''upgrade'' the nation's nuclear weapons labs. Meanwhile, although news media hardly seem to notice, some voices keep insisting that it's wrong to build nuclear weapons. One of those voices belongs to Samuel H. Day Jr. of Madison. After a journalistic career -- including jobs as an AP reporter, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and managing editor of The Progressive magazine -- Sam Day found that he could no longer just write news and commentary. Today, at age 68, Day is in prison. He's serving a six-month sentence for stepping onto the grounds of the U.S. Strategic Nuclear Command headquarters in Nebraska to protest nuclear weapons. A federal court in Omaha declared Sam Day to be a criminal. But Day pointed out that grave criminality could be seen in the highest offices of the land: ''Under international law, it is a crime to point weapons of mass destruction at defenseless cities. Under international law, it is the duty of every citizen to do everything possible to prevent such crimes.'' The nation's military command, he added, ''controls the targeting and launching of many thousands of nuclear warheads, some more than 100 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. And I chose to come here now because, contrary to public opinion and despite the end of the Cold War, our government has not relinquished one iota of its capacity for waging nuclear war. And it has no intention of doing so.'' Newsworthy? What do you think? -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' Love Boat: Politicians and Media Moguls (6/28/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon For media tycoons and their favorite politicians, it was a love boat. For media consumers, it was a cruise to nowhere. On the first day of summer, mega-media owners and other corporate heavies boarded an old aircraft carrier on the Hudson River in New York City for a gala fundraising dinner -- a ''Salute to Newt Gingrich'' that grossed $ 1.7 million for the Republican Congressional Committee's 1996 war chest. Conveners of the dinner included News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons. The assembled media magnates had good reason to celebrate: Only a few days earlier, the U.S. Senate showered them with enough gifts to make Santa Claus look like Silas Marner. In Washington-ese, the legislation is known as the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act. Consumer advocates call it the Time Warner Enrichment Act -- but such critics are apt to get little media notice. (Funny thing about that.) The giveaway sailed through the Senate on June 15 with bipartisan support, 81 to 18. But in the race to aid media conglomerates, Republican senators led the charge. The Senate bill bestows many favors, such as: Permitting a single company to own an unlimited number of radio stations. Letting one corporation buy up as many TV stations as it wants until it transmits to 35 percent of the nation's population. Freeing cable TV monopolies from price controls that have saved consumers more than $ 3 billion since 1992. When the House passes its version of the bill later this summer, supporters will include about 80 House Republicans who flew from the nation's capital in a chartered plane and corporate jets to attend the floating fund-raiser June 21. Years from now, looking back on the summer of 1995, we may remember it as the season when the biggest media giants broke free of nearly all public interest regulation and anti-trust constraints. By the year 2000 or so, the bulk of the country's media outlets could be owned by a half-dozen firms. We tend to forget that just a few years ago, before anyone had ever heard of ''Time Warner,'' there was a company named Time and another called Warner. Now, huge merged companies swallow up other huge merged companies. Would you believe Time Warner Turner Bell Atlantic TCI News Corp.? The situation is already dire -- with fewer and fewer companies gaining more and more control over the media. What's wrong with that? Ask a few journalists. Especially in private, they're likely to express misgivings -- or outright anger -- about the bottom-line mentality now determining newsroom priorities. If you're sick of so much ''infotainment'' coverage and so little news substance, you're not alone. The Senate-approved bill would make the situation much worse. Yet, in theory at least, all is not lost. After both houses of Congress take final action -- probably in a couple of months -- the bill will reach President Clinton's desk. He could veto it. But a veto would require political courage. And Clinton, like most politicians in Washington, is a paper tiger who prefers to growl at media moguls in public while purring at their feet behind the scenes. It's one thing to rail against violence and smut coming out of Hollywood and the music industry, as Sen. Bob Dole did last month when he publicly lambasted Time Warner. But, at the same time, Dole was the moving force behind the Senate bill, providing multibillion-dollar windfalls and unprecedented power for Time Warner. Sen. Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who led opposition to the bill, is hardly an anti-corporate firebrand. But he couldn't stomach the legislation's extreme provisions. ''Ultimately, this bill is about power,'' Kerrey noted. ''The bottom line is that in this bill, corporations have it and consumers don't.'' Warning of the increased media power that Congress seeks to place in the hands of a few, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said: ''It would make Citizen Kane look like an underachiever.'' Under the banner of ''deregulation,'' Time Warner and TCI -- the two biggest cable companies in the country -- would be able to drastically raise cable rates. Meanwhile, Time Warner and TCI could merge with phone companies, buy more broadcast stations and control both the content and delivery systems of TV programming. So, it's no wonder that the head of Time Warner anted up $ 100,000 as co-chairman of the recent GOP fund-raising bash on a ship in the Hudson River. It may have been billed as a ''Salute to Newt Gingrich,'' but when corporate media brass are on board, politicians seem to be the ones doing most of the saluting. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.''