Letters

RATING THE POLL

Your November/ December poll, "Journalists Rate the Scandal Coverage," does not meet the terms of CJR's mission to keep the press under independent, unsparing professional review. It is not enough to ask the editors to assess their own shameful performance. It is not enough to weigh the allocation of credit for the scoop on an unmentionable Exhibit A as between the Internet sluice-way for the special prosecutor's leaks and the first news-as-entertainment TV network to pick it up.

The question to be addressed here, as in the Joe McCarthy seizure, is the performance by the press of its constitutional function in the self-government of our democracy. The outcome of the mid-term election rebukes not only the political partisans of their attempt at coup d'état by prurience but also the editors who so irresponsibly bought and embellished this hoax on the electorate.

Gerard Piel
retired editor and publisher
Scientific American
New York, New York

I thought Joan Konner's interview with the Lewinsky lawyers was fascinating, but your story on the poll about coverage of the Lewinsky story misrepresents what the poll shows. It does not show what journalists think about the coverage; it tells us only what a sample of executives in the field think. No one can tell what ordinary non-executive journalists as a group believe.

The quotes are indeed interesting, though. Don't you think, however, that when the next super-dramatic event occurs and stories begin circulating, few will remember any lessons from this story until after the flurry of "news" dies down? Just as with these stories, journalists are too busy covering the "news" to consider the situation dispassionately at the time.

J. Herbert Altschull
Professor, Continuing Studies
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

FOSTERING FAILURES

Thank you CJR for lending some urgently needed perspective to the debate over drug policy ("Drugs: Missing the Whole Story," November/December).

The lack of accessible drug treatment, and the failure of the press generally to report on this lack, together with a false public assumption that nothing works anyway, have fueled the surge in foster care placements of children born to addicted mothers. The consequences have been devastating to the very children that removal from home is intended to help.

Anne D. LoPiano
Executive director
National Family Preservation Network
Laurel, Maryland

BBC REVISITED

The idea that the BBC is somehow defending traditional editorial and technical values ("The Battleship That Turned on a Dime," CJR, November/ December) is simply fatuous.

Instead of offering the BBC blind support, PBS, U.S. public radio, and even CJR should look beyond the plummy accents and analyze the journalism. It's a shadow of its former self.

Simon Marks
Chief correspondent
Feature Story Productions
Washington, D.C.

SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIES

Your September/October piece "ABC Goes to the Movies," implies that ABC's World News Tonight Sunday produces features solely to promote the movies of our parent company, Disney. That would be a damning charge, but in this case, is wholly mistaken.

Each Sunday we broadcast the box office receipts and cover the business of Hollywood as we would any other business story, ranging from the comeback of older actors to the lack of women in listings of Hollywood's most powerful.

Over the past year World News Tonight Sunday has produced twelve showclosers either focusing on or related to movies in current release. Three of those movies -- the only three mentioned in the article -- were produced by Disney; the other nine were produced by other studios including Dreamworks, TriStar, and Paramount. Interestingly, that reflects almost exactly estimates of Disney's share of the market (18-25 percent). If we overdid coverage on any one studio's work, it was Paramount. This summer we did three pieces on the different facets of the astonishing popularity of Paramount's nearly unsinkable film Titanic.

Katherine I. O'Hearn
Executive producer
ABC Weekend News
New York, New York

REPORTING TIANANMEN

I take issue with Jay Mathews's claim that my reporting from China "buttressed the myth of a student massacre" in Tiananmen Square (CJR, September/ October).

Within half an hour of the gunfire in Tiananmen Square that morning, I was driven through the square by Chinese troops who had taken me captive. The pro-democracy demonstrators were gone, their encampment was rubble, and scores of soldiers sat cross-legged on the cobblestones. The air was thick with smoke from gunfire, but I saw no bodies, no injured civilians, no blood stains on the ground. And about twenty hours later, when the army released me, that's exactly what I reported.

What I called it then and call it now was an assault in Tiananmen Square, because I'd heard the gunfire, seen the flash of exploding ammunition, and passed among the troops who staged it.

For a long time after June 1989, defending my account of Tiananmen Square was like swimming against the tide. I didn't buttress a myth. I reported what I heard and saw.

Richard Roth
London, England

KHMER ROUGE TECHIES

While I do not take issue with the main point of Chris Bray's letter to the editor ("Who Lost Pol Pot?," November/ December), his sarcastic incredulity over whether the Khmer Rouge learned of The New York Times story about plans to arrest Pol Pot is sadly misplaced. Even in their malarial, remote, mountain-top jungle bases, the Khmer Rouge do not exist in a news vacuum and it is demonstrably true that they learned of the Times story within hours of it being published. Bray is obviously unaware of the Khmer-language short-wave radio broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Both are listened to devotedly by the rebel hierarchy and both aired the story (probably as the Khmer Rouge were drinking their morning coffee).

Bray would probably be astonished to learn that the guerrilla leadership does have cellular phones and fax machines. They also read newspapers -- mainly the Bangkok Post and The (Bangkok) Nation -- both of which also carried the Times story or wire service pick-ups of it.

Bray does have an argument to make, but not on this point.

Matthew Lee
English desk
Agence France-Presse
Washington, D.C.

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