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Thursday, June 15, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unengaged editorial represent the opinion of the Kannan editorial staff. Stated columns represent the views of only the writers
Administrators evasive
KU administrators can't decide what they know about protesters who disrupted former Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin's speech in Hoch Auditorium April 6.
In the April 10 issue of the Kansan Del Shankel, executive vice chancellor, was reported as saying that disciplinary action would be taken against the protesters, some of whom he said already were known to administrators.
Tuesday a statement released by Shankel and David Ambler, vice chancellor for student affairs, said the protesters would not be disciplined because their identities were not known.
Snankel denied yesterday that he had ever said administrators knew the identities of any of the protesters.
CONSIDERING THE DEGREE to which the issue of the protesters brought reactions from members of the University, it seems unlikely that Shankel would have let an incorrect statement about what he said remain on the front page of the Kansan without some comment. The Kansan received no such comment.
Letters to the Kansan on the subject of the protesters dominated the editorial page of the Kansan for several days after the incident. The widespread news coverage and outrage expressed by students and faculty made it obvious that what was needed after the incident was a statement from the administration that the disrupters would be disciplined. It was intended to calm those who were outraged but all it has accomplished is a discrepancy in the administration's position.
The basis for changing the administration's position was the pictures of protesters taken by a police photographer.
MORE THAN TWO months have passed since Shankel said the photographs could be used for identification.
The statement released Tuesday, however, said that they were of such poor quality that none of the demonstrators could be identified.
Does it take more than two months of looking at photographs to decide that none of the people in them are recognizable?
What seems more plausible is that by waiting until the spring semester is over and the people whose emotions were so tied up in the incident are either gone or have had a chance to calm down, an accommodationist position of nonaction has again appeared.
When William Shockley, the Nobel prize winner who advocates that blacks are genetically inferior was prevented from speaking by protesters, outrage burst out and there was pressure to have the protesters disciplined. Even then the administration promised action. Little occurred.
When an Iranian student is alleged to be a spy and witnesses testify that they saw him beat another Iranian, the appropriate action is promised. No action was announced.
When an exhibit of Nazi artifacts was to be presented on campus just after the television program "Holocaust," it was canceled by the administration. When outrage on the infringement to free speech arose, the exhibition was reinstalled.
When important and controversial issues can be gradually swept aside by image-conscious administrators, it is difficult to determine the facts. And the facts are the only things upon which judgments can be made.
The violence that Skokie, Ill. officials have been predicting for more than a year is once again hovering over that predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb.
Monday the Supreme Court removed some of the uncertainty about violence occurring in Skokie by allowing members of the National Socialist Party of America to march through the suburb June 25.
Violence menaces free speech
Soon after the decision was announced, some Jewish militants said they would put thousands of marchers in the streets of Nazi demonstration. The Midwest coordinator for the Jewish Defense League, Stu Feiler, said the league would blockade all streets leading to the base planned for the demonstration.
"We will between 3,000 and 5,000 people in the streets, and there'll be no way the Nazis can get through." Feiler said. "If they turn around and go back, there will be no violence. If they get through, there will be bloodshed."
THAT PROMISE of violence has become a little less disturbing since the Nazis have said that with the meeting of three conditions, they will cancel their Skype denial of the meeting. These conditions have been met—the Supreme Court decision and the Illinois Legislature's refusal to limit or ban the demonstration. The third condition is the removal of a $60,000 bond requirement for residents in Marquette Park, another Chicago suburb.
A federal court will hear the Nazis' challenge of the requirement June 20.
A Nazi spokesman has said that the demonstration in Skokie, where 7,000 survivors of World War II Nazi concentration camp call for the denial of the Nazis' freedom of speech.
It is true that the Nazis have faced months of repression of
their right to speak. Their first attempt at a demonstration—May 1, 1977—failed when it was blocked by city officials. When
Lori
Bore
Editorial Writer
the Nazis changed the date to April 30, the suburb issued a blanket injunction against all Nazi demonstrations in Skokie. The suburb also passed three ordinances, the first of which required a group planning a demonstration to give 30 days notice of the demonstration and to have $350,000 in liability
insurance to cover any accidents. The group then could get a demonstration permit if the suburb approved. The two other ordinances prohibited "military style" uniforms and the display of "symbols offensive to the community."
At that point the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in, trying to protect free speech, even though the organization disliked the Nazi cause. The group is led by members in protest of the organization's support of the Nazis.
SUBSEQUENT STATE and federal courts have all ruled against Skokie's attempts to block the Nazi demonstration.
Most of the courts agreed with the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said, "If these civil rights of freedom of speech, expression and assembly are to remain vital for all, they must protect not only their rights but also those capable, but also those ideas it quite justifiably rejects and despises."
The courts are right, of course. The Nad demonstration is a necessary evil—necessary but not all the time should not be restricted unless that ambiguity, "a clear and present danger," can be avoided, if they prove that danger makes the ambiguity welcome. Suppression of speech would be so easy otherwise.
The demonstration is not an incitement to riot, as some opponents of it have said. Although Nana Joafer Frank Skoko was a lawmaker, the Skoko as a tool, he is sincere in trying to make public his views.
If anyone is guilty of inciting a riot, it is the militant soldiers in the Pakistani-backed Nazi march. Eager to tell their viewpoint, they also are eager to join the fight.
The Nazis are running the risk of violence by demonstrating but they are not asking for it. All they are asking for is the right to present their viewpoint.
TV does not forebode mental atrophy
By ERIC SEVAREID N.V. Times Feature
Broadcasting and print journalism are more complementary than competitive, but they are different. Many TV critics cannot seem to grasp or accept this. They are often cases in broadcast news and documentaries; they see it through their own prism. They tell us we should have left out this or included it, and why we should be placing reasons why we do what we do, dictated by the special imperiales of the medium.
Television is an informational and entertainment omnibus.
But Renaissance men, or women, are in short supply.
When a paper appoints someone to the job of general TV critic it is asking him to tell about the high drama and low comedy; of music and dance; of economics, government an electoral politics; of science and history. A newspaper of journalism itself as a calling.
I have seen innumerable studies and surveys about the quality of TV programming and how they are perceived by general audience. I have seen none about the quality of professional press criticism of television and what they may be perceived as incidence or to television itself.
PAPERS DO a better job than broadcasters, especially the networks, both in running audience vs. audience. No network or station that I know of has an in-house ambudman. We have nankered with attempts at systematic listener rebuttal, but not succeeds. The block is not possibly, but program rigidities.
I would ask you to fix this in mind—broadcast journalism is the only business in the country. I can think of that has its chief benefit as well as its chief enterprise. It is, at times, a surfacing experience.
We have no proper mechanism either for counter-criticizing the printed press or explaining ourselves and explaining ourselves.
Broadcasting must be criticized; it deserves constant monitoring by its critics. But I detect more than a whiff of warring in much of the media I read in the papers and magazines.
A new article in Esquire informs me that prime time
television is a "golden haven of desperate, sometimes crazed automatons, writting in struggles for Neilsen points. That entertainment world is hard to get in, not psychotic. It might be calmer if the papers had not reported it, breathlessly, relentlessly, like a weekly national lottery. In any event, it may be easier with publishers if, say, the circulations of the New York Times, the Daily News and the Post were to fluctuate by tens of thousands of readers every
BUT TODAY no network or big station news division can make the slightest difference in severe monitoring in the papers and
and, in this business,
a destabilizing million dollars a year. It was a wave of news about rumors and covergirl treatment.
I read a good deal about
livered incomes of broadcast
news people, and many are
boated. I rarely read about the
huge incomes of syndicated
columnists or cartoonists,
which has been going on for
decades.
I occasionally read wild cries of alarm by TV critics that the executive head of a network—the man who carries the ultimate legal and political responsibility to respond in matters of news substance or personnel in the network news division. This
dilutability of the First Amendment simply because of technological change in the transmission of information and ideas is an absurd and dangerous notion.
I cannot clearly foresee the future of networks and broadcasting generally. I feel sure it is no serious threat to
I am quite aware that a good many broadcast owners and managers were slow themselves. They were right, they were wrong, the advertising business and found, often to their discomfort, that they had become costeurs of the First Amendment. Those who still won't face the pressure of the broadcasting business.
It was not big ratings or vast popularity that triggered the move by ABC to hire the New York lady for a preposterous,
IF THOSE charges are right, then I do not understand the meaning of certain facts:
"Zombie" is the word. I have never met a mison in my life, except some drunks and mental defectives.
treveroy that cover the networks because of their quasimonopoly position will descend on the big newspaper empires
I do not believe TV is a serious danger to American newspapers or to American society, education or cultural standards. I do not believe the critics of电视 that is causing us into a passive, inert people, minds and bodies become mush.
- That about 60 million
magazines. Recently, the D.C. City Council formally protested the dismissal of a local anchorwoman God help her.
Of course, broadcast journalism is by its nature the most personal form of journalism ever. So there is an apotheosis of broadcast personalities, along with other pop celebrities, going on. Newspaper treatment of it, not dampened it down as I wish to heaven it could be. Writing about other journalists is not my idea of a journalistic career.
happens very rarely, at least in the network I'm most familiar with. It is considered normal when done by the publishers of the papers those critics write for.
I SUPPOSE the most serious example, over the years, of the double standard in print has been on the issue of First Amendment rights for broadcasting. Publishers and editors have fought courageously, sometimes heroically, the freedom the press and thank God the press and your predecessors did so. Only slowly and reluctantly have many publishers and editors come to accept that the notion of the divisibility,
newspapers. There are more daily papers in America now than at the end of World War II.
They are, on the whole, extremely profitable. Networks cannot grow in size and scope. They can own only so many stations; they cannot seriously impair them, they cannot expand the hours in the day. They face the structural changes, which could be profound, that are coming with cable television, with satellite transmission, with playback equipment in the homes and all other facilities of the munications magic. Individual newspaper chains, however, do grow and will, at a stunning rate. The same clouds of con-
newspapers are purchased every day in this country and read by perhaps twice that number, far more than the number of people news-ait last-sday;
- That: many millions more young Americans are studying in colleges, millions more adult students in the study courses at home;
- That extra millions fill the sports arenas, the tennis courts, the jogging tracks, the hunting fields and fishing streams, the planes and ships as they travel the world.
The alarmist intellectual critics of television show us precious little direct evidence of
what they think TV is doing to the mass of people. They do not know ordinary people or understand their resilience. Nor do they love them, this particular type of intellectual.
As Eric Huff said once,
"The businessman just wants
your money; the military man
just wants you to obey. But the
intellectual wants your soul. We
people want to get down on
the knees and love what they
hate and hate what they love."
They have always opposed anything new that was massive and popular—the first printing presses, even the typewriter, the silent films, the talking films, radio shows, the movie thatrove the popular. That would cost them their sense of distinctiveness.
And I find myself thinking these days that on balance mass media may well be a force for national unity, not division, the most important common hearth or parish of humanity who makes the community weather and sound the notes of the day. Not a force for violence in the world. This, indeed, is one of the century's most peaceable people. It is our awareness of violence that has increased, and therefore our repugnance.
MASS MEDIA have done much of that. I would not go so far as to suggest that they are becoming a moral substitute for war or confrontation, but something is happening.
it was television that Satad and Begin used. It is the cameras and reporters that the Cambodians and the Idi Amirs make are not around when commit to commit their mass atrocities.
It is as if mass media are becoming an instrument for the human conscience. If it lies anywhere, that conscience lies in the free Western world. Even the most remote tyrannies feel obliged to call themselves republics, a moral concept. And more often they do react with sensitivity to charges of human rights violations. Without mass media, I doubt that they would.
Eric Sevarell, retired CBS-TV commentator, delivered the above address before the United Press International luncheon in conjunction with the recent annual convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
It states, "Specific responsibilities include . . . articulating the goals of the university's athletics program and the University."
The job description for the new KU athletic director, who will replace resigning director Clyde Walker, said the applicant should be responsible for keeping the public informed about the men's athletic program.
If the search committee for the new director keeps this in mind, many problems can be avoided, problems that have caused animosity between the KUAC office and students.
KUAC director should be open
For instance, in fall 1976 Walker tried to secretly plan moving the annual KU-Missouri team from its original Stadium in Kansas City, Mo.
a student of the KUAC Board, Jill Grubaugh, and walked had asked the Board to keep the Board during an Oct. 13, 1976, meeting.
WALKER HAD been under fire from students and the Kansan for conducting business in secrecy.
"I'm afraid that they'll come with a decision, not a proposal, but that there'll be no discussion of it." Grubbaugh said.
During that time MU was considering enlarging their football stadium. It doesn't make sense to enlarge a stadium and then play a game elsewhere.
The MU plan was dropped after the KUAC proposal was made public.
Last fall Walker tried to persuade the Kansan not to report the proposed $2 million renovation of Stadium and went to conduct a public's business without the public's knowledge.
At a Nov. 1, 1977, meeting with the Student Senate Sports Committee and interested students, Walsh said that the proposal got out into the public while we're just working on it."
However, at the same meeting he contradicted himself.
keep people informed," he said. The Student Senate later passed a resolution opposing the renovation. A 2,500 signature petition was also presented to the KUAC.
"It's my responsibility to keep people informed," he said.
The KUAC responded to the students' pressure and dropped
the proposed VIP seating and Victory Club improvements and a $50,000 wall across the south end of the stadium.
The VIP seating and the Victory Club improvement
would not have benefited students. And the south wall would have prevented students from watching the game from watching it.
Bob Beer
Editorial Writ
Editorial Writer
Students accused Walker of forsaking the interests of students by trying to make more seats available for the public at a higher price. The move would have brought in more money for KU athletes but at the student's expense.
Of course, there are people who think that some business should be conducted in security or military weapons' development and strategies that are truly for national security are
But secrecy for a university athletic program? Poppycock.
it is hoped that the search committee, composed of Gerhard Zuther, professor of English; Clark Coan, dean of foreign students; Mike Harper, student body president; and Laura Pinkston, former student body president, the University is composed of more than athletes and their advocates.
"Articulating to the public the goals of the men's athletics program and the University" means just that.
Letters Policy
The Kanasw welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten and include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include the writer's name, faculty or staff position. Letters are not to exceed 500 words in length. The Kanasw reserves the right to edit all letters for publication.