Newsmen lash out against censorship
KANSAS CITY, Mo.—A pair of leading journalists lashed out against government suppression and censorship of the mass media Thursday at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Symposium which is being held on the campus of the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
Journalists discuss government censorship
Jack Newfield, assistant editor of the Village Voice, and Sander Vanocur, NBC News correspondent, spoke on "The Power and Responsibility of the Press" during the second day of the five-day symposium.
Newfield opened his speech with an outline of the failure of the "old journalism."
Photo by Greg Gorman
Journalists Jack Newfield and Sander Vanocur gave half-hour talks on "The Power and Responsibility of the Press" at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Symposium at UMKC. Both men advocated the need for a greater versatility in the news.
He said the failure was not just in the journalism schools that have impersonal factories which produce clerks of facts or the monopoly ownership of newspapers in too many cities.
"My root criticism of old journalism," Newfield said, "is that it is blind to an important part of the truth, that it doesn't print all of the truth all of the time."
Newfield cited examples such as the New York Times refusal to print stories of Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lucas on the Chicago conspiracy trial and the refusal of the Washington Post to print the story of operation "Phoenix" involving the secret training of GI's in assassination and torture techniques.
"All these corporate institutions feel they are part of the elite that runs the country," Newfield said. "And the men and women who control these monsters are not neutral, they have a mind set, a life style and political values concealed under a rhetoric of objectivity. But the values are institutionalized by the
24 KANSAN Feb. 27 1970
Times, Associated Press and CBS into corporate bureaucracies."
The corollary to the mass media's presumption against insurgency, Newfield said, is its bias in the direction of all authority.
"The presumption of truth is always with the President, university dean or local police chief." Newfield charged. "The burden of proof is always on the powerless and inarticulate poor."
Newfield listed three strategies for democratizing the mass media and particularly the press.
- "Make multiple ownership of television and newspapers in any one city a violation of the anti-trust law.
- "Begin organizing professional working journalists into radical caucuses inside their shops. They could demand participatory democracy inside the city room. By this I mean reporters would have a say in what stories are assigned. This would take power away from aging editors and conservative unions and give it to the reporters who are closer in touch with realities.
- "Need of a new journalism which would be more personal and subjective. A writing based on personal participation and open advocacy. Writing that is subjective rather than objective. It has a respect for detail and fact. The new journalism is what Norman Mailer uses in his memoir, poetry, essay and short story, to tell it more how it really is." Newfield said.
The new journalism breaks down artificial barriers between leisure and work, between public and private knowledge. It is used by writers committed to writing not about the world, but changing the world, he said.
Vanocur's speech dealt mainly with governmental censorship of the news.
"The government ought to get away from our throats," he emphasized." The government has license power and seems anxious to use it. I don't mind being harassed but being censored," he asserted.
Vanocur said editorializing is what Vice-President Agnew called "Instant analysis." He said the commentators had two hours to prepare. "Does that disqualify them? Some know a good bit more than the Vice-President," he said.
"To refrain from commentary is not instant analysis but it is democracy," Vanocur declared.
"Our view of the truth is closer than the government's," Vanocur said. "At least by competing we have come closer to the truth than by acting as a transmission belt of the government's views."
Vanocur attacked the familiar excuse of the government whenever they are criticized. The public officials say, "If you only knew what we know but cannot tell you.'
It is expressions such as these, Vanocur said, that have lead to our becoming involved in Vietnam when we have no business being there.
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