TV v. the Pentagon

A brief peace that broke out after the election between Spiro Agnew and TV is over. The war grew hot again last week when CBS, for the second time in four weeks, aired the Vice President's least favorite documentary of the year, The Selling of the Pentagon. One purpose was to give foes of the program a chance to be seen and heard; the documentary itself was followed by previously taped attacks from Agnew and others. The firepower being employed by both sides reflected the vital interests involved: the reputation of the military during an unpopular war, and the integrity of the editorial process employed in TV news.

The one-hour program, first shown on Feb. 23 and made with Pentagon cooperation, charged the Defense Department with excessive and improper publicity activities. Even by its own estimate, the Pentagon publicity budget has risen to $30 million this year, ten times what it was in 1959.*CBS, quoting the Twentieth Century Fund, said that the true current expenditure may be as much as $190 million.

The documentary, widely praised by TV critics, thus treated an important, vastly underreported subject with footage that was often fascinating and bound to remain in the viewer's memory. It exposed oversimplified, cold war anti-Communist propaganda films produced by the Pentagon years ago and still being shown. CBS cameras also covered the Army's much-traveled lecturing colonels; their speeches violated service regulations against public statements on the foreign policy aspects of Viet Nam. Other segments depicted a violent Green Beret karate demonstration and children reveling in it, and a group of VIPs--getting four-star treatment on a Defense Department tour--going gung-ho after test-firing high-priced weaponry. The network included criticism of itself. Walter Cronkite was the Government's narrator in one of the cold war films; a former Air Force information officer in Viet Nam described how CBS had been gulled into filming a misleadingly optimistic description of air action over North Viet Nam.

But the program hurt its message by overstating its case. Shots of the VIPs seemed to be selected to make them look foolish. The script, though generally well-done, was sometimes flawed by heavily underlining its points, trying too hard for irony or poignancy (after a firepower demonstration: "War is not fought in front of a grandstand"). Numerous complaints about factual accuracy and deceptive editing followed from Defense Department Spokesman Daniel Z. Henkin. But the issues were relatively minor and probably beside the point; more significant was the program's overall impact. Investigative reporting is strongest when it includes the best of what it is condemning. The CBS show never seemed to concede any legitimate Pentagon public relations activity. The result at times was a polemic that avoided the question: Why shouldn't the military, faced with genuine community-image and recruiting problems, wage an honest public relations campaign?

If the program lacked balance, so did its critics. In the epilogue that followed the documentary last week, Congressman F. Edward Hebert, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was heard calling it "a splendid professional hatchet job" and "one of the most un-American things I've ever seen on the tube." Agnew accused CBS of "propagandistc manipulation" in the Pentagon show and claimed there had been misleading editing. The Vice President also attacked the network's powerful 1968 documentary Hunger in America and its never-aired 1966 "Project Nassau," in which CBS was murkily involved in filming an aborted invasion of Haiti.

CBS News President Richard S. Salant, who rose to that title as a corporation lawyer rather than a journalist, was shown in a rebuttal that was not as convincing or direct as it might have been. Salant and his NBC counterpart, Reuven Frank, did, at week's end, issue letters that effectively refuted a Washington Post editorial questioning the usual film editing practices of the networks. It is probably a vain hope that the final word on the subject was issued on a public TV show last week by White House Director of Communications Herbert Klein. He declared that he did not "concur in all phases" with the Vice President's attacks on the networks; The Selling of the Pentagon was not "fully balanced," but, Klein concluded, "the President himself looks [at this subject] with some criticism and has ordered severe cutbacks in unnecessary information activities, ones which he felt didn't serve a useful public purpose."

NBC also took arms last week against criticism of the networks' war coverage. In the face of claims that the newscasts were "biased" or "distorted" to disparage the operations in Laos, Julian Goodman, president of NBC, dispatched letters to all 535 Senators and Congressmen defending NBC's reportage and condemning "the continuing effort to discredit and intimidate the network news organizations." NBC Anchorman John Chancellor fired a follow-up salvo in his news show, declaring: "Various people in the Administration, including the President and the Vice President, have been making nasty cracks about the TV coverage of the campaign in southern Laos. They say we've not been telling the whole story, and that's true. We haven't been able to tell the whole story because we haven't been allowed to. Some of the people who have been complaining that the whole story hasn't been told are the people who tried to keep it from being told."

-The Pentagon's public affairs operation was established under a 1947 law creating the Department of Defense. Its annual expenditures, including those for the information section, are subject to congressional approval.

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