Taking Aim Again At Viet Nam Pbs Gives Airtime to a Controversial Rebuttal

By Richard Zoglin

Few works of journalism can claim the label definitive. But to many viewers and critics, PBS's 13-part series Viet Nam: A Television History, first telecast in the fall of 1983, seemed a valid contender for the title. Scrupulously researched, the $5.6 million project recounted the complex history of the war with admirable thoroughness and dispassion. The series was widely praised as a comprehensive and balanced piece of work, and it won a host of major journalism awards, including six Emmys.

This week, however, the series will come under attack on the very network that gave it life. PBS, in an unusual move, will run an hour-long rebuttal produced by Accuracy in Media, the conservative group dedicated to exposing "liberal bias" in print and on television. The AIM film is the centerpiece of a two-hour Inside Story special that includes a brief history of the PBS series, an examination of AIM's major charges and a 22-minute panel discussion of the issue. The segment is moderated by Harvard Law Professor Arthur Miller and involves historians, journalists and representatives from both AIM and the Viet Nam series. Behind the debate over Viet Nam, however, lies a more immediate question of journalistic responsibility: Is public TV setting a dangerous precedent by broadcasting the reply of an openly partisan group to one of its programs?

AIM's rebuttal is less polished and sophisticated than most network documentaries. Except for an ultrasmooth on-camera host, Charlton Heston, the program is rather dry and technically clumsy. Many of its charges seem directed less at the Viet Nam series than at general policies and attitudes that, in AIM's view, contributed to the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam. The program exhumes, for example, the old conservative charge that the media misled the nation about the 1968 Tet offensive and resurrects news footage of a smiling Jane Fonda visiting North Viet Nam, accompanied by mocking music.

Yet the AIM program cannot be completely dismissed. It has marshaled its own cadre of authorities to help make a case that the Viet Nam series, among other things, inaccurately portrayed North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh as a benign nationalist rather than a ruthless Communist; denigrated the South Vietnamese government and people; overstated the extent of drug abuse and morale problems among U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam; and underplayed the brutality of the Communist regimes that took over in Southeast Asia after the U.S. departure. The Inside Story analysis lends credence to some of these complaints, though it also points out several factual errors and oversimplifications in the AIM program.

Is the exercise worthwhile, or will it start an ominous trend? The arguments are raging in broadcasting corridors. Though TV networks in recent years have increasingly sought ways to accommodate viewer feedback, they have traditionally drawn the line at turning over airtime to programs produced by outsiders. "Allowing your facility to be used for such a pointed attack from a particular ideological point of view seems to me bad journalism and bad broadcasting," says NBC Senior News Commentator John Chancellor. "It has to say to a lot of people who are watching, 'Basically, we were wrong.' "

The original series' producers argue that the AIM program is a shallow and polemical response to an exhaustively researched work of scholarship. "If PBS feels that a reply to this series is appropriate, why does AIM get a monopoly?" asks Executive Producer Richard Ellison. "It's a precedent that I consider dangerous in and of itself, and also because it is part of a general atmosphere of pressure on the media from the right."

Some have charged that PBS succumbed to at least indirect pressure from the Reagan Administration to telecast the AIM program. The film was partly funded by a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded by then NEH Chief William Bennett, now Reagan's Secretary of Education. The program was later given a special screening at the White House, to which PBS officials were invited. Such interest at the top levels of Government, critics say, can hardly be ignored by a TV service depending on federal funds for its existence.

PBS officials deny that Administration pressure influenced their decision. Barry Chase, vice president for news and public affairs programming, points out that the original series evoked numerous complaints from veterans and Vietnamese refugees, and he contends that the AIM show is a legitimate way to air some of those concerns. "I think a response mechanism of some sort is badly needed on TV," says Chase. "And there's no reason in the world why a producer ought not to respond to attacks."

Network news executives, while hardly sympathetic to AIM, are reassured by the fact that PBS is placing the show in a larger context. "I think the format they have ended up with is a justifiable one," says Van Gordon Sauter, executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group. Indeed, except for its length, the AIM program seems little different from -- or more troubling than -- the "editorial replies" run frequently by local stations or guest editorials on a newspaper's op-ed page. The danger is that the Viet Nam skirmish may intensify. AIM Chairman Reed Irvine is contemplating a reply to ABC's recent three-hour documentary on the nuclear threat. Says Irvine: "I'd love to do a program showing the other side of that coin."

With reporting by Peter Ainslie/New York