Friday, May 21, 1983 13
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Hoaxes Indict the Sensation-Seeking Media
(Continued from Page 1)
recognized as a literary
genre.
There was no malice in
the Poe excursion into
fancy. There was a sinis-
ter intent in the Hitler
diary fakes — greed and a
desire to rewrite history
to present the Nazi leader
in a more favorable light.
There was deliberate,
evil intent in the West Bank
episode and a shocking and
shameful disregard of fun-
damental journalistic pre-
cepts, so much so as to make
some American editors and
correspondents guilty of col-
lusion by negligence. Few of
the correspondents and
editors who handled this
story can look back at their
work and say they had
taken the necessary precau-
tions to establish the verac-
ity of their reports.
The Hitler diary episode
stank to high heavens.
There were so many incred-
ible aspects to it which any
honest investigative re-
porter would have dis-
covered immediately as to
make the documents sus-
pect from the start. Once a
serious examination was
made, it took only a few
hours to establish that the
papers were not only a
forgery but a poor one from
start to finish and that there
was absolutely nothing in
them that could stand
scrutiny.
Yet Time and Newsweek,
the American news maga-
zines, virtuously com-
mended themselves for not
having bought publication
rights but, without any
editorial selectivity, they
published thousands of
words on the contents of the
documents without even
waiting to establish the au-
thenticity of the material.
American newspapers gen-
erally carried less of the
contents and more about the
debate over authenticity.
There was news after a fash-
ion in this.
Hugh Trevor-Roper,
who first said the diaries
were authentic and later
changed his mind, lost a
good bit of his reputation
as an outstanding
authority on the Hitler
era. David Irving, who
writes the history of the
Nazi era from a far right-
ist viewpoint, last most of
his credibility when after
first condemning the
diaries as forgeries he
suddenly turned around
and claimed they were
genuine.
First blame, of course,
goes to the publisher and
editors of Stern, the sensa-
tional Hamburg weekly
which was taken for about
$4 million by the swindlers.
One'cannot help wondering
how a responsible editor
could trust so implicitly as
an intermediary a jour-
nalist who was a Nazi
addict, who was sponsored
by two Nazi generals, who
spent his time and money in
acquiring relics of Hitler
and the Nazi regime and
whose wife publicly
lamented after the exposure
of the swindle, that it was a
pity that Der Fuehrer could
not now be revealed in his
true light.
It was for some days a hot
story for the American press
and our editors, uncritical
and unquestioning, made
the most of it. When conclu-
sive proof emerged that the
documents were faked, the
American media quickly
dropped the story and tried
to justify the extraordinary
play given to it.
Newsweek, which. had ',
put a Hitler cover on an
issue containing 13 pages
on the contents of the
diaries, argued that "true or
false, the documents would
have historic importance."
Why? They provided a
momentary sensation and
that was all. These forgeries
will not alter history of the
Nazi era. They will not
change the course of events
in the way the forged
Zinoviev Letter brought
about the defeat of Britain's
Labor Government in 1924
or the forged Protocols of
Zion, which tormented the
Jewish people for nearly a
century.
The episode, if it is re-
membered at all, will be
as an example of the fail-
ure of the media to exer-
cise sound editorial
judgment and of the way
in which personal pre-
dilections can influence
such judgment.
In the case of the Hitler
diary forgeries, if one is
charitable, one can say that
the media was a victim of its
avid craving for sensation.
That cannot be said about
the incredible lack of judg-
ment or balance shown by
the American media in
their handling of reports
from the West Bank of a
mysterious "epidemic"
•among young Palestinian
girls there and the sub-
sequent allegations by the
Liberation
Palestine
Organization that the Is-
raeli authorities had caused
the epidemic in order to re-
nder the Arab girls sterile
and thus reduce the future
Arab population.
Any reporter with experi-
ence and integrity would
have been suspicious of that
story and would not have
touched it with a 10-foot
pole without_solid substan-
tiation. Any TV correspon-
dent who couldn't recognize
that he was being tricked by
a set-up in which the girls in
a school dorm began to weep
and wail and throw- them-
selves about on signal when
the TV camera was focused
upon them, shouldn't be
permitted out alone.
It would be interesting to
know how many correspon-
dents actually demanded of
their PLO informants sub-
stantiation of the allega-
tions against the Israelis
and what they received be-
fore they trotted off to file
their dispatches. One can-
not help but feel there Nivas
malice or at least incompe-
tence somewhere along the
line; that here and there, a
reporter or editor was wait-
ing for a chance to stick it to
the Israelis, an editor who
welcomed anything critical
of the Israelis and could eas-
ily submerge his editorial
judgment.
American correspon-
dents, as this writer can
attest from personal ex-
perience, frequently find
Israeli officials abrasive
and arrogant. It is a con-
dition that has existed as
long as Israel has been a
state and some corre-
spondents consciously or
unconsciously let their
personal resentment
color their dispatches.
What reflects most
damagingly on the Ameri-
can press is,that when inde-
pendent investigations (by
the U.S. Center for Disease
Control and the World
Health Organization) fi-
nally and conclusively es-
tablished the falsity of the
PLO charges and denied
even the existence of an
epidemic (except of hys-
teria) the rectifications
were in most cases buried
deep in the news columns,
easily overlooked by the av-
erage newspaper reader.
The - verifications were not
pictorial so they got little
more than a hurried refer-
ence on the TV channels
that had shown the Arab
school girls in paroxysms.
It wouldn't hurt if the
media, in dealing with the
Middle East particularly,
took a refresher course in
the basics of journalism
and, in future displayed
some healthy skepticism,
more enterprise in estab-
lishing the facts, a little
more judgment and com-
mon sense. To this they
could add a readiness not to
believe the worst of the Is-
raelis until it is proven.
It also wouldn't hurt to
remember that the hardest
part of the job is not the col-
lection of information but
its presentation, honestly
and fairly with a minimum
of partisanship or bias.
,
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