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. 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