Truths Heard and Unheard

By Thomas Griffith

On his first day on the witness stand, General William C. Westmoreland described how he made frequent visits to his field commanders in Viet Nam to hear their briefings and get firsthand impressions. He used the word briefings as an old soldier would, perhaps not even aware of its connection to his $120 million libel suit against CBS. For briefings are also what journalism is about--gathering facts, asking questions and then briefing a public that hasn't the time or the patience to hear it all.

Did CBS choose unfairly to prove a thesis when it reduced hours of taped interviews to make a 90-min. Viet Nam documentary in which General Westmoreland came off looking bad? In a paneled and marbled federal courtroom in Manhattan, television screens are arrayed so that judge, jury, lawyers and spectators can see replays of what CBS chose and what it disregarded. This unusual behind-the-scenes look at the editing process disturbs the press--reporters think they should be judged by their printed stories, not by their notes; television producers by the footage they used, not by rejected outtakes. Back in 1964 the Supreme Court ruled, in a case that the press hailed as a great victory, that a public figure suing for libel must prove not only that a statement was false but that it was made knowing it to be false "or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." But how else can one tell whether the writer or editor knew something to be false without knowing what was in his mind, or knowing what he had to go on? And thus the New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan decision of 1964, which was never intended to do the press a favor--it was meant to ensure that public debate should be "uninhibited, robust and wide-open"--has since been giving the press a lot of trouble. Lawyers can now call up notes, unused film and memos to ask a witness why he chose one quote and not another, and to attack each choice as prejudiced.

Selection itself is no proof of bias, it is merely a necessity: the millions of words a newspaper receives must be reduced to the thousands it prints; hours of tape must be fitted to the time constraint of a half-hour news program. The bias, if there is one, is less apt to be in ideology than in choosing what will most interest the audience or document the thesis the journalist has found in the material.

CBS finds itself with several awkward problems, whether or not Westmoreland can prove that he was libeled. In his recent autobiography, Mike Wallace describes how as a young actor and talk-show host turned interviewer he first developed his talent for skewering his subjects. Among other techniques, "we used searching, tight close-ups to record the tentative glances, the nervous tics, the beads of perspiration." This is how many viewers will remember Wallace's devastating questioning of Westmoreland. When that Viet Nam program was first criticized, CBS commendably ordered up its own in-house critique, which, though standing by the program, found it seriously flawed. That report later had to be turned over to the opposing lawyer. When courts permit libel lawyers to pry so deeply into the news-gathering process, the press is tempted to operate like a fly-by-night bookie, keeping no records that might later embarrass it. This is a clumsy way to do business. But it is a lesson the press itself has already taught public officials, who find their most confidential memos later made public, and then spread over the front pages, under the Freedom of Information Act.

The final irony is that CBS is being sued for doing what CBS itself first accused Westmoreland of doing. CBS said that in Westmoreland's briefings of the Pentagon and the President, the general kept from them, with doctored figures, the true state of affairs in Viet Nam. Now in court Westmoreland seeks to prove that CBS knowingly distorted the record in the case it made about him. As the costly trial unfolds, the reputations of both are being damaged.