Columnists: Disillusioned with Journalism

The American press is contributing to the “confusion and frustration now damaging the nation’s spirit.” The charge comes not from a partisan politician or a bitter New Radical, but from a usually liberal journalist disillusioned with his profession. Columnist and ABC-TV Commentator Howard K. Smith, 53, last week gave up his two-year-old column because in past years “I had the exhilarating feeling of being a tiny part in a great age of journalism. I miss that feeling now.”

An uncomplicated egalitarian where race relations are concerned, Smith nevertheless writes in his farewell column that the “elevation of Stokely Carmichael into a real force in our nation” is an example of an irresponsible journalistic buildup. A few years back, Joe McCarthy was similarly elevated, says Smith, but he at least was a U.S. Senator. Carmichael is “basically a nobody, who, before the press took notice of him, had achieved nothing. He failed to win a following—except from us with our cameras and note pads—in the rural South and in the city ghettos.” Thanks to the big play the press gave Carmichael, however, a civil rights leader recently told Smith, “if I say no to Stokely, you fellows won’t print it in one sentence on the back page. My people think I am doing nothing. But if I go see him, it’s on the front page and my people think I am in there pitching.”

Just as exaggerated as Carmichael, thinks Smith, is “the credibility gap,” which he calls “one of the most distorting oversimplifications of the time.” The President, says Smith, has to make judgments on facts that may be only partially known. “Yet we tend to call it calculated deception if he does not instantly provide conclusive facts and admit failure. If he does not keep a frozen consistency, he is held to be lying. No government ever has been run that way and none ever will.”

Viet Nam coverage, writes Smith, is full of one-sided journalism, such as the widely printed photo of the South Vietnamese police chief’s execution of a Viet Cong. “Not even a perfunctory acknowledgment was made of the fact that such executions, en masse, are the Viet Cong way of war.” Smith reports that his own son Jack, left for dead by the Communists in the battle of la Drang, witnessed the execution by the enemy of a dozen U.S. soldiers who were in uniform.

Instead of doing his weekly column, Smith plans to work on a book on the “dispiriting sixties.”