The American Scene

Jane Fonda, Dr Spock and peace

Al Capp The Peace Mafia here was more enraged by the peace than they ever were by the war. (The Peace Mafia must not be confused with those of us who simply, and passionately, wanted an end to the violence. We tried to achieve that by voting for Nixon, the first Commander-in-Chief to bring GIs home, instead of sending more abroad; by not announcing we were willing to " beg" for peace during his negotiations for peace; and by expressing, publicly and privately, our abhorrence of violence. The Peace Mafia expressed their abhorrence of violence by blowing up buildings, demolishing Army headquarters, and raising huge sums to defend the more high-spirited among them charged with killing cops.) The leaders of the Peace Mafia reacted to the news that the detested Nixon had finally extricated us from the war to which we were committed by the inaugural address of their deified Kennedy, not with thanksgiving, but by damning it as another of his dirty tricks. And, in a way it was. It deprived them of their crusade. Now Jane Fonda will have to go back to Xrated movies, and Dr Spock to diaper rash.

Miss Fonda warned the nation that the agreement was merely a Nixon strategy to plunge us into another, and greater, war. A group supporting Dr Spock said, "knowing the character of Mr Nixon, we must guard against the increased danger of [his involving us in] intervention elsewhere."

Yet even while they were expressing these heartfelt hopes that the bloodshed wasn't over, they must have known the jig was up. Miss Fonda and Dr Spock, and their like, had convinced a troublesome number of us that it was indecent for the US to help its allies, and dishonourable to keep its word. They taught the last Presi dent, and the present one, a lesson that will not be lost on future Presidents; that it is too risky to offer American support to any friendly nation, threatened anywhere. The first victim will, of course, be Israel.

The forces of world anti-semitism have been strengthened beyond their wildest hopes, by our Jane Fondas and Dr Spocks. Not that they are anti-semites. They are incapable only of seeing beyond the tips of their noses. The enduring effect of their hysterically-applauded philosophy of "to hell with anyone but us" on US policy, will be to compel us to let Israel go it alone in any future confrontation with Communist power. They have persuaded enough of us that, no matter what happens to our friends, it must not ever again be considered any of our business. As soon as the would-be destroyers of Israel realise that, Miss Fonda and Dr Spock should be as honoured in Cairo as they were in Hanoi.

Now that we're no longer spending a million a minute in Indochina we're getting an equal number of ideas per minute as to what to do with the money. There is already a burgeoning campaign, led by liberal ecclesiastics, to rebuild all we destroyed in the last round of the bombing of Hanoi, beginning with the site of the Bach Lai hospital. However, since a SAM launching pad and a munitions factory were also part of that site, the question is this : would it be unsporting not to rebuild them, too ?

Unless a satisfactorily idealistic answer can be found, that campaign may die of embarrassment.

"Use the money to rebuild the ghettoes ! " is another bitter cry. Those who have spent billions trying that, are crying even more bitterly. In every ghetto in which we've erected multi-million dollar, publicly-subsidised housing, stand crumbling temples to our soft hearts and brains, stripped of every appurtenance that could be removed and sold, from light-bulbs to toilet-seats, abandoned, in terror, by all with the energy to flee, inhabited only by the helpless and aged, a killing-ground for young punks who rob, rape and murder them with such frequency that the accounts of the robbery, rape and murder of two women in their eighties in a single day in such projects, failed to make the front page of the New York Times or, indeed, the front section.

We dismissed with contempt the curmudgeons who, back in the 'sixties, warned us that those who get something for nothing regard it as worth nothing. Now that we've learned that, and have elected an administration that has, there is a way to dispose of all the money we no longer have to spend in Indochina, and that is, let those who earn it, keep it.

Now that the media can no longer belabour the administration for suppressing the freedom of the Vietcong, Dr Clay Whitehead, a White House advisor, has provided them with a cause just as good: the suppression of the freedom of the media.

The threatened medium is TV. To understand the issue, let me give you a short course in the arrangements, for TV in America. It is all (except inconsequential ' educational ' TV) commercial. Licences to operate TV stations are awarded free by the government, based on an undefined promise to "operate in the public interest." The fact that no TV station, in our history, has ever had its licence revoked for not operating in the public interest is due either to the government's horror of using its power, or the passion for public service of all American broadcasters since American broadcasting began.

There are between 500 and 600 local TV stations, all profitable. Each manufactures its own local news show. For "national news," news of the rest of the nation and the world outside, each subscribes to one of the national shows, manufactured in New York City, by the three networks. A ' network ' becomes one by owning six local stations, usually in our greatest, most profitable, cities. The profits from these six stations plus fees from hundreds of subscribing (or affiliated) stations, are immense enough to enable the networks to maintain huge studios, hire big name anchor men, famed correspondents abroad, and pay for the considerable costs of manufacturing national news shows.

Of the four anchor men (or principal commentators) on the three national TV news shows, Walter Cronkhite (CBS), John Chancellor (NBC) and Harry Reasoner (ABC) are liberals of long standing, and conviction. The most influential, Cronkhite, was, for a time, considered as a running mate by George McGovern. Only Howard K. Smith, who shares the ABC newscast with Harry Reasoner, is not a liberal. Nor is he a conservative. He alone is a TV journalist.

All the producers, without exception, of the three national TV news shows, are liberals. There is not, to my knowledge, a single writer, or correspondent, connected with any of the three, who is not a liberal. Yet this is not, as the Vice-President once charged, "a conspiracy." It is simply the honest conviction by those who govern the content of our three national TV news shows, that anyone who isn't a liberal is either an ignoramus or a bigot, and they sensibly will not hire that sort.

In an address to a journalistic society, Dr Whitehead suggested that local TV stations no longer accept, without question, anything the three networks manufacture and distribute, which are labelled ' news ' shows, but examine these products for journalistic shoddiness. Which is, clearly as possible, in the manufacture of news shows for a profit, as in the manufacture of new cars for a profit. And that manufacturers of shoddy news shows be as likely to have their licences recalled, as manufacturers of shoddy cars to have their cars recalled. Ralph Nader made precisely the same suggestion when he urged local automobile distributors not to accept any product manufactured by the big three in 'Detroit, without careful examination before they unloaded them on the public. For alerting local automobile distributors to protect the public, Ralph Nader was hailed by TV as a freedom fighter. When Dr Whitehead alerted local TV news show distributors to do the same thing, he was denounced, by TV, as a fascist.

The hell of it is that Dr Whitehead needn't have made that speech. The Ameri can public has, long since, demonstrated that it can protect itself. Although 53 per cent, by a recent poll, said they preferred to get their news from TV, that was a measurement of their indblence, not their trust. For a vastly larger percentage said they didn't believe what they saw on it. In the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention riots, the three national TV news shows moaned about the brutality of Mayor Daley's cops and slobbered over the nobility of "the kids." Every poll taken thereafter, however, showed the public overwhelmingly supporting the Mayor and his cops, and revolted by "the kids."

At the time of the Kent State tragedy, the national news shows were maudlin about the idealism of the students, wrung their hands over the savagery of the National Guard (many of them students, too) who were rushed in to protect the community from further idealistic burning and wrecking. Yet, by three to one, the public sorrowfully, but sternly, supported the National Guard.

No national TV news show has ever had a critical word to say about the compulsory transportation of the helpless, selected by race, known here as 'bussing.' No TV footage has ever been shown of its evils, except the evil of any community that objected to it. Yet, after years of that, four of every five whites, and two of every four blacks, are opposed to bussing. The solemnity of American commercial TV's claim that it alone, of all manufacturers of products to be sold for a profit, is incapable of shoddiness, is aweinspiring. It is cheering, however, to realise that most Americans, being a free and naturally sceptical people, know damn well they aren't.