Fair Play: CBS, General Westmoreland, and How a Television Documentary Went Wrong. - book reviews

National Review, May 5, 1989 by Benjamin Hart

Fair Play: CBS, General Westmoreland and How a Television Documentary Went Wrong, by Burton Benjamin (Harper & Row, 218 pp., $17.95)

SEVEN YEARS AGO CBS aired the now infamous documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," which resulted in a $120-million lawsuit against the network by General William Westmoreland. Following a cover story in TV Guide calling the documentary a "smear," the heavies at CBS commissioned their colleague Burton Benjamin, a former director of CBS News, to do an internal investigation and find out if TV Guide's charges were true. The result was Fair Play, in which, apart from a few quibbies, Benjamin supports the TV Guide assessment. His book is not at all tbe sort of institutional puff-piece one might expect from someone who has invested thirty years of his life in the network. Benjamin concludes that the program's thesis-that General Westmoreland had been part conspiracy" to downgrade the CIA's estimates of enemy troop strength in order to give the impression that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam-was not proven. There were, says Benjamin, honest disagreements about the strength of the enemy forces. Moreover, in its zealous attempt to make its case, CBS News grievously compromised its own journalistic standards. For example, CBS paid $25,000 to a program consultant who for 14 years had been engaged in a fanatical crusade against Westmoreland; what's more, the program's producer, George Crile, knew it. The paid consultant even had an opportunity to rehearse his answers to softball interview questions, while General Westmoreland was given no such opportunity. CBS grilled Westmoreland with prosecutorial zeal and omitted testimony buttressing his points. CBS also pulled quotes out of context in order to imply that Westmoreland knew about a meeting that was crucial to proving the program's conspiracy theory a meeting, it turned out, that Westmoreland knew nothing about. Westmoreland did not win his libel suit, because he is a public figure and, therefore, would have had to prove not just that the program was shoddy, unfair, or even inaccurate, but also that these defects stemmed from actual "malice." However, as Benjamin points out, even though CBS avoided losing the lawsuit, it nonetheless lost plenty of credibility. Benjamin himself is refreshingly non-ideological -an old-style newsman with no political axe to grind, genuinely concerned about balance, fairness, and accuracy. He implicitly raises important questions about the post-Watergate practice of thesis journalism, in which the reporter hunts for facts to confirm his preconceived theory, and rejects facts that don't. Regrettably, CBS News seems to have learned little from tbe Westmoreland affair or from Benjamin's damaging investigation. George Crile, the man most responsible for the notorious documentary, is still a producer at CBS, working with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.