PRESS POISON. Do not swallow!" was a leftist poster slogan in the May 1968 French uprising. We Americans could well heed this warning. Newspaper owners and Voice of America broadcasters love to brag about this country's free, objective press. Meanwhile, news management--a genteel euphemism for lying--is often the order of the day.

The lies don't happen accidentally. Those who own and run newspapers, like most businessmen and bureaucrats, have a large stake in convincing Americans that challenges to capitalism are threats to our lives and freedoms. Publishers and editors don't need to deliberately lie or censor, although that does happen. Misinformation may be as natural as deciding that certain stories should stay on page 57 (or not run at all), and failing to use radical news sources while regularly printing the latest State Department press release. Status-quo bias is almost everywhere, from a rightist local Daily Monopoly up through the New York Times.

The press treatment of Cambodia since the fall of the Lon Nol regime last April is a prime example of news distortion. An editorial last summer in The New York Times, titled "Cambodia's Crime," summed up the official view of events there. It spoke of millions of people from Phnom Penh and other cities "forced by the Communists at gunpoint to walk into the countryside without organized provision for food, shelter, physical security, or medical care." It concluded that Cambodia "resembles a giant prison camp with the urban supporters of the former regime now being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor...the barbarous cruelty of the Khmer Rouge can be compared to Soviet extermination of the Kulaks or with the Gulag Archipalego." William Shawcross's article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books is more restrained, saying, "The Cambodians are suffering horribly under their new rulers. They have suffered every day of the last six years--ever since the beginning of one of the most destructive foreign policies the United States ever pursued." He, at least, connects Cambodia's travails to the Indochina War, an embarrassing event which the Times would rather forget.

This lurid interpretation of events in Cambodia seems designed to shock readers and increase their fear of socialism. But the Times editorial version of events is based on liberal amounts of prejudice and half-truths--they even forgot to read some of their own news coverage of Cambodia. Also, the Indochina Resource Center, a U.S. group, recently released an exhaustively-documented report, The Politics of Food: Starvation and Agricultural Revolution in Cambodia, which sheds more light on events in that country.

The U.S. press usually describes the evacuation of Phnom Penh as a vengeful, irrational act by the Khmer Rouge, designed mainly to subdue and redirect the population. But less biased observers say that, in fact, if the Communists had not evacuated Phnom Penh in April, many thousands would have died of cholera, plague and starvation. The city's pre-1970 peacetime population had been 600,000; by last April, it had been swelled by 3 million refugees from the war. The U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime had lost control of the whole countryside, so it depended completely on American food shipments. These were inadequate; the U.S. was continuing a policy described by the Government Accounting Office in 1971: "Not to become involved in the problem of civilian war victims in Cambodia." While the U.S. stinted on food, it provided Lon Nol's regime with 95 per cent of its total revenue--for guns, to keep the Reds out of the capital. So the food shortage worsened. Rations were only sixty per cent of normal human requirements. Prices soared and black marketeers prospered. Corruption was so severe that the Lon Nol regime could not administer a relief program with the food it did have. Death by starvation and epidemic became common by mid-April because of the collapse of the water supply, transportation, power, and medical care systems.

By contrast, in the Communist-controlled countryside, land reform and collectivization, water conservation and increased use of fertilizer had raised food production well above the hunger levels of 1970-1973, when these areas were under heavy U.S. bombing. There was enough extra food in the country for city residents, but the only way they could get it was to go where the food grew; there were too few trucks to carry the food into the capital. Other considerations, such as the Khmer Rouge's fear that the U.S. would bomb Phnom Penh off the map, only added to the urgency of the evacuation.

The evacuation itself does not deserve the Times' anathema of "death march," either. Most residents of Phnom Pehn had left rural homes because of the war; the Communists had planned for their return. Several U.S. reporters saw the march in progress as they traveled out of Cambodia in May, and said there was sufficient food for those on the road. Most evacuees walked, covering roughly 2.5 miles per day and many of the old and sick went by car or truck. People did die on the road, but not by the thousands as U.S. government sources said; most deaths were from cholera caught while in Phnom Penh.

The evacuation of the hospitals is more difficult to explain. Phnom Penh's hospitals had become grossly over-crowded pest-houses by mid-April; after the evacuation, the Communists did clean them and resume their operation with Cambodian doctors. The Khmer Rouge had developed a system of rudimentary clinics and hospitals in the countryside; evacuees may have gone to these. Whether or not the Khmer Rouge had won in April or not, the sick would have had a hard time, due to the general shortage of medicine and supplies for both sides in the civil war.

On the accusations that the Cambodian Communists have carried out mass murder since April, the observation made last May by Richard Boyle, combat reporter and eyewitness to the seizure Phnom Penh, still stands: "Stories of a bloodbath, as reported by other news agencies, cannot be verified and there is every indication that these accounts are lies." Proof of alleged executions usually comes from refugees in Thailand, who "knew" of such killings without having seen them. Many actively backed the Lon Nol government, and the Thais restrict access to refugee camps to some U.S. officials, who may steer journalists toward handpicked refugees. Until more foreigners enter Cambodia and bring back independent reports, events there will remain cloudy.

If reports of mass executions of Cambodians are true, why are many of them who lived in the West going home? Recently, according to the Guardian, seven planeloads of Cambodians left for that country from France, while in the U.S. on January 26,114 Cambodians publicly announced their desire to return. The radical press covered these news conferences in Philadelphia and Washington; the orthodox press blacked them out. Many of these people are ex-Lon Nol soldiers; the Cambodian government says that it welcomes such people back, if they are willing to work and to defend the country.

But is there any freedom in Cambodia? Ieng Sary was not joking last summer when he described Cambodia as a "giant workshop." After a devastating war in which a tenth of the population died and another tenth was wounded, the government seeks rapid reconstruction and industrialization. These policies do have support in the countryside; Times reporter Schanberg said "Although recent refugee reports from newly settled areas are almost uniformly dark, the villagers the Westerners met in long-organized districts tell of the advantages of the system. They said they were getting better education and eating better, and were immensely proud of their victory." Life is hard in Cambodia. Poverty, forced industrialization, the after effects of a brutal war alone would see to that.

Last May, liberal Times columnist Tom Wicker and conservative columnist William Safire agreed that socialism was cruel and against human nature. Safire damned socialism as "anti-city, anti-civilization, anti-freedom." But using the rigors of Cambodian socialism to warn Americans away from considering alternatives to capitalism here is dishonest; we face vastly different--and potentially far better--conditions for changing our economic system. But the press' treatment of Cambodia is no isolated instance; coverage of Allende's Chile, and of Portugal today would reveal similarly distorted coverage. Why? A.J. Liebling once said, "Freedom of the press is for those who own one." And that s the way it is for now.