It's Alive

HEADLINE of the month: "And they were all dead." The Boston Herald-American's five-column front-page headline over a five-column picture and story on the American Airlines crash Friday in Chicago.

Backcourt steal of the month: The Herald-American's luring away the Globe's columnist and editorial writer Ken Hartnett, to become city editor--the first such switch of a top Globe staffer in living memory.

Playmaking guard responsible for the headline and the steal: Herald-American gung ho editor Don Forst, late of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, where his reporters considered him the best editor in the country.

Forst's willingness to go for all the gusto can only be good news for Boston readers. Lacking competition from the heretofore mediocre Hearst paper, the Globe has become more and more complacent. Although the Globe boasts some of the best reporters in the country, notably Curtis Willkie in the Washington bureau, its overall editorial direction can only be described as laidback. While the Globe's Lazy-Boy-recliner-and-beer-can-with-TV-tuned-to-the-Red-Sox energy level may do wonders for its reporters' longevity and mid-career heart attack possibilities, Boston is the worse for it in terms of the hustled- and scrambled-for news story.

OTHER, better, newspapers don't really provide happy mediums between hustle and heart attacks, either, though. At the Washington Post, news reporters--especially on cityside--constantly battle in a cutthroat competition to get their stories on the front page, and consequently tend to go for the quickie scandal rather than the drawn-out drudgery of research into government processes and problems. At The New York Times, the game is total, Machiavellian office politics. Executive editor Abe Rosenthal sits like Jehovah on his throne, flashing thunderbolts from his fingertips at any lower-echelon staffer who incurs his disfavor. Former Crimson president Richard Meislin '75 snagged a Times job right out of college as Rosenthal's copyboy--bottom of the ladder that runs: copyboy-news clerk-reporter trainee-reporter--and rose like a Saturn V. rocket through the ranks. He now works as Albany burean chief, possibly the youngest bureau chief in the Times' history.

The ideal, of course, is a news staff totally motivated by their editor's enthusiasm and energy--the Spark-Plug syndrome rather than the Times' Carrot-and-Stick or the Post's Survival-of-the-Fittest. Don Forst is quick with his stick--he fired the Herald's Sunday magazine editor not long ago when the guy chose to spend a weekend with his family rather than fly down to the magazine's printers in Kentucky with a last-minute editorial change. But Forst's approach to Hartnett suggests a Champion Spark Plug in the making. According to Dave O'Brian's "Don't Quote Me..." column in the Boston Phoenix (O'Brian is the Boston media junkie's weekly fix), Forst told Hartnett, "Sure, go ahead. Stay where you are and in 10 years you'll be doing the same things you're doing now." One thing for sure, the Herald won't be doing the same things it used to.

The Next Saigon

THE REPORTING from southern Africa's hot spot, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, is serving up another object lesson in how biased the American media can be. The failing this time is the same one as always--almost total reliance on official sources of information. Americans reading of the recent elections in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe fell prey to the old New Hampshire Primary Gimmick--you predict your percentage of the vote, well below what your polls and organization are telling you in private, and when you beat the percentage, you've won. George McGovern didn't win the New Hampshire primary in 1972, nor did Eugene McCarthy in 1968, but they pulled down a higher percentage "than expected," and "won," at least in the eyes of the media. In Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, reporters let the Ian Smith regime do the predicting--they said 60 per cent turnout would be an endorsement of the process, and sure enough, when the turnout broke 60, bang! instant international legitimacy. Instant legitimacy, that is, in the eyes of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives in England, not to mention a majority of the U.S. Senate.

But Thatcher and the Senators were looking through the bottom halves of their bifocals. The American public couldn't see much either. Buried in the penultimate paragraphs of John Burns' stories in The New York Times, every once in a while, were descriptions of white farmers (who control most of the country's arable land) assembling their black workers and local villagers together in order to lecture them on the importance of voting. The farmers and the government would then provide "armed escorts" to the polls. The purpose of the escort service, of course, was to prevent those nasty Patriotic Front guerillas from messing with the democratic process. Burns and the wire services reporters made the escorts sound almost as benign as the Harvard Police's late-night drive-home service.

The reality in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, however, is something else again. Over 80 per cent of the country was and still is under martial law. Those escorts were at least as coercive as anything the Patriotic Front did to disrupt the elections. And beyond any coercion, the voting itself was form without content. Blacks did not get to vote on the constitution under which Biship Muzorewa will be taking power--that was drawn up by Ian Smith's regime and passed on by just the whites (5 per cent of the population). That constitution leaves control of the military, judiciary, and police in the hands of the whites, and guarantees that Muzorewa's government will not be able to restructure the country--or even pass anything Ian Smith doesn't want. The whites retained over a fourth of the seats in Parliament, as well as veto power over any constitutional changes. Plus, the whites elected their own representatives earlier this year, and got to vote again to add to Muzorewa's margin.

BURNS AND the wire services get these facts into most of their stories, but they don't explore the sordid details. Instead, they write amazingly sympathetic stories slanted toward the brave-whites-fighting-off-savage-hordes-in-darkest-Africa line. This spring, for instance, after the guerillas had shot down a Rhodesian Airways plane, Burns hopped the next flight and wrote about the whites gulping down the whiskey straight and nervously joking while the pilot did evasive maneuvers. Such brave folk!

Even more egregiously, Burns and the wires related verbatim the official claims from Salisbury that guerilla defections were mounting after the elections. Vietnam is not so long gone that no one remembers the body-counts of dead Viet-Cong. If those counts were correct, half of Asia's population fought and died for the NLF. This imbalance, this reliance on Salisbury officials to keep Americans informed, might be correct if the Times and other media sent correspondents to Mozambique and Zambia, to cover the war from the guerillas' side. But that's not likely--foreign correspondents cost too much money, and the Times is, after all, the newspaper of record, which is why it will keep on parroting the Salisbury Rag.