The First Amendment; William Worthy

The following program is made possible in part by a grant from the courier corporation of Lowell Massachusetts. WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. Now presents the First Amendment and a free people. An examination of civil liberties and the media in the 1970s. And now here is the director of the Institute for democratic communication Dr. Bernard Ruben. Welcome to another edition of The First Amendment and a free people. I'm absolutely delighted to tell you that our guest today is Mr. William Worthy who is visiting professor at Boston University. And joining me as co-host today is another professor at Boston University School of Public communication. Jim Higgins William worthy is interesting on this particular program because very recently we had

Dean Goian of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy who was a first American ambassador to South Vietnam. William worthy was our first United States correspondent in North Vietnam in 1964 and 65. This is rather typical of what. Bill Worthy has done since he graduated from Bates College. He's been an innovative journalist largely associated most of the time with the Baltimore Afro-American at least since 1951 among other things that you should know about he was one of the first people in China in 1957 defying a State Department ban because he felt that that was not in the best interests of the American peoples. Information needs. Secondly he went between 60 and 61 for four trips to Cuba. And as I said was the first correspondent to come from the United States to get into North Vietnam. He's lectured everywhere he's been an

even fellow or has been awarded accolades by the Boston press club the Capitol press club Lincoln University and other places. Now before I get into anything else let me just say that Bill. You have seen foreign policy from the journalists point of view for a long time and you have tried to get around official restrictions as to what a journalist can cover. Let me just throw this first question right at you. What's the situation today in terms of what the journalist needs to have as basic requirements for his coverage. Well if you were to use a college student as a launching point somebody who might be interested in going into the field of journalism I think a broad liberal arts background is essential. Increasingly so and a very good grasp of

the third world realities in the world of 976. I think if you don't understand the link as Langston Hughes would put it once put it between a Roxbury and a and then Goler and Cuba and Vietnam. Your view is somewhat askew here let me let me just get in with a question on that because this is something Bill and I used to talk about some years ago when I wrote for a newspaper which I had something to do with in Pennsylvania called the Yorkers that and daily and then conversations with Bill and also with young reporters there. We used to talk about the fact that the advent of nuclear energy that is the possibility of unleashing nuclear energy had really changed transformed the world. And that also you had a situation in which

technologically you could begin to feed clothe house and provide food comforts everybody on the face of the earth. Technologically Bill and I used to talk about this this is possible. The third thing and this is I suppose the thing that Bill is getting at is that what you are what the era in which we're living is the era in which the colonial empires in the third world in Asia Africa and Latin America are breaking apart. And there seems to be have been and this is one reason I know you went to China to Vietnam to Cuba seems to be a look let me put it just this way a reluctance on the part of the United States government to have the people of the United States let alone the students of the United States come to realize what is happening what kind of process is happening on these three continents reversing a situation of three or four hundred years. And the United States attempting to in many in many parts of the world maintain that colonial situation historian will start and when said to me 10 years ago down at Atlanta University the United States is very much in position of

pre-civil war slave ocracy determined to stand to hold on no matter what the cost in violence. And of course it's a futile position. Well you know when you went first to China and Cuba. There was a State Department ongoing racially you know passport couldn't be used for going into those countries. I'm not sure that I remember correctly but I think you were sick by coincidence as you got off a boat to Cuba and so on and you cross one of those obvious sickness Yes you can live to the right moment. You you had a trip across the bridge from Hong Kong was it into China. The State Department wanted to get you for defying the bend but it was the world of journalism that came to your defense. More in the trying a case than in the Cuban war on the China get what you want your time your last part was lifted in the china case was right and there'd been sufficient passage of time from the height of the

McCarthy period in the height of the outrage over the defeated trunk I shuk and the sufficient passage of time since you know the Korean War so that passions of China had cooled. But in the case and I think that accounts for the support that I did get from much of the US press in the case of Cuba we were still in the midst of the hysteria. I remember Edward P. Morgan once reporting on his ABC News program that on a visit to Florida in the early 60s he was astounded to find out the people in Florida as a result of the generated artificially generated hysteria. I actually believe the keeper was getting ready to invade the United States. People with 8 million people getting ready to invade the United States less than 1 million at that time I am. And so the press reflected that and I had relatively little press support on the Cuba passport case. I don't know the principle was exactly the same once you in China for not only the

Afro-American UN as an independent journalist but also for CBS. Yes it was a curious relationship. He had done work for CBS News in Soviet Union Eastern Europe and Africa over the previous two years but when the chance to go to China came up they were so scared that it was understood that once I arrived there are broadcasting tapes and film that you sent back would be used but there was nothing by way of travel expenses or anything so what were they scared of them. Their own shadow. The wealth you get the more scared you get. I think it's a basic rule either for individuals or institutions. In other words they were scared of the government prohibition right. Yeah. Whereas any administration needs a network more than a network needs an administration. But I'd like to ask you about the third world comment that you made obviously the third world is very very very important very little news is given to the American people.

Most countries in the world most of the news concerns the industrialized Japan and Western Europe maybe some on the Soviet Union of a very little. That's why the countries subjected to so many shocks in the PRI this country in the past we had the State Department putting certain criteria that journalists had to before they travel. Now you know you always by we I mean the lawyers and Civil Liberties Union who defended me and myself you know that travel control stock control and intellectual control this was our basic per what's the what's the major barrier today is it the economics of gathering news or is it the lack of interest of the journalists themselves the journalist organizations the newspapers the networks and so on. Why don't we get more news. Well. I think you have to start from the realization that the news industry is a commercial business and its whole operations are geared to

the generation of profit presumably given the state of U.S. consciousness political consciousness awareness. Presumably the judgments are made of the top journalistic levels of News Asia or Africa and Latin America. Let alone domestic ghettos don't generate profit news from those areas does not generate profits and the consequences of that ignorance bad judgment. Illusions delusions. There's also there's also another factor you know Bill I think and that is a what I would call a kind of a a loosely knit cohesion a collaboration between the news agencies and and government for example in the latest. You know ghost playing playing footsie. Yeah late latest disturbances in the movement in Angola. I read stories by respected correspondents of the dateline Washington giving details all kinds of repartee

about the Angola. So it's partly it's cheaper to do it that way as you point out. But it also has to do with following an official line. Right. How many stories were written out of Saigon following a press conference called by our military or the South Vietnamese military without the correspondent actually setting foot from his hotel room or the coffee shop or something. I know it's it's a it's really a colonial mentality at work tied in with a business and overriding concern for business profits. Now also what about I don't know if you knew a man by the name of clay I believe it was. I'm not sure of the first name but he died in an airplane crash covering Africa. One of the networks about 10 years ago. And whenever you hear the name on the radio you know there will be a report from somewhere in Africa. I thought it was absurd that one man should be covering the whole of Africa. But it hasn't changed very much has it for the net.

No you know. And there's another factor particularly when it involves so-called police actions or colonial type wars as in Indochina. Way back at a conference in Rangoon in the early 50s I heard a man named Cher arrear who had been prime minister of Indonesia right after World War 2 right after independence came to Indonesia say that it was traditional in the colonies. In this case in the nature of that call anybody was true in India Burma Indochina French British or the colonies that the people in the metropolitan country. In other words in London and Paris and the Hague in Madrid and Lisbon in Rome when Italy had called me this week in Berlin when Germany had colonies and now in the United States. It's traditional that the people in the metropolitan country are kept in

ignorance about the turmoil in the colonies and in Colonial areas. It's sort of built in you don't you not look for a conspiracy theory or an active conspiracy. It's built into the system in the Times of London correspondent. I've said this many times to students students and to lecture audiences. The Times of London correspondents in a British colony such as India was almost as important as the colonial governor. You could say the colonial governor was at the top. The Anglican bishop was a close second in The Times of London correspondent was a close third and the Times of London correspondent had to tell the people back in England a little bit more than a colonial governor but not substantively more. And the same thing. I think it broadly applies today that the wire services in this country or nationalistic outfits

Time magazine Newsweek and even The New York Times Christian Science Monitor they have their nationalistic biases and I don't think they are in the networks. I don't think they adequately inform the people united states what is going on in the spheres of influence that the US has all over the world. And as I said earlier the result is disaster. Well it's not only lack of information as misinformation as you know very well from reading the Pike Report. Where were prominent journalists and non prominent journalists of the United States have not been have been abroad have been in foreign countries but not reporting accurately but reporting what the CIA asked them to report or reporting directly to the CIA only thing that you can say for distorted information like the report however terrible is when news is distorted or created when the story comes out if it does come out this story can be set right. The facts can be arrived at. Possibly but there is no coverage when

there is ignorance. There is just no there is no coming back at it and. I was curious about that part of the. The second time you talked about the Third World you mention the ghettos. Now that that's not overseas but but right at home and in large measure I mean Roxbury and Cuba for example why doesn't the structure of the press cover the ghettos as not not enough to say that this interest for the profit motive there must be something more than that. It's a bias that doctor I don't like Gulliver and b you never studies department is very much interested in directing University's attention to and is trying to get funds for a joint degree program linking the journalism to pop and the Afro-American Studies department so that the middle class white middle class student that comes out of a generalist department such as Boston University emerges with some degree even lighten that about

urban you know city conditions. And will not be a case or cases of the blind leading the blind. If you take just thinking thinking out of my own classes it be you over the last couple years. If you take somebody from Ohio or elsewhere in middle America and put them in urban journalism schools such as it be you and give them the proper professional training at the end of the training period it doesn't mean that they have any political social insights necessarily And that's that's on the reportorial level. Again I think that the average editor the average publisher doesn't see this is something that millions of his daily readers or hundreds of thousands of his daily readers is particularly interested know the I'm the average editor or publisher of being just what you described a few minutes ago as white middle class and you know it is.

Which is not very much little than the student's own memory limits limits his or her perspective and vision for example the explosions the rebellions in the ghettos in Watts in Detroit I was a little proud of absolutely out of nowhere turmoil in the colonies had not been reported. I remember a government official reporting in the late sixties in March do you want to have the government reporting to group of us who were hating departments as to what was going on. Cambridge Massachusetts with a student and I had only recently arrived from the environs of Cambridge Massachusetts and I knew that these people were of a certain type at certain social interest college students all kinds of cars too. But he was preaching revolution too as he said you should have been there on the square you should have heard what they said You should've seen the fire in their eyes and I was listening to something that would have done well by Jules Verne. When he was writing some of his fantasies and yet most of the people listening accepted it as gospel. Now

to break the gospel of ignorance. You said the white middle class phrase loss must be must be better trained socially. What about. People from the Third World. What can we do to make the First Amendment come along. Well Jim and I Jim Hagen than I ever talked about this overall situation. Any number of times over the last few years and before I get into that let me just throw in a beautiful couplet from one of Langston Hughes his poems he wrote and I think in 1952 you find of the American scholar for that you know it's called consider me. And in it he has this working class resident saying can you forgive me what I lack. Black caught in the crack that splits the world into from China to Alabama via Lenox Avenue. It's beautiful political phrase which in 1000 uses writings are full of beautiful political insights.

The I think that given the state of apathy in this country and if it applied more than just to the campuses it applies even to people who are desperately out of work and desperately in need of money to pay their rent desperately in need of money to pay for food. The apathy seems to be all pervasive and it obviously is not going to last forever. But I. Given I've been saying Jamaicans and I've been saying that the real blows to the American system the US system over the next period will probably continue to be from third world countries in Asia or Africa in Latin America and Goa. It's a most recent example and it means the drying up of a narrowing down of the shriveling up I guess is about best word of the US influence worldwide. And I think Henry Kissinger for all his many sins seems to be aware of it.

And that The People United States not being in a particular rebellious mood right now. And that includes people in the inner cities are going to be following along X years from now in the trail of the end goals of Vietnam's the Cubas. As the economy here becomes more and more unable to serve the domestic needs of the people I'm trying to understand you have a pessimistic view based upon what you see you know is this Is this what you're saying. Well I know there's a great deal organizing going on in this country on all kinds of neighborhood community issues. This has been true it began in the mid 60s and it's intensified. And yet this is not being reported after a while of the bill. I meant to say Ruben a question that the white community and neighborhood issues are not covered by the mass media to any

extent you can have ethnic issues of an Italian nature a Greek nature or Puerto Rican nature or in the metropolitan press the metropolitan daily radio television simply do not get it is something wrong with the way news is covered I've often felt that if we had pardon the phrase some sort of a systems analysis approach to the news rather than to what is happening and we divided the news that is take for Archie's 12 categories or seven categories as you describe Systems Analysis theory economics health and human issues there might be issues and subjects and then editors and journalists would say you know nine thousand nine hundred seventy seven is going to start on January 1 and on December 30 first. Let us cover all of these issues somehow and by February 1 I want my first report on what issues we have failed to cover which we know are stories. Is it possible or is this too esoteric a comprehension of what the news business might be. Well I think it would certainly contribute greatly to improve coverage

if you asked me if I think it's realistic at this stage. Short of a tremendous popular pressure on the media I don't think so. Is it possible for anybody to publish a newspaper or run a radio station on that basis I'm talking about single units now on a profit making basis. Yes. I really don't know. I really don't know. What do you think. Well I think it might be possible. I think it might. Well the paper that I talked to today that I worked for for some years we we paid our way and. And we covered things from almost from the point of view that you are a lab orating we covered issues we had what we call topical beats rather than just accidental beats and I suppose most newspapers do you know they have education reporters welfare reporters and so forth and so on. But you're quite correct that they don't that they don't really define these issues and people report on them on an on a let's say a day to day news basis they all do features once in a while as I suppose this is one reason Bill Whether

years has kept himself has maintained himself as an independent reporter over the years rather than getting involved in a in the kind of you know institutional complex that the that the press consists business. I think that's partly true but let me since time is beginning. Let me make mention a couple of things that I think might put everything we've been trying to say in perspective. Back around 1930. In other words a decade before the war in Asia. The second world war a young revolutionary in uneasier who later became president Sukarno made a famous statement famous in Asia not famous the United States. He said that Vietnam and Indonesia are Western imperialism Zz two weakest links. Obviously the first part of that had been born out of Vietnam. One of the two weakest links we have yet to see the fulfillment of

his I think accurate prophecy that Indonesia is the second of the two weakest links and he could have added he could have added to Cuba was yet the third weakest link. I suppose in the intervening 46 years the American people had really been aware of the fact that this was an improved system was not destined to last forever that it was going to break down. But it did have its weaknesses inherent weaknesses as any repressive exploitative system does. And suppose our news coverage had been good to be to that unfolding story instead of to be all good theater theory whereby we had first tried to make goat the American press much of American prose was somebody's American press first try to make Hoshi Minow to be another Hitler which obviously was not a sustainable position. And he was and I don't mean he was an admirer at least of the origins of the United States right. Yeah. And we're back in 1921. Van Wyck Brooks said Few Americans know and here I'm reading. Few Americans know even

today really know. I mean apprehend that America is an empire with all the paraphernalia or imperialism. Now that was 54 years ago 55 years ago. Suppose our educational system in the US press in the intervening a half century had really been educating the people the United States the fact that we are an empire and that US America was aligning empire right rapidly declining rapidly declining abroad. I mean declining abroad in a rapid more rapid rate than deteriorating within but the deterioration within is obvious to all with eyes to see in them. How different the whole world outlook would be if the press had done this kind of educational job. But it's not in its nature given the profit making motive yet the whole the world outlook of the people of the United States is we're not talking about that we haven't been led into a Vietnam War. Yes I could never have been led into a Korean War. I mean look at Korea now about ready to explode again and nothing has been resolved ever since United States came to its rescue in the

post-war rescue of South Korea one dictator after another in the post-World War Two period. You don't see much chance for nations of the of the true American spirit of the Bill of Rights and some some evangelical quality coming into the picture. I think that the Jeffersonian strain is still strong in the United States. I think it's going to be put to a verse if you had to test over the next decade. Because the economic deterioration is going to encourage a repressive strain which is the the peril strain in the US makeup and US history. But I don't think the Jeffersonian libertarian strain is dead. If I did I guess I'd move out of the country. Yeah no I would agree with that but I'd like to also point out you know I was a long as were talking on an optimistic note. I know we would but yeah. Well I think at this moment we are that what happened in the Vietnam the consequences of Vietnam were learned somehow because what happened in Vietnam was impossible to achieve in Angola.

Right there was a beautiful cartoon in the Muslim paper of Mohammed speaks in the mid-60s which cited many kinds of audiences. It shows a white American sergeant reporting to a. Superior officer he salutes and says. Total of nine enemy kilts or five Vietcong and four of our own negroes. And that tells the story that I've been trying to get across in this last half hour. William Whitley We appreciate your telling us this story it's a very insightful story one that causes much reflection and really a kind of reflection that you have to do you must take time out from other things to think about some of these thoughts that you've given to us. I want to thank you very sincerely you know. Also I want to thank my co-host James Higgins for joining us on this edition of The First Amendment and a free people.

WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University has presented the First Amendment and a free people. An examination of the media and civil liberties in the 1970s. This program was recorded in the studios of WGBH Boston and was made possible in part by a grant from the courier corporation of Lowell Massachusetts.