All the Handouts Fit to Print

To the editors of the New York Times, the story obviously seemed significant. It began with more than half a column on the front page and carried over to a full page inside. Written by Times Washington Bureau Chief Tom Wicker, the piece was based on a handout: a statement calling for a more liberalized U.S. policy toward Communist China, including eventual diplomatic recognition and admission to the United Nations. Wicker emphasized that the statement had been signed by "198 academic experts on China," all of whom belong to the Association for Asian Studies. Happy to have so many experts agreeing with its own position, the Times applauded in an editorial: "The statement on China by 198 Asian scholars--opposed by only 19 other members of the Association for Asian Studies--shows where the weight of informed American opinion lies."

Signers in Dispute. All of which goes to illustrate the danger of making too much of handouts. In a letter published by the Times last week, Wm. Theodore de Bary, a member of the Association for Asian Studies and Chairman of the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Columbia University, explained that the signers are only a fraction of the association's 3,374 members. "Since it is a policy of the Association not to take a stand or conduct a vote on political questions," wrote De Bary, "no person or group can claim to represent the membership. Signers of the statement must have been unaware such a construction would be put upon it by those presenting it to the Times."

The association's national secretary, L. A. Peter Gosling, associate professor of geography at the University of Michigan, was even blunter. Calling Wicker's article "factually inaccurate^" Gosling estimated that only one-third of the signers could be considered China experts. By paying $15-a-year dues, anyone who demonstrates an interest in Asia can join the association; members range from anthropologists to theologians to librarians. Moreover, charged Gosling, some of the signers do not belong to the association; nor was the entire membership contacted and given a chance to sign the paper. "It was disorganized," says Gosling. "They sent letters to people they knew who shared similar views, and these people sent the material on to others who generally were in agreement."

The drafters of the document--Harold Taylor, onetime president of Sarah Lawrence College, and Betty Goetz Lall, of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations--deny any such intent. As the leaders of the Manhattan-based National Research Council on Peace Strategy, which issues statements on foreign policy, they feel that they consulted enough China scholars on the wording of their paper, and that they circulated it sufficiently. No other U.S. newspaper, however, shared the Times's enthusiasm for the document. If they ran anything on it at all, most papers carried a much shorter Associated Press story that coupled the scholars' recommendations with similar ones made by Senator Fulbright. Even many of the papers that subscribe to the New York Times News Service ran the A.P. version.

Acute Scholaritis. "I and the New York Times," says Wicker, "thought and still think the document was a considerable contribution to debate on the subject." He attributed the complaints to what he calls the "China lobby." But the fact is that the criticism came from all quarters. In his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, David Nelson Rowe, political science professor at Yale, charged the Times with "at the very least a gross distortion of the meaning of the statistics. Such are the distortions of propagandistic journalism." The liberal Reporter magazine editorialized: "The Times built the release into major significance by giving it inordinate prominence and a largely spurious authority. This is not just an acute case of 'scholaritis'; this is irresponsible journalism."

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