Delayed Replay

"What follows," said Walter Cronkite two-thirds of the way through a regular newscast last week, "is unusual for the CBS Evening News." Indeed it was. For the rest of the program was given over to an 8 min. 40 sec. report on the accuracy of a 1 min. 50 sec. news item that was telecast last November.

The original film was of combat at Bau Me. Though hardly another My Lai, the action included one gruesome incident. A South Vietnamese soldier pulled a knife from the side of a prostrate prisoner and then plunged it back into his bare stomach. Said Cronkite: "For reasons not entirely clear, the White House has engaged in an undercover campaign to discredit CBS News by alleging that the story was faked. This has been done by prompting receptive reporters and columnists to publish White House and Pentagon suspicions."

Specifically, CBS was upset by a story in the Des Moines Register and a Jack Anderson column syndicated in 620 papers. The Register is the old paper of Presidential Aide Clark Mollenhoff, but it seems that he did not prompt the Register on this matter. In fact, it may have been the other way round. After the Register quoted Pentagon sources to cast doubt on the Bau Me item, Mollenhoff wrote a memo lumping it with other alleged CBS News indiscretions. The memo was circulated around the White House and leaked to Anderson.

CBS replayed the Bau Me item last week, adding stop action, closeups and further background to refute Pentagon suggestions that supporting helicopters were not American, that the South Vietnamese troops were merely on a training exercise and that the prisoner may have been dead when stabbed. To debunk the last charge, CBS produced the knife wielder, Sergeant Nguyen Van Mot of the South Vietnamese Regional Forces, who claimed that he had stabbed the prisoner in self-defense.

Cronkite summed up: "We broadcast the original story in the belief it told something about the nature of the war in Viet Nam. What has happened since then tells something about the Government and its relations with news media which carry stories the Government finds disagreeable."

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