Making the Unbelievable Believable

Newswatch

Was it the ingenuity of a press secretary, aggressive tactics by the police or self-restraint among press photographers that spared newspaper readers and television viewers the sight of the dead bodies of San Francisco Mayor George R. Moscone and City Councilman Harvey Milk? No: the coroner got there first and sealed up the rooms. Readers could be grateful nonetheless, so soon after being subjected in vivid detail to the carnage in Guyana.

After the first wave of social scientists, explaining how such cults can mesmerize their followers, come social scientists examining the degree of morbidity in press and public interest. More than a difference in numbers divides the killings in San Francisco and the 900 deaths in Guyana. Two public officials murdered by a disappointed office seeker may not be a common occurrence, but it is a credible one. Guyana needed more than reporters' descriptive words to establish the truth for readers. Only the gruesome photographs brought confirming proof of the astonishing numbers of the dead.

Dictators have always understood the accusatory power of photographs. The vast unphotographed domain of the Gulag archipelago became reality in Western minds only through the frenzied memory and meticulous detail of Solzhenitsyn. Reports of Hitler's death camps were repeatedly denied until photographers were able to fix forever in the mind the piles of corpses at Auschwitz and Dachau. Cambodia may have endured the crudest slaughter of a people since Hitler's time, but the evidence had to be pieced together from the individual accounts of fleeing Cambodians. The events they describe overlap, so that estimates of the dead vary widely and thus lack credibility. Without the witness of photographs in this age of the camera, the enormity of what has happened can only be guessed at and has yet to be comprehended by the rest of the world.

Your Pompous Honor. Chief Justice Warren Burger has no love for the press, and the press no love for him. The press thinks he imperfectly understands why it needs First Amendment freedoms and suspects him of carrying on a Nixonian vendetta against the press. Still, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the Chief Justice when reading a summary of an "investigation" of him in Jack Anderson's column"Our investigation turned up a number of disturbing facets of Burger's character, some previously reported and some not--but all ofwhich we confirmed. Put together, they reveal a complex, often contradictory individual: rigidly conservative, obsessively secretive, pompous, condescending, manipulative and possessed of a hair-trigger temper.

"Burger clearly does not understand what a free press is all about. . . " That should make a free press clearer to the Justice.

The Naked Truth. "Backstage with Esquire" is one of those columns about the magazine's contributors that seek to prove what trendy spotters its trend spotters are. Esquire carries the practice too far in its current issue, in trumpeting its cover story, "The Year of the Lusty Woman--It's All Right to Be a Sex Object Again." As whomped-up pieces go, it's relatively modest, confining its thesis only to a year, not to a decade, as in Tom Wolfe's overhyped Me Decade. The author is described as Judy Klemesrud, "an avowed feminist and veteran New York Times reporter." How wide the phenomenon of the lusty-again woman is, and how detached an observer of the trend Klemesrud is, gets called into question, however, when "Backstage with Esquire" goes on to note: "Klemesrud is sending out Christmas cards this season that bear a striking photograph of her lying face down on a fur rug, stark naked."

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