If they gave an award for The Most Outrageous Right-Wing Column of 2006, a strong contender for the trophy would be E. Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas City Star.
On Dec. 10, he wrote a column that started out to be one of those mea culpa columns wherein he admits that his incessant cheerleading for the Iraq Civil War may have been just a tad, um, you know, like -- wrong.
Instead, he proceeds to defend the war and claim that American journalists want America to lose in Iraq and tries to prove it by slandering an entire group of his own colleagues -- claiming that when he worked at the Dallas bureau of UPI the office erupted in cheers when a bulletin came across reporting the fall of Saigon in April 1975.
So McClanahan turns a Mea Culpa column into a Maxima Culpa column -- and quite possibly becomes the first author of such a column to be corrected by his own paper.
Here is what McClanahan wrote on Dec. 10:
One sunny day in April, bells started ringing from the dozens of printers scattered around the room. We knew it was an item with "flash" priority, which carries 10 bells. I looked down. A printer tapped out: "Saigon falls." What happened next was astonishing. Many of my colleagues, young journalists who had come of age politically
during the heyday of the anti-war movement, stood up and
cheered. Oh, goodie. The United States has lost a war. Many were my
friends, but the scene left me cold.
Not surprisingly, McClanahan's memory of events was called into question by former UPI staffers not amused at having their professionalism and patriotism trashed.
One, Thomas Roty, pointed out that when the bulleting about the fall of Saigon moved on the UPI wire, it would have been night in Dallas -- hardly the sunny day McClanahan remembered.
The indicated morning signoff times (on April 30, 1975) were those in Saigon. Because of uncertainty about whether South Vietnam observed Daylight Saving Time or not, it is unclear whether the time difference with Dallas was ten hours or eleven. Regardless, that flash would have moved around 8:30 or 9:30 PM Central Saving Time. The sun would have had to set very late in Dallas that evening to conform to Mr. McClanahan's account.
Further, well-known "downhold" UPI staffing policies would have normally
precluded the presence of "many" people there at that hour.The flash was sent by the "LD" in the initials ... Leon Daniel, UPI's veteran foreign and war correspondent and a Marine veteran of the Korean War. Bureau Manager Dawson and reporter Paul Vogle (the "PDV" initials) were both Army veterans of Vietnam, who stayed on there as civilian journalists. They all risked life and limb to report that piece of world history .. and all three stayed behind after the North Vietnamese takeover to continue to do so until the Hanoi authorities ordered them to leave. Dawson was the last American war reporter in Saigon.
Their colleagues the world over were busily engaged in transmitting their
dispatches to UPI's thousands of newspaper and broadcast clients and
gathering related local information, not in acting like stadium demonstrators. Just as UPI's famed Dallas bureau did twelve years earlier in the agency's Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the John F. Kennedy assassination.For Mr. McClanahan to assert what he does is to impugn at least the
professionalism, if not the patriotism, of his 1975 Dallas colleagues and
by extension, others then at UPI and now at other media organizations.
Roty requested an apology from McClanahan. He didn't get it, but he did get a correction.
A Dec. 10 column by E. Thomas McClanahan based on personal recollections from 31 years ago misstated a newsroom scene at the Dallas UPI bureau. The 1975 news "flash" on the fall of Saigon read "Saigon government surrenders" and moved at night, not on a "sunny day in April." Although the column said "many" cheered in the bureau, at that time of the evening the staff would have dwindled to only a handful.
Another former UPI staffer, Jerry McGinn, wrote an open letter to McClanahan:
And you, I predict, will get busy, soon, I suspect, latching onto another topic, or notion, and getting it wrong, and then reconciling with a cheap shot at someone else you likely will continue to misunderstand.
But it's not too late for you. You could do something useful.
You could latch onto the real victims of this war and deal with their stories. They will be limping past your office, panhandling in the street, limping to and fro and their parents and spouses will be mourning their lives for generations to come.
Bring them back or don't let them pass, like your mea culpa piece. Write about them. Meet their widows and kids
Don't let US forget them, their sacrifices. If you do that as best you can,
and never let go of the real long term effects of this cause you so wrongly beat the drum for, maybe you can really atone for the wrong you have wrought on your readers and me. And the reporters and writers in UPI Dallas, too.
Something tells me that instead of learning a valuable lesson, Mr. McClanahan will just chalk all this up to the vast liberal media conspiracy to ensure America's defeat.
--By Quaoar
