Pasztor's Letter

REPORTING the news is a tricky business; not only are the possibilities for mistakes large, but the reward for an honest and conscientious job is often a complaint more bitter than any distortion could produce. The news does not always make its subject look good, and nobody is more hated than the messenger who brings news that is bad.

Below there appears a letter from Laszlo Pasztor '73, chairman of Harvard Young Americans for Freedom and co-chairman of Students for a Just Peace. An honest and conscientious newspaper receives many such letters. Some are justified and many contain some truth; many others are misleading and self-serving attempts to confuse readers about straightforward, factual stories. The usual policy is to publish, the letter with, at most, a modest reply, and to reply on the fairness of the coverage in question to convince readers of the truth.

But occasionally we receive a letter which is so outrageous, so self-serving, so contrary to fact that our patience fails, and being human, we must speak out. Pasztor's letter is a case in point.

Pasztor levels serious charges at the CRIMSON as a newspaper and at some specific members of its staff as reporters. First, he alleges that there is a "general CRIMSON policy of blatant distortion and outright falsification of news in its coverage of SJP activities," This charge is baseless and absurd. The CRIMSON has no policy toward SJP or any other group. Our reporters are free to report the truth as they see it.

This practice-which includes questioning and checking statements of spokesmen for student political groups-is apparently unsatisfactory to Pasztor and Arthur N. Waldron. In regard to two articles by Katharine L. Day, published on May 1 and 4, Pasztor expresses outrage that a reporter dared to report statements of persons which differed from Pasztor's account of them. Day's first article did report the two reasons cited by SJP for its lack of success in recruiting speakers. It attributed the reasons to SJP because none of their potential speakers made such a statement to the CRIMSON. She reported only what she felt she could be sure of a standard reporting procedure.

PASZTOR'S logic on the question of whether James Humes had agreed to speak at the second teach-in is somewhat convoluted. He suggests that Day should have believed the possible statements of an unnamed secretary about Humes' speaking schedule rather than the actual statement, made by telephone to her of Humes himself. We suggest to Pasztor that Humes would have known whether he was scheduled to fly to Boston to make a speech.

Pasztor's third point is an unpleasant one. Day heard him use the expression in question four separate times; each time, she clearly heard the word "nude," If Pasztor was saying "new," that cannot be helped; again, Day had no choice but to report what she heard. In any case, the phraseology is Pasztor's own. We did not invent it.

Pasztor's blithe allusion to unnamed "half-truths" in articles by David R. Caploe prior to the "Counter Teach-In" is particularly infuriating in light of the fact that it was only through an article published on March 26 by Caploe that members of the Harvard community learned that SJP had-inadvertently or otherwise-seriously misrepresented its program. In fact. the only major inaccuracies in Caploe's coverage came when he trusted SJP spokesmen in their statements that the Teach-In would be addressed by the South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States and the Royal Thai Ambassador to the United States, whose name was given as Anand Sandering Ham.

WE APOLOCIZE to our readers for this naivete. When we checked with the embassies, we learned that the South Vietnamese Ambassador had never intended to speak; indeed, we were told by his appointment secretary that she had told Pasztor at the beginning of that week that the Ambassador would not appear. Checking further, we learned that the Royal Thai Ambassador to the United States had no knowledge of the Teach-In, and that his name did not resemble Anand Sandering Ham; later we learned that the scheduled speaker was Anand Panyarachun, Royal Thai Ambassador to Canada. And it is worth noting that Pasztor stuck to his statements that the South Vietnamese Ambassador would appear until Caploe told him of his conversations with the Embassy, and only then announced that the actual speaker would be Nguyen Hean, a minor official in the Embassy. We leave it to the reader to determine whom to believe in this exchange.

In his attack on an article by Evan W. Thomas published May 7, Pasztor substantially misrepresents what was reported. Thomas's article states that Pasztor had filed charges with Dean Dunlop against a University professor whom he would not name. Thomas reported this because Pasztor told him he had done so in a telephone interview on the afternoon of May 5. Pasztor now claims that we reported that he had charged a certain professor. We did not, and he knows it. Pasztor now states that he was not the complainant. But we did not report that he was a complainant against a named Faculty member; if that is his allegation, it is groundless. We reported what he told Thomas. We stand by that report.

PASZTOR'S attacks on Jeff Magalif's coverage of the CRR are equally unwarranted. His opinion is not shared by two graduate students who have prosecuted students charged by SJP-who have told Magalif that they thought the coverage was fair. In response to the only specific charge which Pasztor makes, Magalif states that he reported on the testimony that personal animosity existed between Pasztor and the defendant because a witness gave such testimony. He did not report that there was "lengthy film evidence which conclusively showed the defendant disrupting" because the film evidence did not show it. Again, the CRIMSON stands behind its reportage.

Pasztor's grandiose statement that he will no longer give news stories to certain reporters is an attempt to dictate our coverage. We reject it. We will continue to assign reporters to stories as we see fit, not according to Pasztor's whims.

Lastly, we are alarmed by the totalitarian tone of Pasztor's letter. Pasztor was angered by Caploe's reporting of the facts. He was further angered by the use of a standard reporting ploy to gain more information than he chose to give us. He claims to have issued us a "warning." We never received his "warning," and we dismiss it. We believe in our reporting, and no self-appointed censor will intimidate us into altering it. SJP has raised the issue of free speech in defense of some dubious propositions; one of them is that a newspaper is attacking their freedoms by refusing to allow them to censor the news. If we impinged upon Pasztor's freedoms to proclaim that the South Vietnamese Ambassador would speak at his Teach-in, we do not apologize. It was unavoidable.

The CRIMSON will continue to attempt to give SJP, and all groups about whom we write, fair and complete coverage. We may succeed more at some times than at others; no newspaper can claim total objectivity. On the whole, we are proud of our coverage of SJP, and we do not propose to suffer silently a pompous lecture by Pasztor. SJP is the group which requested that Students for a Democratic Society, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Radcliffe-Harvard Liberation Alliance be banned from using University facilities because of the role played by some of their members in the disruption of the Teach-in. It is inconceivable to us that this group now presumes to instruct the Harvard community on freedom of speech and freedom of the press.