Few works of journalism can claim the label definitive. But to many viewers and critics, PBS's 13-part series Viet Nam: A Television History, first telecast in the fall of 1983, seemed a valid contender for the title. Scrupulously researched, the $5.6 million project recounted the complex history of the war with admirable thoroughness and dispassion. The series was widely praised as a comprehensive and balanced piece of work, and it won a host of major journalism awards, including six Emmys.
This week, however, the series will come under attack on the very network that gave it life. PBS, in an unusual move, will run an hour-long rebuttal produced by Accuracy in Media, the conservative group dedicated to exposing "liberal bias" in print and on television. The AIM film is the centerpiece of a two-hour Inside Story special that includes a brief history of the PBS series, an examination of AIM's major charges and a 22-minute panel discussion of the issue. The segment is moderated by Harvard Law Professor Arthur Miller and involves historians, journalists and representatives from both AIM and the Viet Nam series. Behind the debate over Viet Nam, however, lies a more immediate question of journalistic responsibility: Is public TV setting a dangerous precedent by broadcasting the reply of an openly partisan group to one of its programs?
AIM's rebuttal is less polished and sophisticated than most network documentaries. Except for an ultrasmooth on-camera host, Charlton Heston, the program is rather dry and technically clumsy. Many of its charges seem directed less at the Viet Nam series than at general policies and attitudes that, in AIM's view, contributed to the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam. The program exhumes, for example, the old conservative charge that the media misled the nation about the 1968 Tet offensive and resurrects news footage of a smiling Jane Fonda visiting North Viet Nam, accompanied by mocking music.
Yet the AIM program cannot be completely dismissed. It has marshaled its own cadre of authorities to help make a case that the Viet Nam series, among other things, inaccurately portrayed North Vietnamese Leader Ho Chi Minh as a benign nationalist rather than a ruthless Communist; denigrated the South Vietnamese government and people; overstated the extent of drug abuse and morale problems among U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam; and underplayed the brutality of the Communist regimes that took over in Southeast Asia after the U.S. departure. The Inside Story analysis lends credence to some of these complaints, though it also points out several factual errors and oversimplifications in the AIM program.
Is the exercise worthwhile, or will it start an ominous trend? The arguments are raging in broadcasting corridors. Though TV networks in recent years have increasingly sought ways to accommodate viewer feedback, they have traditionally drawn the line at turning over airtime to programs produced by outsiders. "Allowing your facility to be used for such a pointed attack from a particular ideological point of view seems to me bad journalism and bad broadcasting," says NBC Senior News Commentator John Chancellor. "It has to say to a lot of people who are watching, 'Basically, we were wrong.' "