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Media
Murder: by Steven Yates
Are today’s media, in some sense, evil? No doubt this is a rather general question, but Death by Journalism? One Teacher’s Fateful Encounter With Political Correctness definitely leaves that kind of impression. Not only does this book pick up where Bernard Goldberg’s Bias left off, it shows that biased reporting and blatant disregard for the truth are hardly limited to highly visible media outlets in New York and Washington, DC. The award-winning author, North Carolina native Jerry Bledsoe, is best known for true-crime bestsellers such as Bitter Blood and Blood Games. He has also penned Just Folks: Visitin’ With Carolina People, North Carolina Curiosities: Guide to Outlandish Things to See and Do in North Carolina and Blue Horizons: Faces and Places From a Bicycle Journey Along the Blue Ridge Parkway. His first venture into the treacherous waters of political correctness is a thoroughly documented account of a sequence of events that began in late 1998 in north central North Carolina, in Randolph and Guilford Counties. What happened to one man and to the small community college where he taught a history course that fall ought to worry anyone concerned about the power of the press in an age that has largely dispensed with the concept of truth. Rhonda Winters, director of Randolph Community College’s Archdale branch campus not far from Greensboro, had obtained approval for an adult-education, community outreach course on North Carolina’s role in the War Between the States. When she went in search of a qualified instructor, her attention soon focused on a 60-year-old Guilford County native named Jack Perdue. Perdue already had a track record at the college from having taught classes in real estate appraisal. Although real estate was his livelihood, history was his passion. Jack Perdue was in fact a living, breathing treasure chest of regional history. A historical preservationist and genealogist, he had written monographs on local historic sites and brochures on how people could trace their ancestry to find out if they had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. This and his preservation work had drawn him into the local Sons of Confederate Veterans camp in 1992, where he eventually became an officer. Because regional history was a calling, his integrity as a historian was extremely important to him. The course entitled "North Carolina History: Our Role in the War for Southern Independence" would meet every Thursday for two and a half hours per session for ten weeks, and be co-sponsored by the local SCV. The $40-per-student cost would pay for the course; no "public" money would be involved. Perdue accepted the offer and went to work with great enthusiasm. He involved a number of other historians including other SCV members who would guest-lecture on aspects of a very broad subject ranging from the weaponry employed by Confederate soldiers to the dresses worn by women of the period to the hardships they faced in the war’s aftermath. Everything presented in class would be referenced, preferably with original written sources from the period. No one was to express personal views or get into politics. This was the way Jack Perdue wanted it. There was the standard publicity, including an entirely neutral article in the High Point Enterprise. Eleven students signed up. As the course began, there was nothing to indicate that on the eve of its completion, a controversy would erupt that would nearly tear the rural community college apart and destroy Jack Perdue’s life. Enter young reporter Ethan Feinsilver, stage left. Feinsilver worked for the Greensboro-based News & Record, covering Randolph County south of Greensboro. He entered the room late and remained, taking notes and later requesting course materials despite not having signed up and paid to take the course or obtaining permission to sit in (something Jack Perdue would likely have granted, had Feinsilver bothered to ask). It is clear from ensuing events that Feinsilver was on the prowl for a controversy, and if he couldn’t find one he was going to create one. Jerry Bledsoe reports that during the break that first night, he was heard asking Jack Perdue, "Why are you being allowed to teach such a controversial course?" Jack was dumbfounded. There was no controversy here. Anyone who wanted information about the course could readily obtain it. At first, Perdue had seemed pleased that a reporter was present, thinking this might win favorable publicity for a course he hoped would become a permanent offering at RCC. Feinsilver did not return the following week. But during that session which featured Confederate re-enactors, a photographer appeared in his stead. The man’s manner made Perdue uneasy. He was angling his photos to make the Confederate flags used by the re-enactors as prominent as possible. Feinsilver kept reappearing, and began to badger students in the course with leading questions designed to provoke a response. Eventually several complained. Feinsilver phoned guest lecturer Herman White at his home. White had dealt with slavery in the fifth session and provided written evidence that at least some North Carolina slaveowners had been kind to their slaves instead of brutalizing them, as the stereotype maintains. He reported how investigation into his own family history turned up documentation showing how the wife of one of his ancestors had taught the family’s slaves to read and write – even though this was against the law – as if preparing them for freedom. Many North Carolinians of the period opposed slavery, after all, and were convinced it was doomed whatever happened between North and South. Moreover, there were many free blacks in the South, relations between them and whites were better here than in the North, and some – no one knew for sure how many – joined the Confederate Army when the war broke out. Be this as it may, the lecture was over, and Feinsilver had missed it. White grew impatient, telling Feinsilver that he wasn’t about to repeat the entire thing over the phone, had no fax machine to send him materials, and that he should have signed up for the course. The next event was the appearance of a county NAACP representative, obviously at Feinsilver’s instigation, at the planned second to last session of the course. Although suspicious of a set-up, Jack Perdue welcomed the man. The NAACP representative would say afterwards – at first, anyway – that he’d been treated with respect and had heard nothing racially offensive. But Feinsilver wasn’t through. Not by a long shot. He was a man with a mission. That Sunday, November 15, 1998, a scathing article appeared in the Greensboro News & Record with the title, "Course reopens war’s old wounds." It was about Jack Perdue’s course, and its author was none other than Ethan Feinsilver. A lengthy subhead referred to the course’s "pro-Confederate slant," stated that it had "anger[ed] black leaders" and was part of the "larger clash between Southern heritage and civil rights groups." Feinsilver focused on the one session that had dealt with slavery. White’s report that at least some slaves had been treated with kindness and that some free blacks had joined the Confederate Army was transformed into the very different claim that "most black people were happy under slavery and that tens of thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy because they believed in the Southern cause." Feinsilver invoked unnamed "Southern history experts" denouncing the course as "pseudo-history" and "pro-Confederate propaganda." The article went on to claim that the state NAACP and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights were considering lodging a formal complaint against Randolph Community College. Feinsilver left the insinuation that Jack Perdue’s course was a part of the regular curriculum and paid for with state money, as opposed to what it was: a community-outreach course, self-supported and paid for solely by its participants. Had anyone said, at any time, that most black people were happy under slavery? There was no evidence anything of the sort was said. The course sessions had been videotaped, and the videotapes should have proved this. Herman White had said some things likely to raise the brows of today’s academic historians who insist that the sole cause of the War for Southern Independence was slavery, but that slaves were happy under slavery was not one of them. Jack Perdue, moreover, had insisted that there was no documentation about specific numbers of blacks fighting for the Confederacy. He had been very explicit about this. Finally, Ethan Feinsilver had not even attended the session that covered slavery and the role of blacks in the war. This did not keep him from writing an article suggesting otherwise; it did not keep his editors at the News & Record from backing him publicly and defending the story’s accuracy; and it did not keep Associated Press from picking up the story and distributing it all over the world. In other words, within 24 hours Jack Perdue and his course, along with Randolph Community College, were thrust into a national and even international spotlight. The thought police descended on these unsuspecting people like packs of wolves, and their wrath even spilled onto other students who innocently said how much they enjoyed the course and how much they were getting out of it. With further articles by Feinsilver referring to the "firestorm of media attention," Randolph Community College faced a public relations nightmare. College officials struggled with damage control, particularly with national civil rights groups breathing down their throats and allegations of a course about "happy slaves" taught by SCV members at RCC appearing in newspapers all over the country. Under enormous pressure, caught in the middle, and with his own career in jeopardy, RCC’s president Larry Linker finally cancelled the last session of the course. None of this could compare to what Jack Perdue was going through – especially given the personality that emerges from Bledsoe’s narrative. Apparently Perdue, somewhat shy by nature, was one of those people who bottled up negative emotions. He had sought only to teach the history he cared about. He was not a celebrity, and had not sought publicity. This very public assault on his integrity was unlike anything in his worst imaginings. Virtually every news media outlet was accepting the validity of the Feinsilver article; follow-up op-eds by nationally syndicated columnists such as Leonard Pitts (of the Miami Herald) were appearing and taking Feinsilver’s version of events for granted. Pitts, a first-rate writer capable of using words like rapier-thrusts, wrote of the course’s "offensive thesis: that the overwhelming majority of blacks were happy in slavery." Pitts went on (I recall the column): "you look at the people pushing a fraudulent, morally bankrupt version of those horrific days and you wonder about them. Are they evil? Are they stupid? Or are they, like the slaveholders of old, merely embracing a delusion they must believe in order to continue believing in themselves?" Jack Perdue found himself publicly denounced, demonized, branded a pseudo-historian and a pro-Confederate propagandist, called names ("crank," "cracker," etc.), accused of romanticizing slavery, of teaching lies and "morally bankrupt" history, of espousing hatred towards blacks, "Yankees," Indians and Jews (Feinsilver was Jewish), and even compared to neo-Nazis saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. Even other students in the course were being attacked as closet racists. Through it all, Perdue mostly held his temper and maintained his dignity. He refused to participate in the media circus. This was used against him. He must be hiding something, the Ethan Feinsilvers of the newspaper world reasoned – even though he was cooperating fully with the college by sharing whatever documentation was asked for and preparing public statements describing what his course had been about. He and others at the college outlined, point by point, specific falsehoods in Feinsilver’s article ranging from relatively trivial ones (e.g., he reported the course as lasting nine weeks instead of ten weeks) to the really damaging ones about happy slaves. He had put words in people’s mouths, attributing to both the course’s students and RCC administrators things they had never said. This was all ignored by the press. Defenses of Jack Perdue’s integrity by his students and others who knew him were also ignored. He was helpless before media supremacy. Eventually the toll on his health began to show. It is generally accepted that extreme, chronic stress can kill you. Perdue spent weeks that winter with what seemed to be a bad cold. Finally, on the morning of February 10, 1999, at around 5 a.m., Jack Perdue had a fatal heart attack – on his and his wife Annie Laura’s 37th wedding anniversary. She and other family members who had suffered through his ordeal with him, the students who had taken his course, and others who had known Jack Perdue all their lives, were convinced that the events beginning with Ethan Feinsilver’s article were responsible for his death. This was, in other words, literally a death by journalism. To insult his memory further, his death was not reported except as a paid-for obituary. The News & Record editors did not consider it sufficiently newsworthy. Jerry Bledsoe reports that Feinsilver repeatedly refused to be interviewed for this book (as did his editors at the News & Record). That leaves us largely in the dark as to his real motives. We can’t say for a fact that Feinsilver himself believed what he had written. He’d seen that a rural, community college was offering a history course that was vulnerable to being portrayed as representing a "Confederate point of view." Members of the SCV were co-sponsoring; Confederate battle flags had been photographed. These days it is easy to speak of "pro-Confederate hate groups" without bothering to investigate them or getting to know the people in them. Perhaps Feinsilver just smelled the possibility of writing the kind of article that establishes careers, given the brand of attack-dog journalism that began to thrive in the politically correct 1990s. We just don’t know. What do we know? We know that based on other articles Feinsilver wrote and from reports by others in the Greensboro News & Record newsroom, he apparently regarded Randolph County, North Carolina, as a "redneck backwater." He had already alienated the people of Asheboro with hostile, negative reporting about their community. We know that there was no controversy surrounding Jack Pardue’s course until Feinsilver put it there. Not even the county NAACP had batted an eyelash. If anyone needs to see a textbook case of media creating "news" instead of reporting it, look no further. We also know that despite his editors’ continued public statements supporting the accuracy of the November 15 article, Feinsilver was put on six-months probation following the explosion he had created. And finally, we know that at the end of that six-month period, Feinsilver left the News & Record. It is easy to infer, with Bledsoe, that he was offered a choice between resigning and being fired and chose to resign, after which he left journalism. Even after moving to Chapel Hill and enrolling in its education school, Feinsilver still declined the opportunity to tell Bledsoe his side of the story – if he had one. The News & Record never issued any public retraction or correction of any kind. Nor did any other paper that had uncritically repeated and even amplified Feinsilver’s charges. Jack Perdue, in one of his rare displays of anger, had emailed a letter to the editor of the neighboring Winston-Salem Journal following a particularly scurrilous editorial (the one comparing him to a Holocaust-denier). He called the paper’s statements "potentially libelous." His letter was refused publication and referred to the paper’s legal department (no action was ever taken). Of course, suing a newspaper for libel is very, very hard, even in a case like this; the large media corporations that now own most city newspapers have huge resources and the capacity to drag out such litigation for years, causing even more damage in the long run. This is why the media’s responsibility to report the truth and not invent things that never happened is so important. Almost to this day, statements are appearing that take the Feinsilver story at face value. Sometimes they amplify it with things not even Feinsilver said, e.g., a history professor at Columbia University commenting that a history course was offered at Randolph Community College in North Carolina depicting slaves as "smiling, singing Sambos." If you believe all the talk about political correctness is just paranoia or "right wing" backlash, read Death by Journalism? Those who know better will find their worst fears about today’s news media confirmed. But don’t read this book before you go to bed at night, and I don’t recommend it to anyone with high blood pressure! My initial question was, Are today’s media in some sense evil? I closed Death by Journalism? with a sense of having encountered something malevolent. One irresponsible and inflammatory article by one reporter set off a chain of events that destroyed a man’s life. Newspaper editors backed the story, publicly at least. Associated Press just passed it on, without anyone bothering to check its accuracy. Other newspapers reprinted and even embellished the allegations. Nationally syndicated columnists and professional agitators uncritically held up Jack Pardue’s course as "evidence" of the hotbed of "racism" they want us to believe still permeates rural, mostly conservative regions – especially in the South! Today’s cultural climate set the conditions for this journalistic train wreck. Political correctness has clearly grown more dangerous than communism ever was, and might yet be this society’s downfall. It nearly controls our most important disseminators of what is supposed to be truthful information: higher education and the news media. Seeing truth as a matter of consensus, leftist intellectuals in universities, cynical ladder-climbers in newsrooms and on editorial boards, and NAACP agitators with the media at their beck and call, all see themselves as "ministers of truth" empowered by warped visions of "morality" and "social justice" to dictate such things as how history should be taught. In the process, they rewrite history to further their own power-hungry agendas. Those who control the past, so to speak, can control the present. Without a truthful account of where we came from, we don’t know where we should go, and we are vulnerable to those taking us where they want us to go. Jerry Bledsoe tells us, in the press release that accompanied my copy of this book, how Death by Journalism? is connected to his true crime sagas. This book is "about crimes, too. Just crimes that can’t be prosecuted…. An honorable and innocent man … had his good reputation destroyed, and many people close to him believe the stress from that killed him. He certainly thought that a crime had been committed against him, and death left him no recourse to it." That explains why Bledsoe wrote this book: "Truth matters. This book shows just how much it does matter. Alter truth even slightly, and it can have drastic effect. In this case, truth was savaged. Journalism isn’t supposed to be about lying. It isn’t supposed to be about destroying innocent people. It isn’t supposed to be about depriving people of basic constitutional rights. All of that happened in this story, and I realized that if I didn’t tell it, nobody would. The lie would live. I felt a deep obligation to my county, as well as to my profession, to see that didn’t happen." March 16, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com |
Death
by Journalism? One Teacher’s Fateful Encounter With Political Correctness