The Herald from Rock Hill, South Carolina • 4

I i Evening Herald Wed Nov 23 1983 Media hyped Day Opinion This pogi it Ml aiid lor opinions Editorial below contain Iho views of Iho Evening Horold Olhar ilom rolled Iho opinion ol Individual writers national and carloonltlt Continuing feature throughout Iho newspaper such as Dear Abby Health Teen Forum and Horoscope plus occasional column by the Evening Herald sport and family editors also may contain the opinion of the writers the public had been duped by ABC into believing When the scenes snd dialogue that were exhaustively debated were finally put into the context of the film it was after all Just a Letter from the editor JIFF COWART Evening Herald City editor Russell Rein Isacutlvo Editor Horace Bailey George Hoover Jr Circulation Director Advertising Director Wayne Patrick Publisher Roger I Sovda General Manager 1 The director of Day had been given the creative assignment of producing a fictional account of what life would be like in the hesrtland of Ksnsss If nuclesr warheads were ever launched He accomplished that and there was nothing so new revealed in the film that it warranted the sensationaliatlc news coverage given it by the pack all seen photographs and film and read accounts of what happened In Hiroshima and Nagasaki Nuclear destruction Is brutal and ugly and we all know that And we an know that the next time the devastation will be Exuberant celebration That a film had come along to remind us of that horror was most assuredly news But It was not of the csliber to demand the excessive debate the dissecting commentary and the vacuous bureaucratic mumblings that it drew They puehed the buttons and blew up the world Sunday night Hollywood concocted a version of what the horror of horrors might be like And ABC television beamed the scenario into every home where Americans worked up the courage to have the set tuned in The movie became an historical national event of enormous proportion and created In me a sense of deep despair But It tha film that unnerved me It was that after viewing the film I realised I had been victimised by one of the most massive and shameless media hypes and political exploitations in the history of television Make no miatake: The threat of nuclear war is extremely serious and should not be taken lightly The events portrayed in ABCs "The Day were devastating and sad And they were unhappily potentially real But bom a positive perspective such a movie can be profitable If it poses questions raises consciousness and displaces apathy to the point that lasting solutions to avoiding nuclear conflict can be found I hope that's why ABC aired the film But Inside me beats the heart of a skeptic Somehow I shake the notion that ABC realised the film would become a rallying point for fanatics bom all political and Ideological walks and it recognised an opportunity to unabashedly promote Itself at a time of Intense ratings wars The network threw its all into exploiting the film: it planned special news presentations it Interviewed experts on its talk shows and It served early notice than any special interest using the movie as a launching pad could get on the tube in the guise of news to carry its message forth Falling to divorce the actual news value from the ABC self-promotion the printed media Jumped the story like a pack of hounds Reporters rushed to write about the film not necessarily because it deserved It but because they blindly accepted ABCs illusion that Day was some kind of landmark In television film history The media frenzy was seized upon by astute pnlltli-Uiw end IntwrtS who turned tllfl movie into a soapbox for their favorite cause i The White House was first In line They charged the film was political and aimed at undermining President -huge defense spending not to mention endangering the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe ABC si-' lowed Secretary of State George Shulti to appear at the conclusion of the movie to dispute what the administration thought was the message Newspapers carried reams of official reaction i Nuclear been proponents were next Then came those who believe only a nation armed to the teeth and beyond can protect the fragile balance of power Then those who believed futuristic defense systems would allow us to fight limited nuclear war When the political debate got stale reporters aought out psychologists scientists sociologists Civil Defense directors and anyone else willing to comment about anything nuclear-related as long as they mentioned the movie in passing Television reporters put microphones in the face of the average man on the street and asked such probing questions as: do you think about nuclear In case you didn't see those everyone said it was horrible i Thera was excruciating debate among experts from all disciplines on the devastating possibilities if children were allowed to see this most horrible of all films There were those who previewed the movie who described in stark detail the burning bodies and smoking In fact the film was not particularly true to life Author and scientist Carl Sagan who appeared on ABC to give his view ssid thst if indeed the button hsd been pushed the destruction and survival rate would have been infinitely worse than what was depicted in the film In the end I suspect ABC got what it really wanted: 100 million viewers the hugest audience ever for a television movie The media should get a thank you note from network executives It would have been nice if Instead of over-hype that sent viewer ratings soaring if instead of speculation about what the psychological Impact would be on America if Instead of debate over whether the film was full of hope or hopelessness the media would have explored more responsibly the question of "What can this country realistically do to prevent a nuclear day If now famous or perhaps Infamous film doer anything to move the world cfoaer to an answer to that ultimate question then the media will truly have a story worth its weight in hype the film was finally unveiled It was a sobering and unhappy picture But it not nearly as awesoms as the media and did likewise in ensuing years But it was not until 1863 that President Lincoln made Thanksgiving an official national holiday Millions of Americans will say grace over the turkey and selfless others will sacrifice to brighten the holiday for the destitute in churches and shelters But most of us will place the emphasis on frivolity to the exclusion some would say of the thanksgiving Cities will feature parades including the 60th annual extravaganza in New York Football fans in Detroit where the Lions play the Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas where the Cowboys play host to the St Louis Cardinals will keep Thanksgiving dinner waiting And many of us will eat to excess at the traditional family meal Others would argue though that these are just the sort of things that Americans are thankful for: the right to choose their activity the abundance and the affluence of the majority to enjoy it In the 1940s artist Norman Rockwell created paintings based on the four American freedoms of religion and expression and from fear or want enumerated by President Franklin Roosevelt Rockwell portrayed a family Thanksgiving gathering to illustrate from Legend has it that the English settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had themselves a good old time in the fall of 1621 To give thanks to the Supreme Being for a bountiful harvest the Pilgrims staged a three-day festival of eating (historians acknowledge the presence of venison and vegetables but are unsure about turkey) shooting contests and according to some books games of chance with the friendly native Americans The celebration of what we know as the "first was exuberant because the colonists had much to be thankful for: a substantial harvest peace with most of the local Indians and Just being alive after a brutal first winter that took the lives of 47 of the original 102 settlers The frivolity was atypical of the sober Puritans so much so that vernacular humorist Finley Peter Dunne under his pen name Mr Dooley wrote in 1900 that Thanksgiving founded (by) Puritans to give thanks presarved Indyans we keep it to give thanks we are presarved In fact the Puritans celebrated days of thanksgiving sporadically and only then when inspired by a particular event George Washington proclaimed the last Thursday in November as the first national Thanksgiving in 1789 and most of the states breakup forces change and fiber optic cables of pure glass At first and its regulators tried to ignore the effects of technology on the monopoly But by the late 1960s and early 1970s the Federal Communications Commission and the courts had begun questioning the setup based on the premise that a vertically Integrated monopoly represented the cheapest means of providing telephone service change for protection of its monopoly- then organised itself accordingly Bell Laboratories had the Job of developing and applying technology to products for the phone network The Western Electric Co msnufretured those products The Bell operating companies served as connection with customers qAnd Long Lines built and managed the national network that tied the Bell companies and independents alike together As long as the monopoly was intact the system worked According to the Commerce Department more than 92 percent of the nation's households have a telephone maintains that everybody who wants telephone service can get it But the goal of providing universal service could not be pursued without erecting a complicated within the Bell charged had used its control of the local Bell networks to been out would-be competitors not only in the long-distance business but also in equipment had been requiring customers who purchased non-Bell equipment to pay a monthly fee called a coupling ostensibly to protect its network from shoddy equipment denied the charges of anti- competitive conduct But on Jan 1982 eight years after the suit wss filed and 10 months after the trial began the company announced it eras settling would give up ownership of the Bell companies said chairman Charles Brown eliminating any possibility that it could use a monopoly over local service to protect its long-distance and equipment businesses It would keep Bell Labs Western Electric and Long Lines snd gain the freedom to enter any business it wanted The Justice Department had initially wanted to break up everything but Baxter the assistant attorney general pronounced himself satisfied The government lawyers had ultimately forced the breakup but the evolution of technology had played Just as large a role was even chafing a bit at the old setup itself was restricted to the business of providing communications service' evfen though Bell Labs was exploring other fields particularly computers By 1972 the MCI Communications Corp was operating a single microwave telephone link between Chicago and SL Louis By 1972 MCI was almost bankrupt because of refusal to give it the local connections it needed to operate a long-distance network In 1974 the FCC ordered to provide those connections That same year the US Department of Justice having watched behavior through negotiations with MCI went to court to prod the company Federal prosecutors Second in a series By NORMAN BLACX Associated Press writer WASHINGTON Before he signed an order on Aug St 1982 requiring the breakup of the Bell System UJ3 District Judge Harold Greene read a lot of letters from the public A few attacked his qualifications as a Judge Most simply pleaded with Greene to stop the Justice Department from dismantling the American Telephone Telegraph Co stop this catastrophe" woman from Milwaukee a wrote a Houston man should apologise to the company and the public for a grotesque miscarriage of leave alone permit them to engage In any business they wish and then you go back to chasing ambulances Or even better get an honest hate what you (Assistant Attorney General William) Baxter the Justice and antitrust departments have done to wrote a Kansas woman have destroyed 100 years of hard work on the part of the best telephone system In the How did get into this fix? The answer requires some knowledge of the history of telephone service In the United States For the past century basic mission was to extend plain old telephone service to every American who wanted it at a reasonable price a goal known as universal service Operating under an agreement worked out In the early 1900s by Theodore Vail then dent the Bell System government regulation and committed Itself to universal service in ex WHO PAYS FOR HEALTH CARE IN THE US? QUOTEUHQUOTE What people are saying Long-distance callers ended up bearing a rising percentage of the costs of constructing and maintaining local phone networks subsidis-' ing local rates for everyone Including neighbors who called each other but made no long-distance calls Urban residents helped subsidise rural residents Everybody benefltted from slow depreciation rates for equipment although everybody paid more over the long run as a result was Inevitable that other companies would see business opportunities within that subsidised system New technologies provided the means to exploit them Scientists perfected microwave radio for telephone transmission introduced the computer age with invention of the transistor and developed new telephones and telephone switching systems along with satellites lasers Just wants to be paid Bob Woolf lawyer and agent for Larry Bird after Bird signed a reported 14 "Hilton seven-year contract with the Boston Celtics homecoming queen by the Oaflin College student body fa Orangeburg SC She has been a full-time student there since 196L understand why the troops are shot at and they want to repeat Vietnam-Our objectives have to be clearer" Rep Marcy Kaptur DOMo on UJL military involvement In 1 going to have more than an escort going to be carried on a float by seven young Zulee Ssmuelsa grandmother who reveal her age on being connection late In 1962 the astonishing background of Dr Southeastern Conservative advocate WILLIAM A RUSHER NEW YORK (NEA) Jesse Jackson's declaration of Ms candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination makes it necessary for Americans to consider afresh a curious episode in the career of the late Martin Luther King Jr and the links of both men to a man named Hunter who should be better known to the American Enterprise Association PCU)Ms The st i least since their days in the SCLC in the early 1960s and at some point in the mid-1970s Jackson incredibly named him to serve as director of the International Department of Operation PUSH United to Save Jackson's Mack self-help group In that capacity regularly accompanied Jackson and Jackson's wife on trips abroad becoming known as a staunch friend of the Arabs and especially of the PLO Thus name (and PUSH title) appear in the program brochure of a May 1978 Organizing for Palestinian human rights hs signed listing himself for a July 1962 ad for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and in December 1982 O'Dell (PUSH and SCLC)" was listed as a member at large of the Executive Committee of the pro-PLO Palestinian Human Rights Committee for 1963 Thst is the astounding 27-year record of a chief foreign policy adviser to the latest entrant in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes The media obligingly burled connection with Msrtin Luther King Jr Will they be ss cooper-stive in the esse of Jesse Jkson? In December of that year King announced that had resigned his post an of the charges But there were seven more months of backing and filling before The New York Times reported on July 27 1962 that O'Dell had left the SCLC for a second time on June 26 mutual agreement' because of-concern that his affiliation with the Integration movement would be used by 'segregationists and O'Dell thereupon dropped out of sight again but there is some question as to whether he in fact severed all his connections with the SCLC In any event between 1968 and 1971 he served as an associate editor of Frsedomways a communist-oriented quarterly targeted at black leaders and In 1969 he was publicly listed as a sponsor of a "cultural tribute to Ben described in a promotional letter as first Mack Communist to win in America In 1977 O'Dell served as an American delegate to the World Peace Council a notorious Soviet front O'Dell has known Jesse Jackson at story begins in 1956 when the Internal Security Subcommittee (of which I was then associate counsel) issued a subpoena for O'Dell whom It suspected of being a district organiser for the Communist Party in New Orleans got wind that the feds were looking for Mm and skipped town bid when the US Marshals inspected his rented room they found a highly suggestive cache of documents Including: two fake Social Security cards In names O'Dell was using as aliases 275 copies of an Issue of the official communist newspaper The Worker a directive from the National Organisation Commission of the Communist Party addressed the a memorandum proposing communist penetration of the churches the NAACP and the Democratic Party and a vast array of communist literature from nearly a dozen countries subsequently appeared before the subcommittee in Washington took the Fifth Amendment on these documents and all related subjects and dropped out of sight By 1962 however he ns believe it or not serving as Southeastern director of Martin Luther King Southern Christian LeaderaMp Conference presence in that high capacity in entourage was one of the factors that prompted Sen Jesse Helms to suggest recently that the Senate ought to inform Itself more deeply about King's communist connections before making Ms birthday a national holiday was the St Louis Globe-Democrat that discovered and published 1982 personal health care expenditures for people of all ages in the United States totaled $322 billion NEA Marilyn Post Some: US HtMli Cere Ftaanctng AdnSnaOrton More than half the health care costs in the United States are paid by private sources either indlvidu-als by themselves or through Insurance coverage.