330
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE LAW AND THE MEDIA
RECKLESS DISREGARD: WESTMORELAND V. CBS ET AL; SHARON
V.
TIME. By Renata Adler.
Alfred A. Knopf. $16.95.
For a writer about the First Amendment, Renata Adler
has a bizarre-almost religious-sense of "the Truth." A major
thesis of her book,
Reckless Disregard,
is that
Time
Magazine did not
tell the Truth about General Ariel Sharon's responsibility for the
Phalangist massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps; and that CBS did not tell the Truth about General
William Westmoreland's role in allegedly concealing enemy troop
estimates in Vietnam. Another thesis of her book-even more
bizarre and wrong-headed-is that the First Amendment is
somehow supposed to protect relatively small, highly moral and
dissenting voices (such as those in the civil rights movement), but
not "unitary powerful and monolithic [news organizations
1
like
Time
and CBS which are guilty of suppressing the very diversity that
it was the purpose of the First Amendment . . . to protect .
~ '
Indeed Adler advocates "different standards for small than for
large publications" and argues that the First Amendment victories
of the giant press do not help to protect small publications. Her
flawed reasoning is that "even if all large publications were to win
their cases, small publications would be
in no
way
protected" (em–
phasis added), since rich libel plaintiffs could stin sue them and ruin
them on legal costs alone . " What she neglects to tell the
reader-and as a sophisticated lawyer, she has to know this-is that
the protective legal precedents established by the large publications
govern the cases brought against the small publications. There is
also developing law which punishes-by court costs and other finan–
cial sanctions-frivolous libel suits brought in the face of dispositive
precedents. Thus the large publications, for better or worse, are
often the vanguard of protection for the First Amendment rights of
small publications as well as for individual citizens.
Adler is correct, of course, in reminding us how incredibly ar–
rogant and hypocritical the giant media can be in their self-righteous
and self-serving defense of
their
rights under the First Amendment.
She does a masterful job of documenting the sometimes shoddy
reporting that went into the
Time
and CBS accounts, and the unwill–
ingness of
Time
to acknowledge its serious mistakes. (CBS was far
