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July 20, 2005
Memory Lapses on General Westmoreland
Posted by Dave Blount at July 20, 2005 9:45 PM
It was nice of CBS News to do an obituary of General William Westmoreland, but as Media Research Center observes, they left out a salient detail: In the early 1980s, Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel suit against CBS News for defaming him in a documentary that accused him of conspiring to "suppress and alter critical intelligence on the enemy." CBS's documentary apparently had its share of flaws, compelling them to settle out of court.
NBC and ABC mentioned the lawsuit in their own obits. But evidently it slipped everybody's mind at CBS. Memory can be funny. Perhaps an improved memory would allow CBS to learn from its mistakes, and stop passing off political hatchet jobs as news.
Apparently this lesson is yet to sink in. CBS's David Martin began his Westmoreland retrospective with this:
If one soldier can embody the complex tragedy of Vietnam, it is William Westmoreland, the picture-perfect general who went from hero to goat in the eyes of many.
Speaking of memory problems, the New York Times seems to remember the outcome of the suit a little differently. Their obituary states that Westmoreland dropped his suit, and implies that it had no merit. According to others (e.g., the less vociferously biased Washington Post), CBS settled just before the case would have gone to the jury.
