During the past few years, Ohio University has had a befuddling policy on political or artistic displays in its Athens and regional campuses. Two years ago, administrators approved the horrific, dishonest Genocide Awareness Week display, which stood on the Howard Hall Site. Enormous placards showed images of aborted fetuses alongside lynched Southern blacks, piles of Cambodian skulls and victims of Nazi concentration camps. For a week that included Passover, thousands of people walked past.
Last spring, an art professor at OU's Ironton campus assigned students to create works inspired by the word controversy
and they did, mounting them in a public hallway. But in that instance, the students must have followed their instructions too closely, so administrators removed several pieces and relocated others to an out-of-the-way classroom.
Now, this week, an exhibit in Alden Library's 3rd floor Fine Arts Library is incomplete because pieces in it criticized President Bush and the American invasion of Iraq. The display The Art of War: The effects of war on art-making includes anti-war images from all time periods, including Korea and Vietnam, but because some artists made their point in an unpatriotic way, their works were yanked. Good thing a photograph of stacked corpses is so palatable.
University officials are quick to say the exhibit has not truly been censored because the missing pieces are available behind a desk and people can ask to see them. In that case, why not just lock them in a back room? Why mount artwork in the first place if patrons can just knock on creators' doors and see what they're making?
Critics said it was inappropriate for the library to stage an unbalanced anti-war show. Never mind that a show devoted to anti-war artwork has a bias and states it upfront. This was never intended to be a display of the effect of war on art, pro and con. If one side of an issue puts up a political display then everyone should be able to put one up OU Distinguished Professor Richard Vedder said. That's absolutely correct. But here, one side can't even make its full presentation.
The CBS affair
In its fervor to break a hot story, CBS and Dan Rather have damaged the network's credibility and given a black eye to all journalists.
By now the details of CBS's journalistic snafu are coming to the surface. Earlier this week CBS News and Rather both admitted that they could not authenticate documents used in a 60 Minutes story that questioned President Bush's service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War and apologized.
However, the apology comes too little too late. It is every news department's reaction to stand by their story and trust their reporters. But CBS's adamant insistence that its story was correct failed to leave them room for any type of mistake and magnified their error in judgment.
After the initial buzz and rumors of forged documents, CBS committed to do everything it could to authenticate its documents. Less than two weeks later, the documents have proved a forgery. The question must be asked why CBS failed to put the documents to such a rigorous test before the story aired.
Adding to the damage is the fact that the warning signs were there. Several of its own hired document critics raised red flags about their authenticity, saying they appeared to have been made using Microsoft Word.
Some critics have said CBS was duped by its source. The documents, which were supposedly written by Bush's late squadron leader, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, were provided by retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who was well known in National Guard circles for trying to discredit Bush's military record. Burkett admitted he lied to CBS after it pressured him to reveal where he got the documents.
The media during this election cycle have already tip-toed around the dreaded phrase liberal bias
and failed to ask many of the tough questions they are charged to ask. CBS's carelessness will make that task even harder.
But even more shameful is that the politicians seem more than eager to continue to fight this 30-year-old war: Americans deserve better. It is time to take the focus off Vietnam and talk about the future. Health care, the war in Iraq and the economy should be front and center in this election.
17
Archives
The Post Editorial Board
20040923444midsize.jpg
