(19) Mon 11 Aug 97 6:15 By: David Bloomberg To: All Re: Less Balance St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:338c 230b31e0 @MSGID: 1:2430/2112 7eb2d96f Message-Id: <970808181447_64715763@emout04.mail.aol.com> Subject: FWD: A little less balance, please A breath of fresh air in journalism. Nancy Craig ================= USA TODAY (7-14-97) ``A LITTLE LESS BALANCE, PLEASE'' By Art Levine It's a truism that journalists need to offer a balanced view of all sides when writing about a public controversy. Sometimes, though, one side of a debate consists of sheer hooey, and the press's failure to make this plain does society a disservice. A case in point is the preposterously 'objective' coverage of the supposed UFO crash in Roswell, N.M. A decent case could be made that the Roswell incident's 50th anniversary, which was celebrated last week, didn't rate much coverage at all, given that the UFO event in question never happened. But Time's June 23 cover asked, 'What really happened out there?' as if the answer were somehow in doubt. On CNN and MSNBC last week, it seemed like all-Roswell, all the time, with no fewer than five live remotes Thursday on the anniversary of what CNN called 'the UFO sighting' there. There were also in- depth discussions of Roswell that day on two CNN talk shows, CNN & Co. and Talkback Live. The weaknesses of 'balanced reporting' in this story are illustrated by USA Today's coverage of an Air Force report stating that the Roswell 'aliens' said to have been glimpsed in 1947 were really crash-test dummies sighted in the mid-1950s. The newspaper said the Air Force 'tried to dispel' the flying-saucer accounts but, for the sake of balance, the paper noted that believers in the Roswell sighting say 'key witnesses' wouldn't confuse events in the 1950s with their 'vivid recollections' of 1947. 'Witnesses include Frank Kaufmann, now 81, who was a civilian employee at the Roswell base and says he saw two of five dead aliens at the crash,' the paper said. It quoted Kaufmann:' 'They were very good-looking people, ash-colored faces... about 5 feet 5 tall, eyes a little more pronounced.' ' Plain folk vs. Big Government: Whom are readers going to believe? A Time/Yankelovich poll showed that 65 percent of people think a UFO crashed at Roswell. The gold helmets. A better approach to covering the Roswell story would be to focus on mounting evidence collected by more discriminating UFO researchers that many key Roswell witnesses, in the words of Kal Korff, 'aren't telling the truth.' Korff is the author of The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know. He says the media are 'treating these witnesses with kid gloves.' Yes, Virginia, many of Roswell's key witnesses have changed their stories several times and have been caught telling falsehoods. Korff' s book shows that a first group of eyewitnesses mistakenly believed that some debris from a shattered radar reflector came from a spaceship. These witnesses didn't say anything about alien bodies. After a 1989 TV episode of Unsolved Mysteries about Roswell, a second melange of 'witnesses' came forward with bizarre tales of alien sightings. No one in this second group has told a plausible or consistent story. Jim Ragsdale, for one, said he spotted four alien bodies near a spaceship. Later he asserted that he saw nine alien bodies, from which he removed gold helmets, and that he buried the aliens in the sand. Glenn Dennis was, in 1947, a young mortician. He said he was called (or visited) by military officers inquiring about small caskets and later met with a frightened nurse at the base hospital, who drew pictures of bulb-headed aliens for him. Her name was Naomi Selff, he told UFO researchers; she was transferred overseas a few days later and disappeared (or became a nun). Dennis was hailed as 'absolutely truthful' by UFO investigator Karl Pflock in a 1994 report. But after learning there was no record of nurse Selff--and no transfers of nurses overseas-- Pflock now concludes that Dennis didn't tell the truth. Dennis responds, 'I may sound like a jerk, but ... I'm telling the truth.' He says he gave a fake name to Pflock to test his ability to keep a secret. The oddest witness of all is Kaufmann, who claims he's still part of a secret military team that recovered the UFO in 1947--although he was discharged from the military in 1945 and, despite what USA Today says, has never substantiated his claim that he later worked at the Roswell base as a civilian. He has told interviewers that everyone from Charles Lindbergh to Werner von Braun was involved in the Roswell incident. When I spoke to Kaufmann last year for MSNBC, I couldn't believe that this tale-spinning old coot was the leading witness in several books and TV shows. He said of his many critics: 'It's up to them to disprove me.' Korff and Pflock have done so, but it's time for the rest of the media to follow their lead in examining improbable, high-profile UFO claims. Maybe then they could solve the real mystery behind Roswell: how one town's citizens could have gulled so many supposedly tough-minded journalists into thinking their stories had any credence at all. --- msgedsq 2.0.5 * Origin: Let the love of truth shine clear (1:2430/2112) SEEN-BY: 12/12 112/4 218/701 890 1001 270/101 353/250 396/1 3615/50 SEEN-BY: 3615/51 @PATH: 2430/1 1423 270/101 396/1 3615/50 218/1001