On Larry Henry and Rupert

By Thomas Griffith

> Why is it that literary liberals so often try to make romantic martyrs out of people they feel compelled to defend? Take Larry Flynt, whose sleazy porn magazine Hustler has run afoul of a Cincinnati obscenity prosecution in a way that does outrageous violence to press freedom. A full-page ad in the New York Times, signed by, among others, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Daniel Ellsberg and John Dean, wasn't willing to leave it at that. In black block letters three inches high, it proclaimed, LARRY FLYNT: AMERICAN DISSIDENT. This label was enough to move the Times to its own editorial dissent. Dissident has an honored meaning these days, and belongs to those who, like Andrei Sakharov, at risk to their own freedom boldly challenge the Soviet Union to live up to its constitution. Flynt himself seems to have had a better sense of proportion about his role--and a good job description of it--in the name he gave his magazine.

> NBC plans an audacious variation of news practice in its expensive new contract with Henry Kissinger. Not only does it plan to use him, as CBS and ABC proposed to do in their spirited bidding for his services, as an interview subject discussing his memoirs when they are published. It wants to put him on an annual foreign-news documentary, and to use him on big breaking stories, being cross-questioned by John Chancellor and David Brinkley on the nightly news. In a way, this is to put the fox among the hens. It is to mix together presumably disinterested commentators with a very interested newsmaker who will have a past to defend as he talks about changes in foreign affairs made in his absence. This could make, on occasion, for a confusing spectacle. NBC must be counting on Kissinger's skill in ambivalent situations.

> The odd thing about the invasion of Manhattan by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press lord, is that so far the newspaper most improved by his arrival is not his Post but its tabloid rival the New York Daily News. Though it still has the largest daily circulation of any American paper, the News's circulation has been going down. Under the editorship of Michael O'Neill, it has forsworn its vulgar and unreliable ways. It covers serious news seriously, where once it was prejudiced and superficial. Yet in becoming a better paper, it lost some of its raffishness and bracing cynicism, as well as those headlines that popped at you like bubble gum, all of which made the News the subway straphanger's bible and the cabby's handbook. Until now Murdoch has done little more than to add gossip and horse-racing tips to the Post, but, feeling the competition, the News is recapturing some of its own past liveliness, without sacrificing seriousness.

The advent of Murdoch, publishing tycoon on three continents, is of more than parochial New York City interest: he gave promise, with his money and his maverick irreverence, of brightening up the increasingly sedate American newspaper scene. The trend is all the other way: newspapers in monopoly cities being sold for huge sums to absentee conglomerates. Unless a local editor with courage and energy insists otherwise, the natural commercial impulse is to put out complacent, unenterprising papers that don't embarrass the local powers that be and make no waves. So far Murdoch, a fellow refreshingly free of cultural pretensions, seems to be aiming only at circulation, not quality. Instead of being bright, new and inventive, he seems curiously oldfashioned.

> In carrying out his vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr., FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to get newsmen to listen to tapes of King's bedroom conversations in hotels. Only fragments ever saw print, but their existence has lingered in the air as a gossipy tidbit. Now, a federal judge has ordered the tapes held under seal for 50 years, not to be disclosed unless under court order. Presumably this is meant to spare King's widow, Coretta, any further embarrassment. A Department of Justice investigation concluded that the tapes were "very probably" illegally obtained; they are thus as much a blot on Hoover's memory as on King's. Why aren't they simply destroyed? Attorney General Griffin Bell ought to see to it.

> Watch the television local news after any big bank robbery. On-camera appears the bank spokesman, mindful of the bank's image as your friendly neighbor. He describes how polite the robbers were as they trussed up the teller: no threats, much courtesy. From the spokesman comes no outrage or even indignation; perhaps the next question provides the answer to that: the bank is fully covered by insurance. The robbers are made glamorous by their victims. Fagin, were he alive, would be adding public relations courses to his school for crime.

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