Books in Brief: How CBS Tried To Kill a Book

How CBS Tried To Kill a Book, by Edith Efron (Nash, 187 pp., $6.95). When Miss Efron’s The News Twisters, which not merely suggested but demonstrated the existence of leftward bias in television news coverage, appeared in 1970, NBC and ABC quietly ignored it. CBS, exposed by Miss Efron as the worst offender, went into an absolute tizzy. The network’s News President, Richard Salant, trotted out flaks and tame scholars to “demolish” the book. Miss Efron’s methodology was attacked (unconvincingly); she was smeared as a racist; she was linked to a fancied right-wing-anti-freedom-of-thepress conspiracy (e.g., because she received a small grant from a foundation set up long ago by the late Alfred Kohlberg, CBS found her guilty-by-association with—Joe McCarthy). Columnists and editorial writers swallowed all this and dutifully regurgitated it. In the present book, Miss Efron describes CBS’ efforts, and refutes its “refutations” of the 1 per cent of her data the network ever dealt with substantially. Heavy going at times, but the reader will come away convinced that one TV network, anyway, wants to be biased. c. h. simonds