[antimedia] antimedia: A little noticed article in the NY Times....

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Posted by antimedia:
A little noticed article in the NY Times....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1159060544.shtml


   ....[1]announces the death of Pham Xuan An at the age of 79. Probably
   fewer than a few hundred Americans know who Phan An was.

     As a reporter for Reuters and then for Time magazine, Mr. An
     covered American and South Vietnamese military and diplomatic
     events and was one of a handful of reporters admitted to
     off-the-record briefings by American authorities. Time made him a
     full staff correspondent, the only Vietnamese to be given that
     distinction by a major American news organization.
     At the same time, however, Mr. An was delivering a steady stream of
     military documents and reports to North Vietnamese authorities,
     writing in invisible ink and leaving the material in containers at
     designated spots around Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.
     It was only after the war that correspondents like Frank McCulloch
     of Time, David Halberstam of The New York Times and Morley Safer of
     CBS News learned that their colleague had been a colonel in the
     North Vietnamese Army.
     âHe was among the best-connected journalists in the country,â Mr.
     Safer wrote in âFlashbacks: On Returning to Vietnamâ (Random House,
     1990), in which he devoted a chapter to Mr. An. âIt was always An
     who would brief new correspondents; it was An whom even the
     competition sought when trying to unravel the hopelessly
     complicated threads of Vietnamese political loyalties.â

   That's right. The well-connected, much cited, Mr. An was an officer in
   the North Vietnamese army attending briefing of the US military,
   visiting US military encampments and reporting everything he found to
   his superiors -- our enemy.
   And the American media depended upon An for their information.

     His former colleagues had conflicting reactions to his dual life.
     âHe felt it was doing his patriotic duty by being an agent,â
     Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a reporter for
     The Washington Post, said at the meeting, âbut we were his friends,
     and he had great admiration for the United States.â
     Mr. McCulloch, the Saigon bureau chief for Time during the war,
     said: âIt tore him up. If circumstances had been reversed, if
     hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had occupied my land, I
     probably would have done the same thing.â

   Now you think about that for a minute. The media constantly argues
   that they cannot be pro-America because they have to remain
   independent. Yet, when confronted with the fact that a trusted source
   was an officer in the enemy army, they're sympathetic to his plight.
   That's our media. Always sympathetic to the enemy's plight yet
   unsympathetic to America's position. It doesn't affect their reporting
   though -- no sir!
   At least there's a few left that are bothered by the truth.

     But Burton Yale Pines, a Time correspondent during the war, said he
     was shocked. âWorse,â he said, âI am embarrassed that I trusted Mr.
     An as enormously as I â and my fellow journalists â did.â

   No apologies for the stories they wrote though. That would be going to
   far!
   What do you think the chances are that you can trust the reporting
   from Iraq? (Hat tip to a faithful reader.)

References

   1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/world/asia/22an.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fH%2fHevesi%2c%20Dennis&oref=login