Due to Circumstances beyond Our Control

Abstract

Recently, Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in public hearings on the Vietnam war-his first public testimony before the committee in nearly two years. N.B.C. broadcast the hearings; C.B.S. did not. C.B.S. justified its decision on the ground that duplication of N.B.C.'s coverage would have served no useful function. See NEvswEEK, March 25, 1968, at 97. But "[i]f you take yourself seriously as a transmitter of news, you run the damn hearings anyway-that is, if there is a 'you' who is capable of feeling seriously about such matters, and not just a piece of machinery gulping down profit-and-loss statements."