Mr. Branfman is on point about MSM being lax in its objectivity and candor. Anyone watching the Today show can see the true lack of objectivity there. It is akin to a dog act from the Ed Sullivan Show. Ted Kennedy, the Clintons or most any Democrat can get the staff to jump through hoops, do back flips, and gratuiously beg. Very entertaining indeed! But pathetic. (So it is reasonable that one of them may go to CBS News?)To be fair, most MSM news is this way.

Since Fred is above this sort of thing, we should be eagerly awaiting his exposes of Air America"s financial woes, The true story of Ted Kennedy and his driving, The Juanita Broddrick story, The real Howard Dean (Is there one?)and the real John Kerry (OK, there isn't one).

Since I share his concern for those killed in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, hopefully, he will surely write about Pol Pot's killing fields (1.7 million or more), and the killing sprees(how many millions?) in Vietnam after the US pullout. How about those free and open societies in North Korea, Vietnam and Laos?

I hope he goes after the likes of Delay and any other politician that is worthy of his "honest" scrutiny. Corruption is corruption no matter where it is. Political and religious affiliation surely will not dissuade the honorable Mr. Branfman from his quest to not be a part of thundering herd.

This noble piece has shown that he certainly is not a lap dog of the Democrats these days.

I'm looking forward to more of your writings.

I agree with those readers who felt Mr. Branfman (a) had a thin factual basis to judge Mr. Koppel; (b) appeared driven by his political beliefs to vilify anyone who is not wholly "on the bus;" and, therefore, (c) shares some profound similarities with those on the right with whom he so vehemently disagrees. It also appears for some of your readers, any article touching upon Dr. Kissinger touches off a similar set of tendencies and reactions. (Of course, Dr. K. long has been a favorite target for elevation to war criminal status, not without good reason, so it probably inevitable that a referendum on his villainy is more important to a lot of people that the point Mr. Branfman was obstensibly attempting to make about journalists.)

At the end of the day, however, I agree with his thesis about the corruption of the "free press," even if I don't completely buy his example. Nonetheless, I can't help but wonder when the press was ever much different. The time during my life when it appeared the press was most successful in rooting out government corruption was the Watergate era -- precisely when Mr. Branfman had his ill-fated lunch and when Kissinger was being lionized in the press.

In fact, there is a credible opposing point of view that the press has become more prone to attacking public officials in the last thirty years than it was before, albeit for sensational personal scandal more than for the crimes of omission and commission that rightly incense Mr. Branfman. Compare the treatment Mr. Clinton got for his infedility to that recieved by Eisenhower or Kennedy.

The problem isn't that our press has gone from a state of purity to one of corruption. The nature of its corruption has shifted with institutional and social changes. But the free press has always been an ideal of the enlightenment more than a reality on the ground. And solutions, if they exist, should not be based, implicitly or explicitly, on a false picture of the past.

If Branfman considers Ted Koppel to be "one of America's most honorable and well-respected journalists," then how does this reflect on Branfman's own credibility? How MANY mass murderers does a journalist need to protect from media scrutiny and promote as a "impartial expert" before his own honor is in question? I would think one might be enough.

Branfman is exercising the same identification with power that he excoriates in his article: he allows his personal feelings for Ted Koppel to override his judgment of the man's public behavior, behavior that is in large part responsible for the public's ignorance of our government's worst murderous excesses. There is nothing honorable about befriending, defending, and protecting a mass murderer. There is nothing respectable about being a mouthpiece for right-wing propaganda.

Does Branfman forget how Ted Koppel got his big "Nightline" break in the first place? He was a shill for big business opponents of Carter. His job then was to keep a nightly vigil before the public of Carter's "incompetence" over the kidnappings in Iran. Where has been his vigilance over the Bush II administration's incompetence in capturing bin Laden? That Koppel occasionally allows competing viewpoints suggests that he does know the difference between news and propanganda, and he has deliberately chosen his own mantle: he's a whore who's turned to pimping for the powerful.

While I agreed with many of the points Mr. Branfman raised about the character of journalism and journalists, I found to my utter dismay that he falls into exactly the same trap he accuses these people of--sucking up to the (in this case, journalistic) priveledged class. How, exactly, can Ted Koppel be "a fine journalist and decent man" when at the first chance he sucked up to the likes of Henry Kissenger--one of the most blatant mass murderers since Hitler--and provided cover and legitimacy for his behavior? And all in the name of, what? "Access"? Maybe if Keppel had been a little less of "a fine journalist and decent man" and DID HIS JOB some portion of the MILLIONS that lost their lives, limbs, loved ones, and property as a result of the POGROMS Kissenger and his crowd set in motion would have been spared.

Bookseller writes, �The root of Mr. Branfman's dissatisfaction with Mr. Koppel appears to lie in personal disappointment: He wanted Mr. Koppel to share his political views ��

Whoa! The issue isn�t a �personal disappointment� or wanting Koppel to share my �political views�. It is real-life, real-time, actual mass murder of some of the finest human beings who ever walked this earth. I lived among Laotian peasants for 4 years, some of the most decent, kind, wonderful people I have ever met in my life. In September 1969 I began interviewing peasants from northern Laos who had escaped massive and secret U.S. bombing of civilian targets that burned grandmothers alive with napalm, buried whole families alive from 500 pound bombs, and shredded infants and children with anti-personnel bombs. I was to interview over 2000 refugees in the next year and a half, and every single one reported that their village had been obliterated by U.S. bombing. They also reported that it was mainly civilians who were killed, since the soldiers were able to live in the deeply carpeted forests, while older people, mothers and children were forced to stay near their villages which were the main targets of the bombing.

I later discovered that the U.S. had dropped over 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, more than all of Europe and the entire Pacific Theater in World War II, much of it on �unprotected towns and villages� in direct violation of the Hague Conventions for the protection of civilian populations. to which the U.S. was a signatory. I also discovered that Henry Kissinger had personally directed this mass murder without consulting Congress or informing the media or American public.

Although this mass murder from the air slowly became known after September 1969, it was not only largely ignored by the media and Congress, but continued for years, and was even expanded by Mr. Kissinger into Cambodia where an area estimated by the U.S. Embassy to be inhabited by 2 million human beings was to be laid waste by August 1973.

My problem with Ted Koppel, much of the U.S. media, and Congress, was not that a �personal disappointment� or they they failed �to share my political views.� It was that, by failing to demand action against war crimes being committed by Henry Kissinger, who would have been executed had the Nuremberg Principles requiring the protection of civilian populations been applied to U.S. leaders, they were colluding in the commission of crimes of war against innocent people who did not even know where America was. While I sympathize with Ted Koppel as a human being, the fact is that he know first-hand that these crimes of war were being committed and contributed to the favorable media coverage of Henry Kissinger that allowed him to continue bombing civilians, illegally overthrowing governments, and supporting regimes which routinely practiced torture, throughout his stay in office.

I couldn�t agree more than we shouldn�t demonize people who don�t share our �political views,� which is why I like and admire Ted as a person. But it seems to me that when one�s government is committing illegal mass murder, and protesting it might save lives, that to collude in that mass murder while it is going on is not a matter of mere �political views� but basic humanity. Noone who talked to those peasants, and my findings were supported by a secret U.S. Embassy study brought to light by Jack Anderson, could doubt that the issue was real-life, actual mass murder that will stain our nation�s name � and its leaders, media, and public � as long as human civilization endures and it remains possible to dare raise the issue of crimes of war. The Laws of War, as we see every day, are among the few protections humanity has against total anarchy. To fail to take them seriously is not only morally repugnant but, in the end, a threat to us all.