LETTER TO THE EDITOR BY
JOHN FROTHINGHAM
News-Gazette,
I take exception to your Oct. 1 front-page story on the killing of civilians during the early days of the Korean War. This is an excellent example of a newspaper placing bad news on the front page in order to increase sales. Now that you no longer have any competition, you don’t need to use bad news to attract readers. We and the Germans were the only ones to fight fairly, and there were certainly many instances where we did not fight fairly. War is sort of like that.
In the body of the story, there are
conflicting stories. This is OK, because you printed both. Who do you suppose was going to be interested in reading the story anyway? Certainly not the majority of the
Was this story part of your Freedom
of Information Act campaign? My own thoughts are that while the public has
the right to know the facts, the vast majority could care less. If the
facts surrounding the story were suppressed almost 50 years ago, I suggest that there were
security and or other good reasons for doing so at that time.
As a retired military officer, if I
had been faced with similar circumstances, I probably would have given the order to fire if I knew I had no other
choice of saving civilian lives. Suppose I did not and American lives were
lost because I did not. Can you imagine the news story that would appear?
-
John Frothingham,
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