Journalism Dept. Gets U.S. Grant : Boston U and Government Ties Spur Debate on Ethics

H. Joachim Maitre, acting dean of Boston University’s School of Communication, recently tacked a sign above his neat desk, not far from his gold-braided military caps and photos of fighter planes.

“Command Post--Cold War Sector,” it reads.

Maitre says a student gave him the computer-printed sign as “a joke.” But many journalists and educators, both in and out of one of the nation’s largest schools of journalism, broadcasting and public relations, are not so sure.

Bitter disputes and angry resignations over allegations of right-wing politics, international intrigue and McCarthy-style tactics have torn the school of 1,817 students and 92 faculty members in recent months. Moreover, critics say the school’s ties to U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. Information Agency may compromise its journalistic integrity.

At the center of the turmoil is Maitre, a 51-year-old former East German MiG pilot who defected to the West in 1953. Since then, he has written on political and military affairs for numerous U.S. and German publications. Now he says it is his “mission” to teach American journalism.

“Yes, I’m a propagandist,” Maitre said in an interview. “I want the whole world to have the same system of journalism as we have.” After all, he added, “our Constitution is propaganda. It espouses a system, a value.”

There’s no question that the university espouses an unusual brand of journalism. A former Czech spy turned Boston University journalism professor, for example, last week opened the nation’s only Center for the Study of Disinformation, or government lying to manipulate the news. He also teaches a popular course on disinformation.

“This is not a course to train future American spies,” said Prof. Lawrence M. Martin-Bittman, 55, who directed disinformation for the Soviet secret police as a Czech intelligence operative in the mid-1960s. “It is designed to protect American journalists from being deceived. What a student does afterward is his business.”

Maitre marched with anti-Sandinista combat troops twice last year to produce what he calls a “lobbying film” for a conservative Washington group that spent $2 million seeking congressional aid for the Nicaraguan rebels.

Also Offers Public Relations

“Let’s not forget, the college also includes public relations,” Maitre said when asked about “Bitter Harvest,” his 30-minute film for the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty. “The propaganda effect of vivid colors cannot be overestimated.”

Maitre also runs a controversial program, under a $180,000 grant from the U.S. Information Agency, that is scheduled to begin teaching journalism in January to 60 Afghan refugees and resistance fighters in Pakistan. The program, under a 1985 congressional appropriation of $500,000, aims to break the Soviet news blackout on Afghanistan by creating an Afghan news service to provide news stories and video footage to foreign wire services and TV networks.

“Perhaps our major task is to develop propaganda” to counter Soviet propaganda, Maitre said. He added, “I assume (the students) will be basically anti-Soviet.”

School support for the Afghan cause is no secret. Afghan relief posters and photos hang in offices and the student lounge, Afghan handicrafts fill cabinets by the main entrance, and the school was official host last weekend for a three-day “Afghan Cultural Fair” by a local Afghan resistance support group.

Maitre declined to name the three professors who have volunteered to work with him in Pakistan because “we have been declared an official enemy by the Soviet Union.” But in a separate interview, university President John R. Silber said he has no qualms about faculty members teaching in Peshawar, a rough-and-tumble border town near the Khyber Pass.

‘Worth Dying For’

“I think it’s a cause worth dying for,” said Silber, 60, a tough-talking Texan who has run the school for 16 years.

Others angrily disagree. Critics both in and out of this urban university of 17,000 on the outskirts of Boston say the program--and Maitre’s approach--ties the journalism school too closely to U.S. foreign policy and the USIA, the official voice of the United States abroad.

“It violates all kinds of journalistic ethics and integrity to become a propaganda arm for the U.S. government, as they would be in Pakistan,” said John Wicklein, a former dean of Boston University’s communications school, who now runs the Kiplinger fellowship program for journalists at Ohio State University’s school of journalism. “I think it’s prostituting the school.”

“The question is to what extent should a school dedicated to freedom of expression be involved with what in effect is a government propaganda effort,” said Everette E. Dennis, director of the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in New York. “I think it compromises the integrity of a journalism program.”

“Anybody who goes in there in this role will be wearing a neon sign saying ‘Yankee propagandist,’ and nothing they say can deny that,” said Bernice Buresh, an associate professor of journalism who has clashed with Maitre over the issue. “It’s an Indiana Jones approach to journalism education.”

The program “leaves us vulnerable to the charge that we are training agent provocateurs or political agents,” agreed Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor. “The question is whether he’s going to be dean or fight international communism.”

The Hearst Corp., whose King Features Syndicate won a $310,000 grant from the U.S. Information Agency to arrange news distribution for the Afghan news service, last month informed the government that it will withdraw from the program on Dec. 31 without “implementing” the program, agency officials said in Washington.

Hearst’s withdrawal came after Michael G. Gartner, head of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and editor of the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times in Kentucky, complained to King Features. “As an editor, how can I rely on a syndicate that is in bed with the U.S. propaganda agency?,” he wrote.

But university President Silber said Gartner “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” The only people who believe the Afghan program places the school in a conflict, Silber added, are “the malignant and the ignorant.”

“We will not be persuaded by efforts of the Soviet Union and people of their cause to stop informing people of the Afghan cause,” Silber said.

‘Giving Them the Tools’

“We’re not shaping their news,” said John R. Kelly, 39, a film professor who will teach the Afghans. “We’re giving them the tools to tell their story.”

Ronald S. Goldman, an associate dean, also defended the program “even if it means compromising the absolute purity of our ivory tower, if it means the voice of the Afghans can be heard.”

Fewer voices are being heard at the school, however. The director of the journalism department, David A. Klatell, resigned last spring, saying stress from the dispute had worsened health problems. And Dean Bernard S. Redmont, who had publicly opposed the Pakistan program, resigned in July after the USIA grant was announced.

Redmont declined comment in London, where he now runs Boston University’s Semester Abroad program. But the Daily Free Press, BU’s independent newspaper, reported this week that four of Redmont’s opponents on the Afghan issue had used “McCarthy-like tactics” to discredit him by spreading rumors and reports about his testimony as a witness at an accused Communist agent’s trial in 1951. Redmont, then an editor at U.S. News & World Report, denied under oath that he was a Communist agent.

David Barboza, a junior at the school and deputy managing editor of the Daily Free Press, said that assistant professor of journalism Henry G. LaBrie III met with reporters last spring to suggest they look into Redmont’s past. Last week, Barboza said, Associate Dean Jasper K. Smith gave him 12 pages of photocopied news stories and a book detailing Redmont’s role in the 1950s.

Denies Discrediting Dean

In a telephone interview, Smith acknowledged researching Redmont’s past last spring and providing the material to Barboza. But Smith said it was “totally a lie” to suggest he had tried to discredit Redmont. “I didn’t want it to be made public,” he said. “I knew exactly what would happen. I’d be accused of being a McCarthyite.”

In a separate interview, LaBrie declined comment on whether he encouraged the student paper to write about Redmont’s past. But he said that he, too, offered his resignation last week after discovering that USIA was more involved in the Afghan program “than I expected,” including sending three employees to Pakistan last spring to help set it up.

“I felt the integrity of the university was at risk,” LaBrie said, “because it’s going to blow up and embarrass us all.”