DATE: Sunday, October 5, 1997               TAG: 9710020260

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

BILL BUCKLEY CASTS A SLUR, UNFAIRLY, ON DOINGS AT ODU

The media got a nasty lesson last week in how it feels when somebody twists a few facts, gets a bunch of other facts wrong, and simply makes up a few things so the story will sound better.

The media that got that lesson was this very newspaper. The person delivering the lesson was William F. Buckley Jr., the columnist, author and eloquent elder statesman of the conservative cause.

Buckley blew through town 10 days ago for a speech at Old Dominion University. In his wake a lot of noses are out of joint. Some of them belong to me, my bosses, ODU President James Koch, and other people who believe that while the papers sometimes make mistakes, they at least ought to try hard to get the basic story straight.

In this case, Buckley didn't. In fact, he committed gaffes that we wouldn't accept from a college journalism intern.

Here's what happened:

Buckley had spent an hour answering questions from a group of ODU honor students when he was asked to pose for a picture with one of them. The photographer, whom Buckley described in a nationally syndicated column as ``an elderly woman,'' noticed that the student, named ``P.J.,'' was wearing a small cross on a silver chain. She asked him to tuck it into his shirt, which he did. When Buckley asked her why he should do so, she said that some non-Christians might be offended if they saw the cross in the photo.

At this point, as Buckley tells it, he and P.J. engaged the photographer in a brief political-correctness debate on her belief that the cross might cause offense, just as some people are offended by photos of people drinking liquor or smoking cigarettes.

``The photographer thought it best to conclude the conversation,'' Buckley wrote. ``She snapped the picture quickly, and the community was spared the embarrassment of a picture in the paper of P.J. wearing a cross around his neck.''

Later in the column, Buckley mused on how this could occur in ``a cosmopolitan setting in the largest city in Virginia.''

``It is disheartening,'' he wrote, ``to reflect on the implications of life as authorized for publication in that paper in Norfolk.''

The problem is, the photographer did not work for ``that paper in Norfolk'' - us, that is - or for any other newspaper in the region, or even for the campus paper. She was a part-time, fill-in photographer hired by ODU to shoot some publicity shots. Her request that the student hide his cross is not ODU policy. In fact, it left ODU officials angry, embarrassed, and unlikely to employ her services again.

Also, the student's name was not ``P.J.'' and Norfolk is not the largest city in Virginia. But those are just the niggling little details, easy to get wrong. Close enough for government work, as the conservatives say. Heck, in our own story about the speech, the writer called Buckley ``obtuse'' when he meant ``abstruse.''

Buckley might also be called a prevaricator, though, for the way he twisted the column to create an excuse for his failure to probe further into what had happened. ``But some social situations preclude investigative reporting,'' he wrote. And, ``After the lecture I thought to address the president privately, but again the circumstances made this impossible . . . .''

In truth, according to an ODU official, Buckley had dinner with President Koch after the offending photo session and the two spent ``half an hour alone after dinner.''

``All Buckley ever had to do was just lean over and whisper something and all this would be straightened out,'' the official told me. ``But he obviously thought he'd found a column and he would not let anything get in the way of it.''

So what's the harm, you might ask? Maybe Buckley, noted for his love of the grape, got a few of the facts turned around in the course of a long day and a busy evening. No big deal.

But it became a bigger deal when Buckley's column got a quarter-page of space in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, along with a drawing of a cross and the bold headline, ``This, Then, Is the New Scarlet Letter?''

You can just hear the silk-stocking boys on Grace Street tsk-tsking all those bumpkins down the road in Norfolk, how their college and their newspaper are running a citywide cleansing of any public display of faith.

Rubbish. All Buckley needed to do before spreading this tale nationwide was pick up a phone and make one quick call. But he's a busy man, and terribly important, and Norfolk is way out there in the provinces, so why waste five minutes on probity?

This is just the kind of story that other commentators, particularly those down-on-the-dial talk-show hosts, love to pick up and spread around. Don't be surprised if some relative calls you from Hackensack wondering what the devil is going on down here.

We had reason to expect better of a man of Buckley's reputation. Koch and others have sent objections, so maybe we'll get an apology.

I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath. Penance doesn't make good copy. MEMO: Dave Addis is the editor of Commentary. Reach him at 446-2726, or

addis(AT)worldnet.att.net.

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