ROANOKE TIMES
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 1, 1995                   TAG: 9507030056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium


NEWSPAPERS WEIGH DEMANDS OF UNABOMBER PUBLISH DIATRIBE, OR RUN RISK THAT MOR

For any editor, the choices are terrible: Cave in to a terrorist, publish a lengthy diatribe and set a dangerous precedent. Refuse, and run the risk that the terrorist will kill more people.

That is exactly what editors at The New York Times and The Washington Post face as they consider whether to run a 62-page, single-spaced manifesto from a terrorist dubbed the Unabomber, whose 17 years of random bomb attacks are believed to have left three people dead and 22 wounded.

``I can well understand an editor or publisher wanting to head off the possibility of a calamity by bending journalistic rules a bit,'' said Marvin Kalb, a former CBS News correspondent and now a media analyst. ``If you had to be journalistically pure and say, `I am not going to yield,' ... and the next day a plane went up, how do you sleep at night?''

The anonymous Unabomber, who got his name because many of his targets have been universities, has eluded the FBI for years. He promised to forgo future bomb attacks designed to kill people if either the Times or the Post publishes his railings against computer technology and the industrial revolution. He has not promised to stop attacks intended to destroy property.

Penthouse magazine has offered to print the manifesto, but the bomber wants exposure in ``respectable'' papers first. If Penthouse is his only option, he has reserved the right to kill one more person.

Top editors at both national newspapers - where the Unabomber's rantings would take up seven full newspaper pages - say they are considering the request that they received Wednesday.

``We will act responsibly and not rashly, knowing that lives could be at stake, '' Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. said in a statement.

To Kalb, the Post and the Times already have bent the rules by publishing lengthy accounts of the bomber's manifesto, ``Industrial Society and Its Future,'' in news stories that ran in Friday editions of both papers.

If they decide to go further, it would not be the first time media capitulated to terrorist demands.

During the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, radio stations and CNN agreed to a government request to broadcast a harangue by the cult's leader.

In 1976, several papers published a statement by Croatian nationalists who had hijacked an airplane and threatened to kill 92 passengers.

But experts say the Unabomber situation is different. The crisis is not acute, and there is no guarantee that publishing the Unabomber's manifesto, and the three annual follow-up stories he's demanding, will stop the killings.



 by CNB