JOURNALIST SAYS RACE ARTICLE LIBELOUS
Author: Associated Press
Date: Friday, September 7, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
A journalist testified yesterday that scientist William Shockley was libeled
in a newspaper article describing Shockley's racial theory and his proposal
for a voluntary sterilization plan.
Clark Mollenhoff, a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee
University, was called as an expert witness in Shockley's $2.5 million libel
suit against Roger Witherspoon and Cox Newspapers Inc.
A column by Witherspoon published in July 1980 in The Atlanta Constitution
described Shockley's theory that blacks as a group are genetically inferior to
whites in intelligence and his plan to pay the "genetically disadvantaged" to
undergo sterilization.
The Constitution is one of the newspapers in the Cox group. Witherspoon
left the newspaper in 1982 and now is a free-lance writer in Atlanta.
Mollenhoff said he reviewed Witherspoon's article and compared it with
transcripts of two telephone interviews the writer conducted with Shockley in
1980.
"Overall, the impact of the article is to paint Dr. Shockley as an
American Hitler," he said. The article was "not accurate, not balanced and
unfair," Mollenhoff said.
Shockley received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for his part in the
invention of the transistor.
Earlier yesterday, Terrence Adamson, an attorney for Witherspoon and Cox,
told the six-member jury in opening arguments that Witherspoon accurately
described Shockley's theory and sterilization plan and then expressed his
opinion about the possible impact of the plan.
Witherspoon compared the Shockley plan to the Nazi atrocities against the
Jews in Germany during World War II "as a device to draw attention to the most
heinous aspects of the plan as he saw it," Adamson said.
Adamson argued that, because the column expressed Witherspoon's opinion,
under the law it cannot be the basis for a libel action.
Adamson told the jury in his opening statement that Shockley has used the
news media to thrust himself and his theories into the public eye despite
repeated refusals by the National Academy of Science to recognize his theories
on genetics.
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