Readers will recall from last month's UNEWS the free publicity the Boston Globe extended to Steve Hassan on February 4 of this year. We thank you all for your many letters to the various parties in Boston. Despite our protests the Globe "stands by" this prejudiced report. Yet, it was a report in which the Globe very selectively accounted for the integrity and credibility of Steve Hassan's activities. In this regard, we wanted to provide our readers with one more piece of information that the Globe did not want you to know:

In a decision dated March 28, 1996, Justice Christina Harms, a presiding judge in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, ruled that Steve Hassan's testimony could not be introduced on the basis of being expert testimony. After reviewing the decision of the federal judge in U.S. v. Fishman (see last month's UNEWS) Justice Harms ruled:

"The Court found in that case [Fishman] that the theories regarding brain washing, if you will, or mind control or cults that the experts wanted to testify to, were not generally accepted within the scientific community. And those experts, and in particular the expert, Doctor Singer, in the Fishman case, that expert had a Ph.D. in Psychology, something more than Mr. Hassan has. He has a Master's Degree.

I am persuaded by the findings and the reasoning in Fishman that similarly Mr. Hassan's views or theories published or as explained from the stand on what is a cult and what is not a cult and how mind control or thought control or brain washing or the like fit into that, is not sufficiently accepted within the applicable scientific community to constitute an area of expertise. And so to that extent, I reverse my ruling, I reconsider and I vacate my qualification of him as an expert in cult and mind control."

This decision is all the more remarkable when one recalls that it is the State of Massachusetts alone that licenses Steve Hassan to hold himself out as "a mental health professional," and Steve is only authorized to do so within the limited confines of Massachusetts. Why did the Globe not report this fact?

As reported elsewhere in this edition, in the intolerance and folly that follows the efforts of advocacy journalists and corrupt editors to impose their values upon their readers, censorship, the arch-enemy of a free press, runs buck naked around the editorial department.

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