For a week each year Daechon Beach in South Korea is turned into a glorious mud hole. Mineral-rich mud is pumped onto the beach and in the ensuing days more than 2 million people frolic in the slimy stuff. As many as 100,000 foreigners may have taken part in this year’s event earlier this month, including a number of U.S. servicemembers.

One of those servicemembers, from Kunsan Air Base, got in trouble for allegedly getting drunk and beating up two South Koreans in the beach’s parking lot. Stars and Stripes went after that story. What it came up with was an additional one: The manager of the Boryeong Mud Festival, Lee Won-ku, lambasted U.S. servicemembers who come to the shindig. They get drunk and rowdy, he told reporter Ashley Rowland, and “leave mountains of garbage.”

So bad do the American troops behave, he said, that the festival organizers considered banning them from the beach. Stripes ran with the story, a straightforward one by Rowland reporting Lee’s indignation and threat. A front-page photo from The Associated Press in the Korea edition July 17 showed writhing people cavorting in the mud. Most of them looked like foreigners.

But foreigners from where? An angry letter to the editor headlined “Stripes threw mud at GIs” from Master Sgt. Donald Sparks estimated that no more than 5 percent of the tens of thousands of foreigners were servicemembers. Sparks, from Camp Red Cloud, South Korea, claimed Stripes was guilty of irresponsible journalism and of fostering “a negative portrayal of servicemembers.”

He decried use of “an interview with one source to single out GIs without getting all the facts and demographics of those tourists attending this festival that caused mayhem.” Sparks said non-U.S. servicemembers included American civilians working overseas and other citizens “from all over the world.”

Lee himself told the reporter that it was hard to ascertain which festival-goers were servicemembers (even though, he said, they are identifiable by their short haircuts) and thus no ban on them was put into effect.

The manager’s comments were newsworthy, as Rowland points out. At the same time, the letter writer had a point. There was no comment in the story from anybody who might have rebutted the South Korean official’s amply quoted statements — or who might have agreed with them, for that matter. And though one could deduce that servicemembers would have been in the small minority among the playful throng — 100,000 foreigners and 2 million South Koreans — the impression left was that the GIs dominated the scene.

Another celebration, another complaint

Two other letters that came in, commenting on Stripes’ coverage of a different sort of celebration, seemed a little unfair to me. The event was the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift. Stripes ran several stories, including one on June 29 reporting details of the public event to be held at Wiesbaden Army Airfield.

Some of those details were wrong or incomplete, according to a letter to the editor from Ronald MacArthur Hirst, from Wiesbaden, identified as “Berlin Airlift veteran and historian.” He said he has noticed “over the years that Stars and Stripes reporters (or the newspaper itself) has never been accurate” on statistics regarding the airlift. This time, he complained, Stripes had not named five additional towns from which the Allies had flown supplies into Berlin. He said the paper should have listed the precise number of tons delivered (2,325,509.6) and the precise number of flights (277,569). He said the airlift ended Sept. 30, 1949, not May 12 as the paper wrote. And he said the paper had told readers “for more than 59 years” that 31 Americans died in the airlift when the number was really 32.

The story did name four main towns whose airfields were used for the airlift, and the others were characterized even in an official American Forces Press Service release as “other northern Germany towns.” As to the exact number of tons delivered and flights made, it seems to me that giving them as “more than 2 million tons” and “more than 277,000 flights,” as the story did, was sufficiently informative. The airlift may have continued until September, but the Soviet siege was broken in May, as the official military press release also noted.

Regarding the number of airmen killed, I could find nowhere in the several stories Stripes did around the event this year any mention at all of casualties.

That letter might not have merited comment in this space if another had not come in playing off it — and taking Stripes and the entire media to task. Referring to the Hirst letter and Stripes’ airlift coverage, Lt. Col. James E. Bass of Heidelberg, Germany, wrote: “Whoever was in charge of that article and its publishing should be more than a little embarrassed. How hard is it to check facts? I’m making a jump here, but this is part of my problem with the media in general.”

The letter went on: “There is no oversight of the media; they self-police. Basically, they can print whatever they want and, unless they are sued and found guilty of libel, nothing is done.” And here in my view is the biggest jump: “Many times they risk the suit due to the potential profits from something that, although false, also happens to sell papers.”

I don’t know how to respond to that, other than to say that with the exception of the sleaziest of tabloids I don’t know of any news organization that would act that way. Does self-policing come with the commitment to “get the facts straight,” as Bass insists? By all means. But in some cases errors don’t turn out to be errors after all. And even when they’re whoppers it doesn’t mean the place you read or heard them is run by cynics or — in the case of the libel suit charge — fiscal nincompoops.