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His confession was therefore suspect from the start, and an “alternative model” of inducement-pressure coaching was plausible and relevant, from the Agca’s first implication of Bulgarians.
4.4. THE MASS MEDIA’S UNCRITICAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION
Despite the implausibility of the SHK claim that Agca had been hired by the Bulgarians and the KGB to shoot the pope, and although it was sustained by argument that amounted to sheer humbuggery, the Bulgarian Connection met the standard of utility.
4.5. BIASED SOURCING
Sterling and Henze, and to a lesser extent Michael Ledeen, dominated perceptions of the Bulgarian Connection in the U.S. mass media to a remarkable degree.
Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative activist and disinformationist, with ready access to the Times, has also received its close protection. His book Grave New World was reviewed in the Times by William Griffith, a Reader’s Digest “roving editor” and right-wing MIT political scientist who found Ledeen’s version of the Bulgarian Connection entirely convincing.
4.6. THE PROPAGANDA AGENDA: QUESTIONS UNASKED, SOURCES UNTAPPED
There is a close linkage among sources used, frames of reference, and agendas of the newsworthy.
Perhaps the most blatant case of willful ignorance concerned the Italian fixer and former member of SISMI, Francesco Pazienza.
5 The Indochina Wars (I): Vietnam
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE U.S. WARS IN INDOCHINA HAS ENGENDERED a good deal of bitter controversy, some close analysis of several specific incidents, and a few general studies.1
5.1. THE BOUNDS OF CONTROVERSY
The belief that the media, particularly television, were responsible for U.S. government failures is widely expressed.
As the war progressed, elite opinion gradually shifted to the belief that the U.S. intervention was a “tragic mistake” that was proving too costly, thus enlarging the domain of debate to include a range of tactical questions hitherto excluded.
Fromkin and Chace define “opponents of the war”—meaning, presumably, critics whose views merit serious consideration—as those who “did not believe that ‘whipping’ the enemy [North Vietnam] was enough, so long as the enemy refused to submit or surrender.”
5.2. “THE WILD MEN IN THE WINGS”
As the elite consensus eroded in the late 1960s, criticism of the “noble cause” on grounds of its lack of success became more acceptable, and the category of “wild men in the wings” narrowed to those who opposed the war on grounds of principle—the same grounds on which they opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, later, Afghanistan.
The search for “opposing viewpoints” as things went wrong was also extremely narrow, limited to the domain of tactics—that is, limited to the question of “whether the policy enunciated worked,” viewed entirely from the standpoint of U.S. interests, and with official premises taken as given.
Unable to develop any political base in the south, the U.S. government proceeded to expand the war. It was able to do this by continually manipulating the political scene in South Vietnam to assure the attainment of its objective: continued fighting until an anti-Communist regime, susceptible to American will, was established in the South.
By the standards we rightly apply to the actions of the Soviet Union or other official enemies, there is nothing further that need be said about the media and Indochina.
We cannot quite say that the propaganda model is verified in the case of the Indochina wars, since it fails to predict such extraordinary, far-reaching, and exceptionless subservience to the state propaganda system.
5.3. THE EARLY STAGES: A CLOSER LOOK
The “first Indochina war,” fought by the French and their client forces and largely supplied by the United States, came to an end with the Geneva Accords of 1954, which established a partition at the 17th parallel pending reunification through elections within two years. The United States pledged not to obstruct these arrangements.
The fundamental source of strength for the revolutionary movement, Race continues, was the appeal of its constructive programs—for example, the land-reform program, which “achieved a far broader distribution of land than did the government program, and without the killing and terror which is associated in the minds of Western readers with communist practices in land reform.”
In the New York Times version, the United States was leading “the free world’s fight to contain aggressive Communism” (Robert Trumbull), defending South Vietnam “against the proxy armies of Soviet Russia—North and South Vietnamese guerrillas” (Hanson Baldwin), just as the French had fought “a seven-and-a-half-year struggle” against “foreign-inspired and supplied Communists.”
In this dismal record we see very clearly the consequences of mindless media obedience in a state with enormous resources of violence.
5.4. REPORTING ON THE WAR
As the U.S. invasion mounted in scale and intensity, Indochina was flooded with war correspondents, many of whom reported what they s...
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In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: “We thank you for liberating us from Communist terror.”
Television analyst Edward Jay Epstein
Reporting of civilian casualties rose from 1966 to a peak in early 1968, then declined sharply as the United States turned to the murderous accelerated pacification campaign, which Hallin does not discuss, presumably because it was largely ignored by television, which had shifted attention to the negotiating tables in Paris in accordance with Washington priorities.
Attribution of the American failure by the public to “treason” or “lack of American will” caused by the failure of the media to support our just cause with sufficient fervor is, therefore, “hardly surprising.”93 This may well explain why the public has apparently been willing to accept the tales about media treachery.
5.5. SOME CRUCIAL EVENTS OF THE WAR 5.5.1. The Tonkin Gulf incident
By mid-1964, there was a growing consensus among Vietnamese in favor of a negotiated political settlement, while the United States was maneuvering with increasing desperation to evade what internal documents describe as “premature negotiations.”
In summary, the national media, overcome by jingoist passion, failed to provide even minimally adequate coverage of this crucial event, although appropriate skepticism would have been aroused in the mind of the reader of the foreign or “alternative” media, or the reader with the sophistication to treat the media as a disinformation system disguising a reality that can perhaps be ascertained with sufficient energy and dedication.
5.5.2. The Tet offensive
Media coverage of the Tet offensive has been the centerpiece of the critique of the media for “losing the war” by their incompetent reporting and their anti-government bias reflecting their passion for confronting authority.
The Braestrup-Freedom House thesis has two essential components: (1) coverage of the Tet offensive illustrates media incompetence and their “adversarial stance”; (2) by their portrayal of an American victory as a defeat, the media bear responsibility for the loss of American resolve and the subsequent American defeat in Vietnam.
With regard to the course of public opinion, the Freedom House study decisively refutes its own thesis. It includes a chapter on public opinion polls by Burns Roper, which demonstrates, as Braestrup concedes, that “there is no available evidence of a direct relationship between the dominant media themes in early 1968 and changes in American mass public opinion vis-à-vis the Vietnam war itself,” but rather a continuing “slow drift toward the dove side” after an initial wave of support for the president and “frustration and anger at the foe” during the Tet offensive.
As in this example, the U.S. government claim that the Tet offensive was a military defeat for the Communists was widely reported, although the U.S. government official’s perception of an initial Viet Cong victory goes well beyond the typical media accounts in the crime of “pessimism.”
While the U.S. media rarely strayed from the framework of the state propaganda system, others were unconstrained by these limits: for example, the Le Monde correspondents cited; or British photo-journalist Philip Jones Griffiths, who concluded from his observations on the scene that the thousands of civilian victims of the reconquest of Hué “were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen,” and then designated “as the victims of a Communist massacre.”132
We have now addressed the argument presented by critics of the media for its alleged “adversarial stance” on their own chosen grounds, the grounds that they select as the strongest for their case.
5.5.3. The Paris Peace Agreements
The Tet offensive convinced large sectors of elite opinion that the costs of the U.S. effort were too high.
The Paris Agreements committed “the United States and all other countries [to] respect the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam” (article 1).
Surveying these events, we reach essentially the same conclusions as before, although once again the performance of the media—at the peak period of their alleged “independence” and “adversarial stance”—goes well beyond the predictions of the propaganda model, exceeding the expected norm of obedience to the state authorities and reaching the level that one finds in totalitarian states.
5.6. THE VIETNAM WAR IN RETROSPECT
In April 1975, the war came to an end, and the thirty-year conflict entered a new phase.
in a land that had been reduced to ruin by foreign armies after a century of colonial oppression. In the United States too, elite groups faced a problem of reconstruction, bu...
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In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forest.
