Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

“The Gulf of Tonkin incident,” Hallin observes, “was a classic of Cold War news management . . . On virtually every important point, the reporting of the two Gulf of Tonkin incidents . . . was either misleading or simply false”—and in accordance with the needs of the U.S. executive at that crucial moment.

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. The Pentagon Papers analyst describes these events as “an important firebreak,” noting that “the Tonkin Gulf Resolution set U.S. public support for virtually any action.”

That the United States has a right to conduct military operations in South Vietnam to uproot the NLF and destroy the peasant society in which it was based, that its goals are democracy and self-determination, and that its forces “protect” and “bring security” to South Vietnamese peasants are principles taken for granted in the Braestrup–Freedom House version, where no patriotic assumption or cliché is ever challenged—or even noticed, so deeply rooted are these doctrines. Correspondingly, the fact that the media coverage surveyed is framed entirely within these patriotic premises passes unnoticed.

In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because “the destruction was mutual,”164 a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own—a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate.

The Times recognizes that the United States did suffer “shame” during its Indochina wars: “the shame of defeat.” Victory, we are to assume, would not have been shameful, and the record of aggression and atrocities generally supported by the Times evokes no shame. Rather, the United States thought it was “resisting” Communists “when it intervened in Indochina”; how we “resist” the natives defending their homes from our attack, the Times does not explain.

The United States did not achieve its maximal goals in Indochina, but it did gain a partial victory. Despite talk by Eisenhower and others about Vietnamese raw materials, the primary U.S. concern was not Indochina but rather the “domino effect,” the demonstration effect of independent development that might cause “the rot to spread” to Thailand and beyond, perhaps ultimately drawing Japan into a “New Order” from which the United States would be excluded.175 This threat was averted as the United States proceeded to teach the lesson that a “‘war of liberation’ . . . is costly, dangerous and doomed to failure” (Kennedy adviser General Maxwell Taylor, testifying to Congress).176 The countries of Indochina will be lucky to survive; they will not endanger global order by social and economic success in a framework that denies the West the freedom to exploit, infecting regions beyond, as had been feared. It might parenthetically be noted that although this interpretation of the American aggression is supported by substantial evidence,177 there is no hint of its existence in the popular histories or the retrospectives, for such ideas do not conform to the required image of aggrieved benevolence. Again, we see here the operation of the Orwellian principle that ignorance is strength.

Postwar U.S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here. Since “the destruction is mutual,” as is readily demonstrated by a stroll through New York, Boston, Vinh, Quang Ngai Province, and the Plain of Jars, we are entitled to deny reparations, aid, and trade, and to block development funds. The extent of U.S. sadism is noteworthy, as is the (null) reaction to it. In 1977, when India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam to replenish the herds destroyed by U.S. violence, the United States threatened to cancel “food-for-peace” aid, while the press featured photographs of peasants in Cambodia pulling plows as proof of Communist barbarity; the photographs in this case were probable fabrications of Thai intelligence, but authentic ones could, no doubt, have been obtained throughout Indochina. The Carter administration even denied rice to Laos (despite a cynical pretense to the contrary), where the agricultural system was destroyed by U.S. terror bombing. Oxfam America was not permitted to send ten solar pumps to Cambodia for irrigation in 1983; in 1981, the U.S. government sought to block a shipment of school supplies and educational kits to Cambodia by the Mennonite Church.

As Peter Biskind observes, for all the attempt at “balance,” and “despite the preference of [the PBS series] for doves over hawks, it is the right, not the left, that has set this film’s political agenda,” in conformity to elite opinion. Biskind concludes his review of the PBS series by stating: “The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy. The tragedy is that this film lacks the conviction to say so.”

There were, in fact, three distinct U.S. wars: the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South; the bombing of the peasant society of northern Laos, which the U.S. government conceded was unrelated to the war in South Vietnam; and the “clandestine war” between a CIA-run mercenary force based on mountain tribesmen and the Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam apparently at about the level of the Thai and other mercenaries introduced by the United States. The bombing of southern Laos was reported; the clandestine war and the bombing of northern Laos were not, apart from tales about North Vietnamese aggression, often fanciful and subjected to no critical analysis.

David Chandler, comments that the bombing turned “thousands of young Cambodians into participants in an anti-American crusade,” as it “destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK [Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution,” a “class warfare between the ‘base people,’ who had been bombed, and the ‘new people’ who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States.” “French intransigence had turned nationalists into Communists,” Philip Windsor observes, while “American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics.”34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of “base people,” and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse.

“a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”

History has been kind enough to contrive for us a “controlled experiment” to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or distant victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted or absent altogether.3 This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.