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Giuseppe Santovito. From 1983 onward it was alleged in the Italian press that Pazienza had been involved in getting Agca to talk, and he himself eventually made detailed accusations of coaching by elements of SISMI. Although Pazienza was readily available for interviews in a New York City jail, the New York Times ignored him. Our hypothesis is that they did this because if they had talked to him it would have been difficult to avoid discussing his connections with Ledeen and Sterling (both Times sources and under Times protection). This would not have reflected well on the quality of the paper’s sourcing. Pazienza’s story would also have highlighted the Times’s suppression of facts concerning the corruption of SISMI and raised questions about coaching. This would have disturbed the propaganda line.

The trial in Rome was awkward for the Western media, as Agca quickly declared himself to be Jesus and, more important, failed to produce any supportive evidence backing up his claims of Bulgarian involvement. The diligent and extensive court investigation found numerous Gray Wolves links to Agca in the period just up to his assassination attempt, but no witness to his (allegedly) numerous meetings with Bulgarians in Rome, no money, no car, and, in the end, no conviction. As we have pointed out, in addition to the already available evidence of atrocious prison practice in dealing with Agca, and the 1981 meetings with intelligence officials and Martella’s offer, there was a steady accumulation of claims and evidence of pressures on Agca to implicate the Bulgarians. But, despite this evidence and the failure to convict the Bulgarians after a lengthy investigation and trial, the mass media of the West never provided any serious reevaluations of the case. Almost uniformly they hid behind the fact that an Italian court dismissed the case for lack of evidence rather than demonstrated innocence. They never hinted at the possibility that an Italian court and jury might still be biased against the Eastern bloc and protective of the powerful Western interests that had supported the Bulgarian Connection so energetically.

The mass media also never looked back at their own earlier claims and those of the disinformationists to see how they had stood up to the test of accumulated evidence. On January 3, 1983, Newsweek had quoted an Italian official who said that “we have substantial evidence . . . [that] Agca operated in close contact with the Bulgarians,” and the New York Times editorialized on October 20, 1984, that “Agca’s accounts of meetings with Bulgarian officials are verifiable in important details.” If there was “substantial evidence” and “verifiable” details long before the trial, why was this evidence not produced in the courtroom? Why, after an enormous further investigative effort was there still not enough evidence to sustain a conviction? The U.S. mass media didn’t even try to answer these questions. This would mean asking serious questions about the validity of the SHK model and considering alternatives, which the media have never been prepared to do. For them, the alternative model, plausible from the beginning and, by March 1986, based on a great deal of evidence, was still the “Bulgarian view.” The questions raised by the “Bulgarian view,” we believe, would have been applied by the U.S. mass media to analogous facts in a Moscow setting. This means that the view actually employed by the media from beginning to end was a “U.S. government view,” as suggested by a propaganda model. That this was true even after the trial ended we show in a detailed analysis in appendix 2, “Tagliabue’s Finale on the Bulgarian Connection: A Case Study in Bias.”

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 It is widely held that the media “lost the war” by exposing the general population to its horrors and by unfair, incompetent, and biased coverage reflecting the “adversary