Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [129]
A propaganda model leads to different expectations. On its assumptions, we would expect media coverage and interpretation of the war to take for granted that the United States intervened in the service of generous ideals, with the goal of defending South Vietnam from aggression and terrorism and in the interest of democracy and self-determination. With regard to the second-level debate on the performance of the media, a propaganda model leads us to expect that there would be no condemnation of the media for uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of U.S. benevolence and for adherence to the official line on all central issues, or even awareness of these characteristics of media performance. Rather, given that the U.S. government did not attain all of its objectives in Indochina, the issue would be whether the media are to be faulted for undermining the noble cause by adopting too “adversarial” a stance and departing thereby from fairness and objectivity.
We shall see that all of these expectations are amply fulfilled.
5.1. THE BOUNDS OF CONTROVERSY
“For the first time in history,” Robert Elegant writes, “the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen,” leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The belief that the media, particularly television, were responsible for U.S. government failures is widely expressed. It was endorsed by the right-wing media-monitoring organization Accuracy in Media in its hour-long “Vietnam Op/Ed” aired by public television in response to its own thirteen-part series on the war.2 According to a more “moderate” expression of this view, the media had become a “notable new source of national power” by 1970 as part of a general “excess of democracy,” contributing to “the reduction of governmental authority” at home and a resulting “decline in the influence of democracy abroad.” “Broader interests of society and government” require that if journalists do not impose “standards of professionalism,” “the alternative could well be regulation by the government” to the end of “restoring a balance between government and media.”3 Freedom House Executive-Director Leonard Sussman, commenting on Big Story, the study of media coverage of the Tet offensive sponsored by Freedom House, describes the “adversarial aspect” of the press-government relation as “normal,” presupposing without argument that it has been demonstrated, but asks: “Must free institutions be overthrown because of the very freedom they sustain?”4 John Roche proceeds further still, calling for congressional investigation of “the workings of these private governments” who distorted the record in pursuit of their “anti-Johnson mission,” although he fears Congress is too “terrified of the media” and their awesome power to take on this necessary task.5
New York Times television critic John Corry defends the media as merely “unmindful,” not “unpatriotic” as the harsher critics claim. They are not “anti-American,” despite their adversarial stance; rather, “they reflect a powerful element of the journalistic-literary-political culture,” where “the left wins battles . . . by default” because “its ideas make up the moral and intellectual framework for a large part of the culture,” and “television becomes an accomplice of the left when it allows the culture to influence its news judgments,” as in his view it regularly does.6
Media spokespersons, meanwhile, defend their commitment to independence while conceding that they may err through excessive zeal in calling the government to account in vigorous pursuit of their role as watchdog.
Within the mainstream, the debate is largely framed within the bounds illustrated by the PBS-AIM interchange broadcast on the public television network. AIM’s “Vietnam