Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [130]
The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were indeed “unmindful,” but highly “patriotic” in the special and misleading sense that they kept—and keep—closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general “journalistic-literary-political culture” from which “the left” (meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense may adopt an “adversarial stance” with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from the elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and “the influence of democracy abroad,” in the real sense of these words.
These conclusions concerning media conformism are accepted in part by mainstream critics of the media. Thus Leonard Sussman, of Freedom House, observes that “U.S. intervention in 1965 enjoyed near-total . . . editorial support.”8 The “intervention” in 1965 included the deployment of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam, the regular bombing of North Vietnam, and the bombing of South Vietnam at triple the scale in a program of “unlimited aerial warfare inside the country at the price of literally pounding the place to bits.”9 It is a highly significant fact that neither then, nor before, was there any detectable questioning of the righteousness of the American cause in Vietnam, or of the necessity to proceed to full-scale “intervention.” By that time, of course, only questions of tactics and costs remained open, and further discussion in the mainstream media was largely limited to these narrow issues. While dissent and domestic controversy became a focus of media coverage from 1965, the actual views of dissidents and resisters were virtually excluded. These individuals were presented primarily as a threat to order, and while their tactics might be discussed, their views were not: “The antiwar movement stood at the bottom of the media’s hierarchy of legitimate political actors,” Daniel Hallin concludes from his survey of television coverage (the print media were hardly different), “and its access to the news and influence over it were still more limited.”10 All exactly as the propaganda model predicts.
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