Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [133]
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. Let us consider how superpower intervention would be presented from a point of view that permits aggression to be understood as aggression.
In the case of Soviet intervention, there is no serious controversy. True, the Soviet Union has security concerns in Eastern Europe, including states that collaborated with the Nazis in an attack on the Soviet Union that practically destroyed it a generation ago and now serve as a buffer to a rearmed West Germany that is part of a hostile and threatening military alliance. True, Afghanistan borders areas of the Soviet Union where the population could be inflamed by a radical Islamic fundamentalist revival, and the rebels, openly supported by bitter enemies of the Soviet Union, are undoubtedly terrorists committed to harsh oppression and religious fanaticism who carry out violent acts inside the Soviet Union itself and have been attacking Afghanistan from Pakistani bases since 1973, six years before the Soviet invasion.20 But none of these complexities bear on the fact that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan, holds Poland in a firm grip, etc. True, the Russians were invited into Afghanistan in 1979, but as the London Economist accurately observed, “an invader is an invader unless invited in by a government with some claim to legitimacy,”21 and the government that the Soviet Union installed to invite it in plainly lacked any such claim.
None of these matters elicit serious controversy, nor should they. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, like earlier cases of Soviet intervention in the region occupied by the Red Army as it drove out the Nazis during World War II, are described as aggression, and the facts are reported in these terms. The United Nations has repeatedly condemned the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and regularly investigates and denounces the crimes they have committed. Western reporters cover the war from the standpoint of the rebels defending their country from foreign attack, entering Afghanistan with them from their Pakistani sanctuaries. Official Soviet pronouncements are treated not merely with skepticism but with disdain.
In the case of the U.S. intervention in Indochina, no such interpretation has ever been conceivable, apart from “the wild men in the wings,” although it is at least as well grounded as the standard, and obviously correct, interpretation of the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the reporting practice of journalists and commentators is also radically different in the two cases. We put off for a moment the more significant issue of how the war is understood, focusing first on the narrower question of journalistic practice.
In sharp contrast to the Soviet aggression, it was standard practice throughout the Indochina war for journalists to report Washington pronouncements as fact, even in the extreme case when official statements were known to be false. Furthermore, this practice persisted through the period when the media had allegedly had become “a notable new source of national power” threatening government authority. To mention only one typical case from the year in which, we are to understand, this status had been definitively attained (see p. 158), in March 1970 the media reported a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos on the basis of a speech by President Nixon announcing that North Vietnamese forces in Laos had suddenly risen from 50,000 to 67,000. Nixon’s comment came immediately after the U.S. military attaché in Vientiane presented his standard briefing citing the lower figure—a source of much private amusement among the press corps in Vientiane, as one of us witnessed at first hand—but the presidential fabrication was reported as fact.