Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [134]
Only very rarely did U.S. reporters make any effort to see the war from the point of view of “the enemy”—the peasants of South Vietnam, Laos, or later Cambodia—or to accompany the military forces of “the enemy” resisting the U.S. assault. Such evidence as was available was ignored or dismissed. In reporting the war in Afghanistan, it is considered essential and proper to observe it from the standpoint of the victims. In the case of Indochina, it was the American invaders who were regarded as the victims of the “aggression” of the Vietnamese, and the war was reported from their point of view, just as subsequent commentary, including cinema, views the war from this perspective.
Refugee testimony, which could have provided much insight into the nature of the war, was also regularly ignored. The enemy of the U.S. government was the enemy of the press, which could not even refer to them by their own name: they were the “Viet Cong,” a derogatory term of U.S.-Saigon propaganda, not the National Liberation Front, a phrase “never used without quotation marks” by American reporters,24 who regularly referred to “Communist aggression” (E. W. Kenworthy) by the South Vietnamese in South Vietnam and Communist efforts “to subvert this country” (David Halberstam)25—their country, then under the rule of a U.S.-imposed client regime.
To a substantial extent, the war was reported from Washington. In late 1970, when the process of elite defection was well under way, Los Angeles Times Washington correspondent Jules Witcover described the Washington scene during the earlier years:
While the press corps in those years diligently reported what the government said about Vietnam, and questioned the inconsistencies as they arose, too few sought out opposing viewpoints and expertise until too late, when events and the prominence of the Vietnam dissent could no longer be ignored. In coverage of the war, the press corps’ job narrowed down to three basic tasks—reporting what the government said, finding out whether it was true, and assessing whether the policy enunciated worked. The group did a highly professional job on the first task. But it fell down on the second and third, and there is strong evidence the reason is too many reporters sought the answers in all three categories from the same basic source—the government.26
The search for “opposing viewpoints” as things went wrong was also extremely narrow, limited to the domain of tactics—that is, limited to the question of “whether the policy enunciated worked,” viewed entirely from the standpoint of U.S. interests, and with official premises taken as given.
Furthermore, the U.S. war was openly supported by U.S. allies, some of whom sent combat forces (Australia, Thailand, South Korea), while others enriched themselves through their participation in the destruction of Indochina. For Japan and South Korea, this participation contributed significantly to their “take-off” to the status of major economic powers, while Canada and Western Europe also profited from their support for the U.S. operations. In contrast to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United Nations never condemned the U.S. “intervention,” nor did it investigate or denounce the crimes committed in the course of U.S. military operations, a reflection of U.S. world power and influence. These facts notwithstanding, it is common practice to denounce the UN and world opinion for its “double standard” in condemning the U.S. “intervention” in defense of South Vietnam while ignoring the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, regularly described as “genocidal,” a term never used in the mainstream media with regard to the United States in Indochina.
At the time of the full-scale U.S. invasion of Vietnam, in 1965, when there was as yet no debate