Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [143]
No such conception of the evolving events, and their meaning, was ever made accessible through the mainstream media, which kept to the official line that the United States was pursuing limited measures “to strengthen South Vietnam against attack by the Communists,” supporting South Vietnam “against Communist aggression.”65
In the New York Times version, the United States was leading “the free world’s fight to contain aggressive Communism” (Robert Trumbull), defending South Vietnam “against the proxy armies of Soviet Russia—North and South Vietnamese guerrillas” (Hanson Baldwin), just as the French had fought “a seven-and-a-half-year struggle” against “foreign-inspired and supplied Communists.” In early 1965, President Johnson decided “to step up resistance to Vietcong infiltration in South Vietnam” (Tom Wicker); the Vietcong “infiltrate” in their own country, while we “resist” this aggression. Since the South Vietnamese guerrillas were “trying to subvert this country” (David Halberstam), it was natural that the Times supported the strategic-hamlet program as necessary despite the coercion and brutality; it was “conducted as humanely as possible” to offer the peasants “better protection against the Communists” (Halberstam, Homer Bigart). The peasant support for the South Vietnamese “aggressors” and the reasons for it were ignored. Hallin comments that in the entire New York Times coverage from 1961 through September 1963, he found two “extremely brief” references to land tenure.66
While the print media did on occasion reflect the perceptions and opinions of American military officers in the field, arousing much irate condemnation thereby for their anti-Americanism and “negative reporting,” television was more obedient. Thus “the head of the Pentagon’s public-affairs office was able to assure Kennedy that the [NBC] network had been persuaded that it would be ‘against the interest of the United States’ to show its coverage of ‘rough treatment by South Vietnamese soldiers to Viet-Cong prisoners, with a U.S. Army captain appearing in this sequence.’ NBC’s news director undertook to withhold this film’s scheduled appearance on the Huntley-Brinkley show, and to keep it on the shelf so far as any other programs were concerned.”67
Until the expansion of the war in 1965 began to provoke some concern, the NLF and DRV were “treated almost exclusively as an arm of international Communism,” Hallin found in his analysis of the Times’s coverage. “The term civil war began to be used in 1965” and “the term aggression began to appear sometimes in quotation marks”—referring, of course, to Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam, the concept of American aggression being unimaginable, then or since. But concern over Vietnamese “aggression” never abated, as when James Reston discussed “the main point”: “How, then, is this aggression by subversion to be stopped?”—referring to aggression by Vietnamese against the American invaders and their clients. Similarly, on television, even more conformist than the print media, Peter Jennings, showing Pentagon films on U.S. air attacks, commented that “This is the shape of things to come for Communist aggression in Vietnam,” while NBC’s Jack Perkins, reporting an air-force attack that wiped out a “village unabashedly advertising itself with signs and flags as a Vietcong village,” justified the attack as necessary: “The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed.” It is taken for granted that the Americans had every right to be marauding in a region of Vietnam where “Everything in this area for years was Vietcong.” A television report on Operation Attleboro described the fighting as raging “once again to preserve democracy.”68
Summarizing, from the late 1940s, the United States