Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [149]
The network anchormen not only accepted the framework of interpretation formulated by the state authorities, but also were optimistic about the successes achieved in the U.S. war of defense against Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam. Epstein cites work by George Baily, who concludes: “The results in this study demonstrate the combat reports and the government statements generally gave the impression that the Americans were in control, on the offense and holding the initiative, at least until Tet of 1968,” a picture accepted by the network anchormen. Television “focused on [the] progress” of the American ground forces, supporting this picture with “film, supplied by the Pentagon, that showed the bombing of the North” and “suggesting that the Americans were also rebuilding South Vietnam”—while they were systematically destroying it, as could be deduced inferentially from scattered evidence for which no context or interpretation was provided. NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report” described “the American forces in Vietnam as “builders” rather than destroyers,” a “central truth” that “needs underscoring.”
What made this especially deceptive and hypocritical was the fact, noted earlier, that the most advanced and cruel forms of devastation and killing—such as the free use of napalm, defoliants, and Rome plows—were used with few constraints in the South, because its population was voiceless, in contrast with the North, where international publicity and political complications threatened, so that at least visible areas around the major urban centers were spared.86
As for news coverage, “all three networks had definite policies about showing graphic film of wounded American soldiers or suffering Vietnamese civilians,” Epstein observes. “Producers of the NBC and ABC evening-news programs said that they ordered editors to delete excessively grisly or detailed shots,” and CBS had similar policies, which, according to former CBS News president Fred W. Friendly, “helped shield the audience from the true horror of the war.” “The relative bloodlessness of the war depicted on television helps to explain why only a minority in the Lou Harris—Newsweek poll said that television increased their dissatisfaction with the war”; such coverage yielded an impression, Epstein adds, of “a clean, effective technological war,” which was “rudely shaken at Tet in 1968.” As noted earlier, NBC withdrew television clips showing harsh treatment of Viet Cong prisoners at the request of the Kennedy administration.
Throughout this period, furthermore, “television coverage focused almost exclusively on the American effort.” There were few interviews with GVN military or civilian leaders, “and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were almost nonexistent on American television newscasts.”
There was one famous exception to the sanitizing of the war, an August 5, 1965, CBS report by Morley Safer showing U.S. Marines burning huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters, which elicited “a semiofficial campaign” by the Pentagon “to discredit the television story and vilify the correspondent as ‘unpatriotic.’” But surveys of television newscasts by Epstein and Wisconsin Professor Lawrence Lichty show that “instances shown on TV of American brutality toward the South Vietnamese, such as Cam Ne, ‘could be counted on one hand’ [Lichty],” “even though hundreds of South Vietnamese villages were destroyed during this period.” “The Cam Ne story is famous for being the exception to the rule.”
Returning soldiers told a different story, and it became increasingly clear, although not through the medium of television, that the war was bloody and brutal, leading to “disillusionment”—and among a large sector of the general population, increasingly “out of control,” a much stronger and more appropriate reaction.
But, Epstein continues, “the televised picture of gradual progress in the war was abruptly shattered by the Communist [Tet] offensive