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By Root 2677 0

Changing War in Indochina,” Charles Collingwood reported the progress of the pacification campaign in Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta—“once an NLF stronghold,” Hallin observes. This province had been the target of Operation Speedy Express in early 1969, one of the most brutal American operations of the war in an area that had been organized under NLF control with no known North Vietnamese presence, conquered through the “awesome firepower” of the Ninth Division. This included air strikes using napalm, high explosives, and antipersonnel bombs, B-52 bombing, and artillery shelling “around the clock” at a level that “it is impossible to reckon,” with armed helicopters “scouring the landscape from the air night and day” and accounting for “many and perhaps most of the enemy kills”—about 11,000 according to the U.S. command, with 748 weapons captured, a fair indication of who was killed.90 Collingwood was pleased to observe progress in pacification, although there was still “Indian country” beyond. “This is almost like St. Louis on the move into the frontier,” his companion, a U.S. government adviser replied, in a reference that is more accurate than he probably knew.91

In contrast to the heroic and humane image of the American soldiers defending democracy, the NLF and North Vietnamese were portrayed in “an almost perfectly one-dimensional image . . . as cruel, ruthless and fanatical.” Of twelve positive comments by journalists that he found throughout the war, Hallin remarks, “10 concerned the effectiveness of enemy forces: this was the only element of television’s image of the enemy that changed substantially” in the course of the post-Tet shift, mirroring establishment qualms about the prospects for the success of American arms. “What did not change was the dark picture of evil.” When U.S. forces burned villages, this was a necessity because they provided cover and support for the Viet Cong. The results of B-52 saturation bombing were a “tragedy of war.” But when a North Vietnamese artillery shell hit an orphanage in An Hoa in October 1970, ABC’s George Watson commented with horror: “No one was prepared for the massacre, the irrational murder that the North Vietnamese inflicted on An Hoa.” Although civilian casualties were overwhelmingly the result of U.S. firepower, attribution of responsibility by television was weighted by a 10 to 7 ratio to the account of the enemy; its “calculated policy of terror” contrasted with the unfortunate but legitimate side-effects of U.S. operations. Even military operations of the enemy were “terrorism.” Reporting on a Viet Cong ambush of an American patrol, ABC’s Peter Jennings recounted “another of those small but [and here he paused a moment for dramatic effect] harrowing VC butcheries” (October, 1965). The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were portrayed as “savage,” “brutal,” “murderous,” “fanatical,” “suicidal,” “halfcrazed,” mere vermin in areas that were “Communist infested” or “Vietcong infested,” and thus had to be cleansed by the American liberators.92

The style and technique are familiar in state propaganda of all varieties.

Overall, Hallin concludes from his survey, television never veered from the official interpretation of the war as “a struggle to defend democracy against aggression.” In the early years, it was taken for granted that

we would surely win, not only because we were more powerful but because the right was clearly on our side. Television held this view strongly, perhaps more strongly than the public itself. It didn’t work out that way, and eventually television brought the bad news. But it never explained why: it never reexamined the assumptions about the nature of the war it had helped to propagate in the early years. So to the public, the bad news must have seemed nearly as incomprehensible as an earlier “American defeat” in Asia: the “loss” of China.

Attribution of the American failure by the public to “treason” or “lack of American will” caused by the failure of the media to support our just cause with sufficient fervor is, therefore, “hardly surprising.