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By Root 2694 0

the worst of the government or of authority in general, and on that basis to divide up the actors on any issue into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad.’” The “bad actors” include the U.S. forces in Vietnam, the “military-industrial complex,” and the CIA, among others, while “the good” in the eyes of the media are presumably the Communists, who, Braestrup argues sardonically throughout, were consistently overpraised and protected. The prospect, he foresees, “is for a continuation of the current volatile styles, always with the dark possibility that, if the managers do not themselves take action, then outsiders—the courts, the Federal Communications Commission, or Congress—will seek to apply remedies of their own,” a proposal taken up in Roche’s call for a congressional inquiry and the subsequent warnings of the Trilateral Commission, cited earlier (Big Story, I, 705ff.)

The Braestrup–Freedom House thesis has two essential components: (1) coverage of the Tet offensive illustrates media incompetence and their “adversarial stance”; (2) by their portrayal of an American victory as a defeat, the media bear responsibility for the loss of American resolve and the subsequent American defeat in Vietnam. It is the second component of the thesis that carries the dramatic impact, and that has permitted it to set much of the agenda for subsequent discussion of the fourth estate and the dangers that its new-found power and “sixties’ style” of “mindless” hatred of authority pose for the very survival of free institutions and democracy.

The first component of the thesis is commonly accepted even by those who deny the second. Thus, rejecting “the stab-in-the-back thesis,” George Herring nevertheless observes: “That the media was hostile to the war and to Johnson seems clear, and much of the reporting of Tet was misleading”; these “distortions of the media” may have contributed to “growing popular discontent” with the war and “public anxiety,” Herring adds, but these were not the operative factors in Johnson’s decision to de-escalate and seek negotiations after Tet.107

An analysis of the facts and the argument demonstrates that neither component of the Freedom House thesis is tenable. The second, as we shall see, is conceded in the Freedom House study to be false with regard to public opinion, and the straw at which they then grasp will plainly not bear the weight. As for the first component, on the narrow question of professional competence in reporting the facts available under trying and confused circumstances, the performance of the media was acceptable if not outstanding, and compares quite favorably to the internal reporting of the American military authorities and U.S. intelligence, insofar as these are available. But when we turn to broader questions of the sort discussed earlier—that is, if we evaluate the media by the standards that we would properly apply to reporting, say, on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—we see that indeed they can be faulted in precisely the terms anticipated by the propaganda model. The very example selected as providing the strongest grounds for their accusations by Freedom House and other critics from the jingoist right wing of the political spectrum actually happens to demonstrate the precise opposite of what is alleged—namely, it provides yet another striking illustration of the subservience of the media to the state propaganda system.108

The Freedom House study itself provides ample documentation to establish these conclusions, and to refute its own specific allegations point by point. Given the major role that this study and the thesis it allegedly established has played in recent ideology, we will give some attention to the chasm that lies between its interpretation and summaries, on the one hand, and the documentary record that it (in part) presents, on the other.109 The comments and summaries often seriously misrepresent the contents of the documents described or are outright falsifications. The analysis, laced with bitter sarcasm throughout, is thoroughly undermined when compared with the actual documents.