Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [160]
Notice that at this point some rather serious problems arise concerning the second component of the Freedom House thesis: that the misdeeds of the media caused the public to oppose the war, undermining government resolve and leading to U.S. failure in its (by definition, benevolent) aims. To establish the “stab-in-the-back” component of the Freedom House thesis, it is necessary to show that public opinion was swayed toward opposition to the war by media coverage, and that the media and public opinion were a significant factor in the shift of government policy. Neither claim can be sustained.
With regard to the course of public opinion, the Freedom House study decisively refutes its own thesis. It includes a chapter on public opinion polls by Burns Roper, which demonstrates, as Braestrup concedes, that “there is no available evidence of a direct relationship between the dominant media themes in early 1968 and changes in American mass public opinion vis-à-vis the Vietnam war itself,” but rather a continuing “slow drift toward the dove side” after an initial wave of support for the president and “frustration and anger at the foe” during the Tet offensive. A closer examination of their own data undermines the Freedom House thesis even more thoroughly. The early response to the Tet offensive, during the period when media incompetence and unwarranted pessimism were allegedly at their height, was “an increase in the belligerency of the American public”; “the immediate reaction of the U.S. public was to favor stiffened resistance [that is, U.S. resistance to an attack by South Vietnamese in South Vietnam] and intensified U.S. effort.” The major sentiment aroused was “Bomb the hell out of them.” In later February and March, when the media, in the Freedom House version, were beginning to “whisper” the true story of American victory, “there developed a decided negative reaction to the President’s handling of the war and the war itself, and a distinct opposition to more aggressive U.S. military action.” In early February 1968, when the impact of the alleged media “distortions” and “pessimism” reached its peak, public opinion shifted toward the “hawks.” Public opinion returned to the pre-Tet figures by late February, when the media were allegedly correcting their earlier errors. By April, after the offensive had ended and the “errors” had been overcome (albeit in a “whisper”), there was a sharp shift toward the “doves.” By April–May–June, measurements had returned to pre-Tet levels. “When looked at on this broader time scale, the Tet offensive appears merely to have caused a minor ripple in a steadily changing attitude toward our involvement in the war,” a shift toward the position of the doves after an initial shift toward the hawks during the period of media “pessimism.” Tet was just “one more incident” that “reminded the public that the war was not going well—that the confident predictions out of Washington had to be taken with a grain of salt—and that helped move public opinion in the antiwar direction in which it had been moving for nearly three years . . .”116
Faced with this thorough refutation of one essential component of their thesis, without which the thesis loses all significance even if the residue were tenable, the Freedom House analysts retreat to the position that although the public was unaffected by the perverse behavior of the media, there was an effect “on the nation’s ‘leadership segment’” (Burns)—a safer claim, since, as they concede, no data are available. The director of the Freedom House study, Leonard Sussman, concludes that “the Tet offensive, as portrayed in the media, appeared to have had a far greater effect on political Washington and the Administration itself than on the U.S. population’s sentiment on the war” (I, xxxiv). The media failures, in short, left the public unaffected or even more supportive of the war while they misled