Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [161]
In short, we can dismiss out of hand the second component of the Freedom House thesis, the component that had dramatic impact and continuing influence within the post-Vietnam “right turn” among elites and that has set the agenda for subsequent discussion about the “adversarial stance” of the media and its grim consequences. We are left with the conclusion that the media were either irrelevant, or that they continued to operate within the general confines of the approved ideological system, thus refuting the first component of the thesis as well. All that remains of the Freedom House story is the possibility that the media were incompetent (even malevolent), but ineffectual. Notice that the Freedom House thesis here faces the same “logical problem” noted earlier with regard to the charges concerning television: if television is as influential as claimed, then the evidence shows that through 1967 it “encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war.”
To evaluate the remaining shreds of the Freedom House thesis, let us continue with the record of the Tet offensive, now asking whether the media did in fact distort it in their zealous—although utterly ineffectual—efforts to undermine authority.
With lavish use of firepower, U.S. forces succeeded in regaining control of the towns and cities. The city of Hué, which had been conquered from its own population by GVN troops with American assistance several months earlier in a desperate U.S. effort to prevent the growth of popular movements calling for democracy and a negotiated political settlement,118 was 80 percent destroyed by bombing and shelling, which left 2,000 civilians buried in the “smashed ruins,” according to U.S. Air Force Undersecretary Townsend Hoopes; the marines listed “Communist losses” at over 5,000, while Hoopes states that a “sizable part” of the Communist force of 1,000 men who captured the city escaped, allowing a determination of who constituted the “Communist losses.” U.S. AID in May estimated that some 4,000 civilians were left dead in the ruins of the city, most of them victims of U.S. firepower.119
In the Mekong Delta, “Artillery and air strikes leveled half of My Tho, a city of 80,000, and the provincial capital of Ben Tre [Kien Hoa Province, later devastated in the post-Tet terror campaign; see p. 190], with 140,000 inhabitants, was decimated with the justification, as an American colonel put it in one of the most widely quoted statements of the war, ‘We had to destroy the town to save it.’”120 The U.S. command conceded that “the enemy” were overwhelmingly NLF, not North Vietnamese; killed and captured outnumbered captured weapons by a factor of five, an indication of who “the enemy” really were. Secretary of Defense McNamara estimated NVA forces at 50,000 to 55,000 at the end of 1967, mostly in northern regions, with some 10,000 troops placed in Viet Cong combat units; the total roughly matches thirdcountry forces, mostly Korean mercenaries, mobilized by the United States as part of its invasion of South Vietnam, and barely 10 percent of the U.S. forces of over half a million men, even excluding the massive forces engaged in the attack against Vietnam and Laos from the sea and from U.S. sanctuaries from Thailand to the Philippines and Guam, employing means of destruction that dwarfed all else in Indochina.121
As noted earlier, the Tet offensive not only reduced Washington to gloomy despair and convinced U.S. elites that there was no