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By Root 2631 0

realistic hope of a military victory in Vietnam at a cost acceptable to the United States, but also changed the character of media reporting and commentary, which mirrored the changes in elite opinion. On the ground, American correspondents were able to witness the war at first hand, gaining a view rather different from the sanitized and edited version presented under the control of the American military command. Media commentary at home reflected elite opinion in recognizing that the optimistic forecasts that had been relayed from Washington with little skepticism were inaccurate, and that a long and bitter war lay ahead.

But on-the-scene reporting and domestic commentary never veered from the framework of the state propaganda system. In reporting the fighting in Ben Tre and My Tho in the Delta, for example, the press observed that American infantry participated while the towns were blasted by American bombers, helicopter gunships, navy patrol boats, and artillery to root out the Viet Cong—that is, the South Vietnamese guerrillas who “were probably living with the people,” according to an American officer quoted by Bernard Weinraub. Nonetheless, the news reports speak of the perceived need to “blast the city” with jets and helicopter gunships, particularly the poorer and most crowded sections, “to save other sections of the city and the lives of thousands of people . . .” (Lee Lescaze)—people whose lives were threatened not by the southern NLF guerrillas living among them but by the U.S. forces “defending” them from the NLF. Because of Tet, Weinraub explains, “the protection of Ben Tre was limited,” and it was necessary to bring in troops from the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division by helicopter, and to carry out “bombing raids and fire by helicopter gunships and artillery” to “protect” Ben Tre, which “has long been a stronghold of the Vietcong” and is “sometimes considered a Vietcong rest and recreation area,” while surrounding hamlets “thought to be controlled by the Vietcong have been razed by allied bombing and artillery attacks and fire from armed helicopters.” In Ben Tre itself, “the market place is rubble and near the gutted homes nearby women in shawls sit in the noon heat and mourn with loud groans,” while “My Tho still smells of death,” with half the homes destroyed—thanks to the effective “protection” the population received from their American defenders.122

Throughout, it is taken for granted that the forces armed, trained, and supplied by the only foreign element in the delta are “the South Vietnamese,” not the South Vietnamese guerrillas living among the population in their “Vietcong strongholds,” from whom the United States is “protecting” the population by ferocious bombardment of civilian areas.

Recall that we are now evaluating the remaining component of the Freedom House thesis: that the media were suppressing the American victory in their antiestablishment zeal. In fact, they were reporting the story accurately in a narrow sense, but completely within the frame-work of the government propaganda system—never questioned, in a shameful display of media servility. We may imagine what the reaction would be to a comparable performance on the part of the Nazi or Soviet press. Braestrup’s final comment that “a free society deserves better” of its media (I, 728) is accurate enough, although not quite in the sense intended in the Freedom House study.

As throughout the war, the standpoint of the media continued to reflect the perceptions and attitudes of the American military; for example, an American official who observed: “What the Vietcong did was occupy the hamlets we pacified just for the purpose of having the allies move in and bomb them. By their presence, the hamlets were destroyed.”123 The same New York Times report from Binh Dinh Province—the “showcase” province for pacification—indicates this had been going on, unreported, well before the Tet offensive: “The enemy moves in December—which several military men called a ‘softening up’ for the offensive—resulted in a wave of allied air strikes on villages.