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By Root 2826 0

media in the Freedom House study is that they were too “pessimistic.” Strikingly absent is the obvious standard of comparison: the internal reports from the field and analysis by intelligence and official Washington—which were, if anything, even more pessimistic. The logic of the Freedom House brief against the media is highly revealing. In their view, the media in a free society must not only accept without question the principles of the state doctrinal system, as the media did throughout (a fact that Freedom House never addresses, and apparently cannot perceive), but must do so with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism that exceeds that of U.S. intelligence, the military command, Johnson’s “Wise Men,” and other leading figures in the military, political, and corporate world who draw their information from a full range of government sources. It is an interesting conception of a “free society.”

We might ask how the Freedom House conception of a free press in a free society would be applied by Soviet commissars, let us say, to the case of the mass circulation weekly Ogonyok, which published a series of long articles that presented a “bleak picture” of the war in Afghanistan, depicting it “in stark terms,” speaking of “poor morale and desertion” among Afghan units and “tough fighting between elite Soviet troops and Afghan guerrillas,” and implying that “large areas of Afghanistan are under guerrilla control.” The articles also give “a broad hint that drug use is common among Russian troops in Afghanistan,” and they include extracts from a helicopter pilot’s journal describing “the sight and smell of colleagues’ charred bodies” and implying that “helicopter losses are high” after the receipt of sophisticated Western weaponry by the guerrillas, terrorists who finance themselves by producing drugs for the international market (charges verified by Western observers, incidentally). But it would be inhumane for the USSR simply to withdraw without guarantees for the population, because “a Soviet withdrawal would lead to nationwide internecine warfare,” as Afghans who are quoted anticipate. The article does not simply mimic standard U.S. media fare, as these excerpts indicate. Thus it describes an attack on Soviet villages by Afghan guerrillas; one can imagine the U.S. reaction had there been a Viet Cong attack on villages in Texas. But by Freedom House standards, it is plain that the editors merit severe censure for their “adversarial stance,” “pessimism,” and “volatile styles,” “always with the dark possibility that, if the managers do not themselves take action, then outsiders [in the government] will seek to apply remedies of their own.”134 And, in fact, in January 1988, General Dimitri T. Yakov, the Soviet defense minister, applied Freedom House and Braestrup principles to the “adversarial” Soviet press, sharply criticizing articles in Ogonyok and Literaturnaya Gazeta for reporting on the Afghan war in ways that undermined public confidence in the Soviet army and played into the hands of the West.135

In the light of the evidence presented in the Freedom House study, and of much that is ignored, the following conclusions seem reasonable. During the Tet offensive and its aftermath, media performance was creditable, sometimes very highly so, in a narrow sense. More broadly, this reporting was highly deceptive in that it was framed within the unchallenged and unrecognized doctrines of the state propaganda system, which impose a severe distortion. Media reports compare favorably in accuracy with those available to official Washington at the highest level from internal sources, although they were regularly less alarmist, perhaps because the media tended to give credence to official statements and were unaware of the internal assessments. The reports from the scene led media commentators to draw approximately the same conclusions as Johnson’s high-level advisers. The manner in which the media covered the events had little effect on public opinion, except perhaps to enhance its aggressiveness and, of course, to instill ever more deeply