Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [182]
It is not that the facts are entirely hidden. Thus episode 5 (“America Takes Charge”) opens with a description by a GI of how “the ARVN and the VC are the same people, the same race, the same culture, and yet one side seems to be chicken and the other side seems to fight in the face of overwhelming disadvantages” in what is clearly “their country.” A U.S. major discusses the problem in Binh Dinh Province, which “had never been really in friendly hands” since 1946 but rather “under VC control” throughout, compelling the United States to resort to “awesome fire power” that turns heavy jungle into a “moonscape.” But the plain truth that such facts entail cannot be expressed, or perceived.
Balance is also preserved in an “account from both sides” of what happened in the village of Thuy Bo, in January 1967, where British producer Martin Smith had been shown the site of what villagers claimed to be a My Lai–style massacre, one of many they alleged, with a hundred women and children killed. Fox Butterfield reports that in contrast to the “balanced” picture actually presented by PBS, the British participants in the series argued that “the Marine attack on [Thuy Bo] should be labeled a war crime.” This failure to maintain “balance” was in keeping with what a filmmaker involved in the project termed their “more moralistic stance, anxious to accentuate the aspects of the war that were immoral at the expense of looking at it afresh,” which would apparently exclude the “more moralistic stance.”191 In this episode, the marines tell their story of an assault on a VC-defended village and then the villagers (given thirty-five lines of the transcript, to ninety for the marines) tell their conflicting version of a marine massacre of wounded and captured civilians. The sequence ends with a marine describing what took place as a “normal procedure,” with “burning them hootches down and digging them Vietnamese people out of holes [with grenades and rifle fire] and scattering animals, pigs and chickens around like we normally do,” especially after three days in the field under brutal conditions.
The account continues in the same vein. We hear that “American aircraft dropped six times more bombs on South Vietnam than on the Communist North,” and that “most of the enemy troops were native southerners” (episode 8). But no conclusion is suggested, except that the purpose of the U.S. bombing of Vietnam, distributed in this curious manner and at “twice the tonnage dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II,” was to try “to stop North Vietnam from sending soldiers and supplies to the South.” Nevertheless, 140,000 made it through 1967 according to the U.S. government (episode 7), about half the number of South Korean mercenaries and a small fraction of the Americans who were destroying South Vietnam.
The Phoenix program of political assassination is justified at length by its director, William Colby, who denies that it was what it was, and, for balance, some comments are added by critics in the military and by a civilian aide worker, describing apparent random killing and torture. The post-Tet military operations are passed over in total silence. After Nixon’s election in 1968, when these wholesale U.S. massacres began in full force, “the war continued,” we learn: “The weapons were Vietcong rockets, the victims were Danang civilians” killed by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.
After the breakdown of negotiations in October 1972, “The North was again intransigent,