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By Root 2828 0

and in this case the paper had plenty of company” (I, 186, 216). Apart from “flawless” and “infallible,” further Freedom House exclusives, the adjectives can be taken from the military reports and seem unexceptionable. The claim that the media regarded the enemy as infallible is defended through pages 186 to 231, along with typical Freedom House self-refutation: example after example to the contrary is cited, in addition to those just mentioned. The media reported that the VC “undoubtedly” alienated the population, as they caused “indiscriminate slaughter” and “totally misjudged the mood of the South Vietnamese.” They may be suffering “a severe manpower problem” and “hurting badly.”6 They “failed to achieve their main objectives.” Captured VC got lost in Saigon and were falsely told that they would be welcomed. (This appears under Braestrup’s heading “Television: in praise of the VC.”) They did not “get—or heed” important information. And so on. All in all, hardly the picture of an “infallible” and “flawless” enemy.

Note also the Freedom House assumption that a free press, militantly guarding its objectivity, should not only consider those who are resisting the U.S. attack as “the enemy,” “the foe,” etc., but must also refrain from accurately describing “the enemy” as tough, resolute, and courageous. To play its proper role in a free society by Freedom House standards, the media should never veer a moment from the kind of service to the state demanded and secured by force in totalitarian states, so it appears.

The impact of the Freedom House study comes from the impression of massive documentation and the huge resources that were employed to obtain and analyze it. Case by case, the examples collapse on inspection. Here are a few more examples, far from exhaustive.7

On pacification, “TV and radio commentators went far beyond the available information to imply the dramatic worst.” Three examples are cited to prove the point (I, 565). Howard Tuckner, of NBC-TV, reported from New York the views of “U.S. intelligence officials” and “Some U.S. officials in Vietnam”—correctly, as Braestrup concedes in a footnote, adding that these were the views of “CIA in Washington” and “Disheartened junior CORDS officials in Vietnam.” By Freedom House standards, it is improper to cite such sources accurately. The second example is a CBS radio report criticized only for being “depressed”—as were pacification officials on the ground. The third example is from an NBC-TV “special,” in which Dean Brelis says that we don’t know what is happening in the rural areas but “can only imagine,” and that “the cities are no longer secure; perhaps they never were.”8 Hardly remarkable, and far from the fevered conclusion drawn in Braestrup’s paraphrase.

Examples of what Braestrup calls “straw man journalism” abound in his own presentation. Thus he faults the media for claiming that the pacification program had been destroyed, whereas his own conclusion is that “pacification, although hit hard, was not ‘dead’ . . . it was a mixed picture, but clearly neither a military nor a psychological ‘disaster’” (I, 716). The media regularly reported that pacification was hit hard, not dead, as his own evidence clearly shows—in contrast to the Pentagon, which took a more pessimistic view, as we shall see directly. Braestrup’s “straw man journalism” may impress careless readers skimming the text for dramatic conclusions, but it presents no evidence and amounts to no argument.

Braestrup refers sarcastically to “insights into Vietnamese psychology,” as when Morley Safer, watching marines burning down huts in Cam Ne, concluded that a peasant whose home was destroyed would find it hard to believe “that we are on his side” (I, 43). How does Safer know? Perhaps the peasant enjoyed watching the flames. Not all such “psychoanalyzing” is derided, however, as when General Westmoreland explains that “the people in the cities are largely indignant at the Vietcong for violating the sanctity of the Tet period and for their tactics which brought about damage to the cities” (II, 164),