Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [241]
Braestrup seeks the causes for the “exoneration of the Vietcong” for “killing noncombatants or causing the exodus of refugees” (I, 234), overlooking the fact that before seeking the cause of x it is necessary to show that x is true. In this case, it is not. The accounts he cites regularly blame the Viet Cong for civilian suffering and emphasize Viet Cong atrocities. In fact, he himself points out that “both Time and Newsweek put the onus on the Vietcong” in Saigon (I, 246)—as elsewhere. Newsweek titled an article “The VC’s Week of Terror” (Feb. 12) and described VC terror squads executing civilians in Saigon (I, 490). Typically, the media blamed the Viet Cong for having “brought bullets and bombs into the very midst of heavily populated areas, causing indiscriminate slaughter of civilians caught in the cross fire and making homeless twice over the refugees who had fled to the cities for safety . . .” (Time, [I, 246]), adopting the position of U.S. government propaganda that the enemy is to blame if the United States kills and destroys, and failing to add that the refugees had fled to the cities for safety from massive U.S. violence and that such refugee generation was explicit policy.10 In the New York Times, Charles Mohr wrote that “In one sense the Vietcong have been responsible for civilian deaths by launching the urban attacks,” citing American officials who are “sure that the population will be bitter about the guerrillas because of their ‘callous disregard for human life’ ” (I, 243). Meanwhile, AP, the Washington Post, NBC, and others reported Viet Cong causing destruction, using civilians as shields, preventing civilians from fleeing attack, murdering civilians, etc., often on the basis of flimsy evidence that would elicit much Freedom House derision if used to support accounts of American atrocities. In a typical misrepresentation, Braestrup claims that NBC-TV “attributed Saigon’s losses solely to an allied military decision to ‘kill or maim some of the people’ to protect the rest” (our emphasis), citing Howard Tuckner’s statement that there was a decision “that in order to protect most of the . . . people, they had to kill or maim some of the people”—a statement that is quite different from the paraphrase and is noteworthy only for its standard reference to “protecting” the victims (I, 249).
In general, far from “exonerating the Vietcong,” the media bent over backwards to blame them for the casualties and destruction caused by the U.S. forces who were “protecting” and “defending” South Vietnam and its population, according to unquestioned dogma. While the reporting was generally accurate in a narrow sense, the framework and the general picture presented are outlandish, and conform closely to the demands of the state propaganda system. It is, once again, highly revealing that Freedom House regards such service to the state as unremarkable—indeed, insufficient, by its standards.
The more general summaries in the Freedom House study leave the evidence presented far behind. Thus the ruins and destruction “were presented as symbolic evidence of a stunning ‘defeat’ (variously implied or defined) for allied forces” (I, 621). “The Americans, by their heavy use of firepower in a few cities, were implicitly depicted as callously destroying all Vietnam . . ., while the Vietcong’s indiscriminate use of their own firepower, as well as the Hue killings, were largely overlooked” (I, 286). The dominant themes in the media “added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies” (I, 705). “At Tet, the press shouted that the patient was dying” (I, 714). And so on.
We have already cited enough to show how much merit there is in these characterizations. Furthermore, as already indicated, the media reports generally