Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [287]
185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 1981; Kamm, “In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving,” New York Times, November 8, 1981.
186. See p. 174 and note 2.
187. For a point-by-point response, demonstrating that the accusations are a mélange of falsehoods and misrepresentations apart from a few minor points changed in subsequent broadcasts, see the “Content Analysis and Assessment,” included in Inside Story Special Edition: Vietnam Op/Ed, cited in note 2, above.
188. Karnow, Vietnam. For a detailed critique of this highly praised best-seller, see Noam Chomsky, “The Vietnam War in the Age of Orwell,” Race & Class 4 (1984 [Boston Review, January 1984]). See Peter Biskind, “What Price Balance,” Race & Class 4 (1984 [parts in The Nation, December 3, 1983]), on the PBS television history.
189. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 307–8.
190. Later, in another context, we hear that “to many peasants, [the U.S. Marines] were yet another threatening foreign force” (episode 6, on “America’s Enemy” and their point of view).
191. Biskind, citing a London Times account; Butterfield, New York Times, October 2, 1983.
CHAPTER 6: THE INDOCHINA WARS (II)
1. Cited by Bernard Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis (1961; reprint, New York: Double-day, 1969), p. 163, from congressional hearings. The reasons were political: the Pentagon was not in favor. See also Walter Haney, “The Pentagon Papers and U.S. Involvement in Laos,” in Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972; hereafter PP), vol. 5.
2. State Department Background Notes (March 1969); Denis Warner, Reporting Southeast Asia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), p. 171.
3. On this period, see, among others, Haney, “U.S. Involvement in Laos”; Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1970; hereafter AWWA); Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, eds., Laos: War and Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Charles Stevenson, The End of Nowhere (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
4. Howard Elterman, The State, the Mass Media and Ideological Hegemony: United States Policy Decisions in Indochina, 1974–75—Historical Record, Government Pronouncements and Press Coverage (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978), p. 198.
5. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis.
6. A request to the (very cooperative) American embassy in Vientiane to obtain their documentation would have quickly revealed to reporters that the claims they were relaying on the basis of embassy briefings had little relation to the facts, as one of us discovered by carrying out the exercise in Vientiane in early 1970. For a detailed review of the available facts concerning foreign (North Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese Nationalist, and U.S.) involvement through the 1960s, and their relation to what the media were reporting, see AWWA, pp. 203–36; and Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon, 1973; hereafter FRS), pp. 178–79. See also chapter 5, p. 164, and note 22.
7. In Adams and McCoy, Laos; excerpts in AWWA, pp. 96–97.
8. On attempts by former Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth to explain away the suppression of the bombing of northern Laos by obscuring the crucial distinction between the bombing of the civilian society of the North and the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South (acceptable within the doctrinal system in terms of “defense of South Vietnam against North Vietnamese aggression”), see Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 402.
9. Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 332ff. and appendixes.
10. The report states that “until early this spring, when North Vietnamese troops began a series of advances in northeast Laos,” the war had been “limited,” U.S. bombing had been aimed at “North Vietnamese supply routes” and “concentrations of enemy troops,” and “civilian population centers and farmland were largely