From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Subject: Myth of Anti- Vietnam War U.S. Press (Re: Media Bias, etc.)
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Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 23:28:00 GMT

The mythology of a highly critical, independent, mainstream U.S. press 
during the Vietnam War appears to be taken for granted -- one could
read and hear this assumption everywhere in the run-up and post mortem to the
Gulf War.  This mythology gains particular strength because U.S.
rightwingers *accuse* the U.S. press of having "lost" the Vietnam War
through their "unpatriotic" critical reporting, whereas the U.S. press
itself appears to *accept* the charge, except of course that they regard
this critical reporting as a proud moment for themselves --
when the press cut through the lies of its own Government and uncovered the
truth  -- and if only the U.S. people had early listened to the truths of
the U.S. press much grief would have been spared.  One may be drawn 
unconsciously in such a case to think in terms of the analogy of a 
legal trial -- after all, if the "prosecution" brings a "charge", and
the "defense" freely confesses to the charge, then the charge *must*
be true (or at least the "defense" must be "copping a plea" to a lesser
charge). But the analogy of a trial is utterly fallacious, since the
claim of "losing" the war on one side is made in an attempt to rewrite 
historical reality (that being the Vietnam war was a war primarily
against the rural population of South Vietnam) whereas on the other
hand the mainstream U.S. press wishes to claim virtues (which are part
of its ideology of "objective professionalism") which it does not in
fact possess. 

The fundamental aspect of the so-called "critical" coverage in
the U.S. mainstream press/mass media, a posture characteristic of 
U.S. "Cold War liberals" was this --
it was not that the brutal, unprovoked aggression of the United States
against Vietnam was wrong in principle.  It was that the AGGRESSION
WASN'T WORKING.

The single book which discusses the issue of the U.S. mass media
coverage of the Vietnam War and brings together a lot of material
from disparate sources is 

"The "Uncensored War":
The Media and Vietnam
by Daniel C. Hallin
Oxford University Press, 1986 (DS559.46.H35). 

If you were only going to read one book on this subject this is
the book to read.
I have read this book; in the course of my research on the Vietnam War
I have also read or browsed many of the sources Hallin cites and I can
testify that Hallin is accurate in his quotation from other sources. 

After reviewing the evidence, the end of Chapter 4 of Hallin's book 
has the following conclusion (my emphasis):
"  Despite some ambiguities that came through in this situation of 
extraordinary freedom for the war correspondent, the dramatic 
structure of the uncensored "living-room" war of 1965-67 was simple 
and traditional: the forces of good were locked in battle once again 
with the forces of evil.  What began to change in 1967, as we shall
see in the following chapter was **the conviction that the forces of 
good would inevitably prevail**."


Another source Hallin quotes from and which I have read in its
entirety is:

"The First Casualty
From the Crimea to Vietnam:
The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker"
by British journalist Phillip Knightley
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.  Harvest HBJ paperback edition 1976.
An expanded Pan (British) paperback edition has been published circa 
1986 which adds a brief chapter on the coverage of the 1982 Falklands War.)
[This book has perhaps the highest ratio of debunking of official 
myths per paragraph of any book I know of, and is quite
entertaining in a gruesome sort of way.  What I found particularly
interesting is that many propaganda claims of past wars remain
firmly part of "popular" history/culture despite being 
thoroughly debunked -- often quite soon after the event itself.

The young (mid twenties to early thirties) U.S. correspondents
in Saigon before the fall of Ngo Diem (Halberstam, Malcolm Browne)
in November 1963 were virtually considered traitors by the
U.S. government and also the establishment U.S. press (and old
WWII correspondents) for their unfavorable coverage of Diem.
But in fact these young Americans completely accepted the
ideological premises of the Cold War; quoting from Knightley
[my ** emphasis and ellipsis]:

[Chapter 16, "Vietnam 1954-1975" pgs. 379-381 in 1976 Harvest paperback.]
[speaking of the period before the fall of Ngo Diem]
""  It transpired that the Saigon press corps [i.e. U.S. correspondents
based in Saigon] had made some powerful enemies.  Marguerite Higgins,
the New York Herald Tribune's correspondent, who, after her spell as 
a war correspondent in Korea, had married General William Hall, of the 
United States Air Force, had visited Vietnam in the summer of 1963 and 
had been unable to understand the attitude of correspondents like
[Charles] Mohr, [David] Halberstam, and [Neil] Sheehan.  "Reporters 
here would like to see us lose the war to prove they are right," she 
wrote.  Otto Fuerbringer, then the managing editor of TIME, agreed, 
and had discarded the original Mohr-Perry article [a story submitted
at the request of the head office which began with "The war
in Vietnam is being lost"].  He had then called a TIME writer to his
office and dictated the outline of an article to replace it.  When the
article appeared, TIME's chief of correspondents, Richard Clurman, who
had tried to have it stopped called Mohr to placate him.  Mohr said
that unless he could have equal space to reply personally to
Fuerbringer's story, he would resign.  TIME would not agree to this,
so Mohr and Perry went. 

     Washington kept up the pressure.  News reports from Vietnam, said 
Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, were emotional and 
inaccurate.  A stream of highly regarded reporters and special writers 
went out to Vietnam, including several WWII correspondents, and the 
columnist Joseph Alsop.  All decided that the war was going well. 
Frank Conniff, a Hearst writer, blamed the pessimistic reporting on 
American editors.  The fact that young reporters, most of them in 
their twenties, had been assigned to report an involved story 
reflected little credit on the prescience of their employers, he 
wrote.  President Kennedy felt the same way, and he tried to get rid 
of his particular bete noire, David Halberstam, by asking the New
York Times's publisher, "Punch" Sulzberger, to reassign him.
Sulzberger not only refused to do so, but also cancelled a two-week 
holiday that Halberstam was about to take, in case it should appear 
that the Times had yielded to Kennedy's pressure.  **So the impression 
of these early years of Vietnam is of courageous and skilled 
correspondents fighting a long and determined action for the right to 
report the war as they saw it.**

   There is only one flaw in this:  the correspondents **were not 
questioning the American intervention itself, but only its 
effectiveness.**  Most correspondents, despite what Washington thought
about them, were just as interested in seeing the United States win 
the war as was the Pentagon.[footnote in original -- Mohr's commitment 
was such that, back in Vietnam for the New York Times, he took part, 
armed with an M-16, in the American retaking of Hue Citadel after the 
Tet offensive.]  What the correspondents questioned was not 
American policy, but the tactics used to implement that policy, in
particular the backing of Diem as the "white hope" of Vietnam.  "We 
would have liked nothing better than to believe that the war was going 
well, and that it would eventually be won," Halberstam wrote later.
"But it **was impossible to believe these things without denying the 
evidence of our senses.**"  Mohr was embarrassed when he found that his 
stand against TIME had made him something of an anti-war hero.
"Everyone thought I left because I was against the war.  I just thought 
it wasn't working.  I didn't come to think of it as immoral until the 
very end."

    Sheehan said he had arrived in Vietnam [in 1963] convinced that what the 
United States was doing was correct ...
True, Sheehan wondered whether any nation had the right to inflict 
suffering on another for its own ends, and he hoped that would not be 
necessary to do so again, but after three years in Vietnam he was -- 
like most of the correspondents -- basically still a partisan for the 
American cause.""
[Phillip Knightley, "The First Casualty"]


Two quotes from David Halberstam's writing (remember, he was 
considered a traitor by establishment rightwingers like Joseph Alsop)
of the period that appear in Chapter 2 of Hallin's book:

"Communist guerrillas trying to subvert this country admit to having 
underestimated the depth of United States intentions, according to an 
important captured document, and have had to move back their 
timetable for victory." [Saigon, January 20, 1963]


"I believe that Vietnam is a legitimate part of that global 
commitment.  A strategic country in a key area, it is perhaps one of 
only five or six nations in the world that is truly vital to U.S. 
interests."  [1965, from Halberstam's "Making of a Quagmire"]

Knightley notes that almost no American correspondents could face
the truth of what their government was doing in Vietnam.
Of the exceptions, many were women -- Martha Gellhorn, Frances
FitzGerald, Gloria Emerson, novelist Mary McCarthy.  The
male American correspondents -- Michael Herr, author of "Dispatches"
comes to mind -- seem to have been carried away by the machismo
of it all.  (Elsewhere in his book Knightley also notes that
symmetrically, British journalists were not very good at
covering British atrocities in Northern Ireland; the best
coverage came from American journalists.)


Ron Balden
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