No More Learning

6
The Reader's Digest saw the propaganda opportunity presented by the assassination attempt quite early, and hired both Paul Henze, a longtime CIA officer and propaganda specialist, and Claire Sterling to investigate the topic. Sterling's September 1982 article in the Reader's Digest, "The Plot to Kill the Pope," was the most important initiator of the Bulgarian Connection, and its ideas and those of Paul Henze fonned the basis for the NBC-TV program "The Man Who Shot the Pope-A Study in Terrorism," narrated by Marvin Kalb and first aired on September 21, 1982.
The Sterling-Henze-Kalb (SHK) model, in which Agca was an agent of the Bulgarians (and, indirectly, of the Soviet Union), quickly became
146 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the dominant frame of the mass media, through the great outreach of the Reader's Digest and the NBC-TV program (which was repeated in revised form in January 1983), and the ready, even eager, acceptance of this view by the other mainstream media. 7 The mass media in our sample-Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and CBS News-all accepted and used the SHK model from the beginning, and retained that loyalty to the end of the Rome trial in March 1986. In the process they excluded alternative views and a great deal of inconvenient fact. With the Reader's Digest, the Wall Street journa~ the Christian Science Monitor, and NBC-TV also firmly adhering to the SHK line, it quickly established a dominant position throughout the mainstream media.
In the balance of this and the following two sections, we will describe the SHK model, discuss its weaknesses, and outline an alternative frame explaining Agca's confession implicating the Bulgarians, which the media ignored. We will then turn to a closer examination of the media's gullible reception of the SHK view and its fit to a propaganda model.
The SHK model had the following essential elements:
1. Motive. In Sterling's Reader's Digest article, the preeminent motive in the assassination attempt was a Soviet desire to weaken NATO, to be accomplished by implicating a Turk in the assassination of the pope: "The Turk was there at St. Peter's to signal Christendom that Islamic Turkey was an alien and vaguely sinister country that did not belong in NATO. " This motive was accompanied (and soon supplanted) by the contention that the shooting was to help quell the Solidarity movement in Poland by removing its most important supporter. At one point Paul Henze suggested that the intent of the KGB was perhaps merely to "wing" the pope, not kill him, as a warning, as in a James Bond movie. The costs and risks to the Soviet bloc of such a venture were never discussed by Sterling, Henze, or Kalb.
2. The proof of Soviet and Bulgarian involvement. Before Agca's confession and his identification of Bulgarians in November 1982, the evidence on which SHK relied was confined to the fact that Agca had stayed in Bulgaria in the summer of 1980, and that Turkish drug traders with links to the Gray Wolves did business in Bulgaria. In November 1982, Agca named three Bulgarians as his alleged accomplices and claimed to have been hired by the Bulgarians to do the job. He offered no credible evidence and named no witnesses to any dealings with Bulgarians, so that the new "evidence" was simply Agca's assertions, after seventeen months in an Italian prison.
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 147
3. The ideological assumptions. As the case looked extremely thin, especially before Agca's new confession of November 1982, the gaps were filled by ideological assumptions: This is the kind of thing the Soviets do. The Soviet Union and Bulgaria have been actively striving to "destabilize" Turkey. a If there is no hard evidence it is because the Soviets are consummate professionals who cover their tracks and main- tain "plausible deniability. " The KGB hired Agca in Turkey and caused him to use a rightist cover to obscure the fact that he was a KGB agent. Although Agca traveled through eleven other countries, his stay in Bulgaria was crucial because Bulgaria is a totalitarian state and the police know everything; therefore they knew who Agca was, and they must have been using him for their own purposes. 9
4. 2. PROBLEMS WITH THE STERLING-HENZE-KALB MODEL
The basic Sterling-Henze-Kalb model suffered from a complete ab- sence of credible evidence, a reliance on ideological premises, and internal inconsistencies. As problems arose, the grounds were shifted, sometimes with a complete reversal of argument. IO
An initial problem for the model was the Bulgarian-Soviet motive. In this connection, we should note the extreme foolishness of Sterling's original suggestion that the Eastern bloc went to the trouble of locating a Turkish Fascist to shoot the pope in order to make Turkey look bad, and thereby to loosen its ties to NATO. That such a loosened tie would follow from a Turkish Fascist shooting the pope is not sensible, nor is it likely that the conservative Soviet leadership would indulge in such a fanciful plan even if it had a greater probability of "success. "ll This theory assumed that Agca would be caught and identified as a Turk, but that he wouldn't reveal that he had been hired by the Bulgarians
and the Soviets. Subsequently, Sterling suggested that Agca was sup- posed to have been shot in the square to assure his silence. The amaz- ingly incompetent KGB failed to accomplish this simple task. SHK also maintained at various points that Agca may not even have known who hired him, so he couldn't implicate the East. Later, when Agca claimed that he had been heavily involved with Bulgarians in Rome, Sterling and Henze lapsed into silence on the failure of the KGB to maintain a semblance of plausible deniability.
148 MAl'UFACTURING CONSENT
SHK finally settled firmly on the idea that quelling the Polish Soli- darity movement was the real Soviet-Bulgarian motive. But this theory is as implausible as its predecessor, when we take account of timing and elementary cost-benefit analysis. Agca was allegedly recruited in Tur- key long before Solidarity existed. In a variant Sterling version of the timing of his recruitment, Agca was hired by the Bulgarians in July 1980, which was still prior to the Gdansk shipyard strike, and thus before Solidarity appeared a credible threat to Soviet control. The risks and costs of an assassination attempt would seem heavy-and, in fact, the costs to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria were severe based merely on the widespread belief in their involvement, even in the absence of credible evidence. The supposed benefits from the act are also not plausible. The assassination ofthe pope, especially ifblamed on the Soviet Union, would infuriate and unify the Poles and strengthen their opposition to a Soviet-dominated regime. And the further costs in damaged relations with Western Europe-which were extremely important to the Soviet Union in 1981, with the gas pipeline being negotiated and with the placement of new U. S. missiles in Western Europe a major Soviet concern-would seem to militate against taking foolish riskS. 12
A second problem with the SHK model is that Agca had threatened to kill the pope in 1979 at the time of a papal visit to Turkey-again, long before Solidarity existed. This suggests that Agca and the Turkish right had their own grievances against the pope and a rationale for assassinating him that was independent of any Soviet influence. It was partly for this reason that SHK argue that Agca was recruited by the Soviet Union in Turkey before the pope's visit there, setting him up for the later attack. But not only is this pure speculation unsupported by a trace of evidence, it fails to explain why the entire Fascist press, not just Agca, assailed the pope's visit in 1979. Was the entire Fascist right serving Soviet ends? The only time this issue was ever raised in the mass media, on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour" of January 5, 1983, Paul Henze stated in no uncertain terms that "there was no [press] opposi- tion" to the pope's visit in 1979. The Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu, however, assembled a large collection of citations from the Turkish rightist press of the time to demonstrate that Henze's statement was false. 13
A third problem for the SHK model was that Agca was a committed rightist, and therefore not a likely candidate for service to the Commu- nist powers (although perhaps amenable to fingering them as co-con- spirators in a prison context). SHK strove mightily to make Agca out to be a rootless mercenary, but the best they could come up with was
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 149
the fact that Agca didn't seem to have been registered as a member of the Gray Wolves. 14 But all his friends, associates, and affiliations from high school days onward were Gray Wolves, and in his travels through Europe up to the time of his May 13, Ig81, rendezvous, he moved solely through the Gray Wolves network. While in prison, Agca addressed a letter to Alparslan Turkes, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party of Turkey, expressing his continued commitment and loyalty. This letter was bothersome to Sterling and Henze as it is inconsistent with their depiction of Agca as apolitical, and Sterling dismissed it without argument as a "laughably clumsy forgery. " A problem, however, is that Agca's letter was introduced as evidence in a trial in Ankara by the Turkish military authorities, usually adequate proof for Sterling of authenticity. She doesn't mention this fact or examine their case. Ugur Mumcu devotes five pages of his book Agca Dossier to a detailed ac- count of the Turkes letter, describing the great pains the authorities took, including tapping outside experts, to establish its authenticity.
The conclusion on all sides was that the letter was genuine.
A fourth problem with the SHK model is the notion that because of the efficiency of the Bulgarian secret police, Agca's presence in Sofia
must have been known to them, and he must therefore have been on their payroll. This assumed efficiency is an ideological assumption un- supported by any evidence and contradicted by actual Bulgarian and Soviet performance. There is no evidence that the Bulgarians ever identified Agca, who was using a false passport. Furthermore, the con- tention that the Bulgarian police know everything was refuted in impor- tant testimony during the Rome trial on September 22, Ig85, when Gray Wolves official Abdullah Catli stated that many Gray Wolves preferred to traverse Bulgaria because it was easy to hide in the large flow of Turkish immigrant traffic through that country.
A fifth problem for the SHK model was the fact that Agca seems to have gotten his gun through the Gray Wolves network, not from the Bulgarians, who presumably could have slipped it to him quite easily in Rome. In her Reader's Digesl article, Sterling traced Agca's gun to Horst Grillmaier, an Austrian gun dealer who, according to Sterling, had fled behind the Iron Curtain after May 13, Ig81, to avoid question- ing in the West. It turned out later, however, that Grillmaier was a former Nazi who specialized in supplying right-wing gun buyers; that he had not disappeared behind the Iron Curtain at all; and that the gun had proceeded through a number of intermediaries, to be transmitted to Agca by a Gray Wolves friend. Sterling handles the disintegration ofthe original Grillmaier line by simply shifting to a new conspiratorial
I50 MA:><UFACTURING CONSENT
ground: the clever Bulgarians had Agca purchase a gun through a known Fascist to strengthen the case that Agca was a right-winger who could not possibly be connected to the Communist powers.
A final set of problems for the SHK model lies in the extraordinary level of incompetence and gross violations of the principles of plausible deniability that it attributes to the Bulgarian and Soviet secret police- features that coexist uneasily with the superspy image invoked else- where in the model. At various points, SHK contended that the Soviets and Bulgarians were professionals who could afford to go after the pope because they would never be implicated themselves. But hiring Agca, a wanted criminal and a mentally unbalanced rightist, would appear extremely foolish, as the cover would quickly be blown in the likely event that he was caught. In Sterling's initial tale, the KGB wanted him to be caught--or at least to have his body identified-to discredit Turkey. With the shift to weakening Solidarity as the motive, the threat of disclosure of Bulgarian-Soviet involvement would seem very serious. Yet the Bulgarians and KGB hired Agca and then failed to kill him. Another anomaly was bringing Agca to Sofia for instructions. If he had already been recruited in Turkey, wouldn't bringing him to Sofia be a foolish compromising of his carefully prepared "cover"? If so, doesn't his visit to Sofia constitute an argument against Soviet and Bulgarian involvement?
While Agca's November 1982 confession that he had Bulgarian co- conspirators made the Bulgarian Connection instantly "true" for the Western media, it wreaked havoc with the SHK model and with the logic of "plausible deniability. " If, as Agca confessed, the Bulgarians connived with him in Rome, escorted him to St. Peter's Square to plan the attack, entertained him at their apartments, and participated in the attack itself, what happens to the logic of the "cover"?
4. 3. AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL
An alternative explanation of the Bulgarian Connection can be derived from the questions the U. S. press would surely have raised if an analo- gous scenario had occurred in Moscow, in which Agca, who had briefly visited the United States on his travels, and has been in a Soviet prison for seventeen months after having shot a high Soviet official, now confesses that three U. S. embassy members were his co-conspirators. In this case, the U. S. press would have paid close attention to the convenience of the confession to Soviet propaganda needs, to the sev-
THE KGB-BULGAR. IAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 151
enteen-month delay in the naming of Americans, and to the obvious possibility that Agca had been encouraged or coerced into revising his story. They would have focused intently on Agca's prison conditions, his visitors there, his amenability to a "deal" with his captors, and any evidence in his statements or from other sources that he had been coached. The fact that Agca had visited the United States, among twelve countries, would not be considered strong evidence of CIA involvement, and the press might even have pointed out that a mini- mally competent CIA would not have brought Agca to Washington for instructions in the first place.
The alternative model would take the same fact that SHK start out with-Agca's stay in Sofia, Bulgaria-but interpret it differently. That visit violates principles of plausible deniability and would be especially foolish if the KGB had already recruited Agca in Turkey. On the other hand, it provides a Western propaganda system with the necessary tie between Agca's terrorist attack in Rome and the Soviet bloc. The
convenience of Agca's confession-to Socialist leader Craxi, to the Christian Democrats and neo-Fascists in Italy, and to Reagan searching for a tie-in between "international terrorism" and the Soviet Union-is also crystal clear, and would immediately suggest to an objective press the possibility that this "demand" might have elicited an appropriate "supply" from the imprisoned Agca. The lag in Agca's naming of any Bulgarians-seventeen months after he entered an Italian prison and seven months after he had agreed to "cooperate" with the investigating magistrate, Hario Martella-is also highly suggestive. Why did it take him so long to name his co-conspirators? Sterling tried to explain this on the ground that Agca had hopes that the Bulgarians would "spring him" and gave them time; his successive elaborations of claims and subsequent retractions she explained in terms of Agca's "signaling" to his alleged partners. This complex and speculative attempt to rational- ize inconvenient facts is not necessary; a very straightforward explana- tion based on Agca's character and affiliations and the inducements known to have been offered to him (described below) does quite nicely. ls Furthermore, Sterling's explanation does not account for the fact that Agca failed to provide serious evidence late in the trial, long after it was clear that the Bulgarians had not responded to his alleged
signals.
Another suggestive feature of Agca's confession is that it/ollowed the
creation and wide media distribution of the SHK model. During the course of the investigation of the plot, it was revealed that the impris- oned Agca had access to newspapers, radio, and television, among other modes of personal communication with the outside world. It was also
152 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
brought out in the investigation that Agca's "desire for personal public- ity seems unquenchable. . . . At one point in the Italian investigation, he abruptly clammed up when the magistrates refused his demand that journalists be present as he 'confessed. ' " 1 6 Agca was interrogated about a possible Bulgarian connection long before his confession, and was surely aware that his interrogators would be quite pleased to have him produce one. And by the fall of 1982 one was being provided to him in the press and on the screen every day.
We mentioned earlier that the Italian secret-service agency 818MI had actually distributed a piece of disinformation tying the Soviets to the assassination attempt within days of the attack. At the time of the shooting, 8ISMI was headed by General Giuseppe 8antovito, a mem- ber of the extreme right-wing organization Propaganda Due (P-2), and SISMI and the other intelligence agencies were heavily infiltrated with P-2 members. A P-2 scandal broke in Italy in March 1981, and by August 8antovito had been forced to leave 81SMI, but the rightist grip on this organization was by no means broken.
An important feature of Italian politics in the period from 1966 through 1981 was the protection given by the intelligence services to right-wing terror, under a program designated the "strategy of ten- sion. "17 One aspect of this strategy was the carrying out of right-wing terrorist attacks, which were then attributed to the left, frequently with [he help of forged documents and planted informers committing per- jury. The point ofthe strategy was to polarize society, discredit the left, and set the stage for a rightist coup. Many P-2 members in the armed forces and intelligence services took part in implementing this program, and many others were sympathetic to its aims. In July 1984, an Italian parliamentary commission published its final report on the P-2 conspir- acy, and it and its accompanying volumes of hearings pointed up the politicization of the intelligence services, their frequent use of tech- niques of disinformation, and their connivance with and protection of right-wing terror. In July 1985 a Bologna court issued a decision in which it named 818Ml and its officers as having engaged in numerous
forgeries, and also in having collaborated in covering up the Bologna terrorist bombing of 1980. 18
818MI participated in a five-hour interrogation of Agca in December 1981, exploring his link to "international terrorism. " Investigating Judge Martella acknowledges in his long investigative report that he had spoken to Agca about the possibility of a commuted sentence if he "cooperated," and the Italian press quoted Agca's lawyer's report ofthe terms of proposed deals that had been offered to Agca. 19 There were also a variety of reports in the European and dissident media of pres-
THE KGB-Bl;LGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 153
sures applied to Agca while in prison. A London Sunday Times team pointed out in May 1983 that the secret services "visited Agca and warned him that once his solitary confinement was over, 'the authorities could no longer guarantee his safety. ' "20 According to Orsen Oymen, a Turkish expert on the case, the Catholic chaplain in Agca's prison, Father Mariano Santini, had frequent access to Agca and was one of those who pressed him to cooperate with the authorities. 21 There is some possible confirmation of Santini's pressure tactics in a letter which Agca addressed to the Vatican, dated September 24, 1982, which com- plained bitterly of threats to his life emanating from a Vatican emissary.
During the course of the Rome trial, Giovanni Pandico, the principal Italian state witness in the trial of Mafia leaders in Naples and an associate of Raphael Cutaia, a Mafia leader who had been in Ascoli Piceno prison with Agca, claimed in an interview (and subsequently before the court) that Agca had been coerced, persuaded and coached to implicate the Bulgarians by Cutolo, Santini, and others. Pandico claimed that CutaIa himself had been coerced into working on Agca by threats to himself, and that former SISMI officials Giuseppi Musumeci and Francesco Pazienza were key initiators of the plot. One of the important individuals accused by Pandico, Francesco Pazienza, while denying the charges, gave his own detailed account of who in SISMI had participated in persuading Agca to talk.
From the inception of the case, there were points suggesting that Agca was coached while in prison. After his long (and unexplained) silence, Agca identified the Bulgarians in a photo album allegedly shown to him for the first time on November 9, 1982. But in a speech before the Italian parliament, the minister of defense, Lelio Lagorio, stated that Agca had identified the Bulgarians in September of 1982. This discrepancy has never been explained, but that Agca saw these photos for the first time on November 9 is not believable. 22 A key element in Agca's testimony was his claim to have visited the apartment of Sergei Antonov, one of the Bulgarians arrested in the "plot," and to have met his wife and daughter, which was supported by many fine details regarding Antonov's hobbies and the characteristics ofhis apart- ment. The defense, however, was able to show that one feature of Antonov's apartment mentioned by Agca was in error, although charac- teristic of the other apartments in Antonov's building, which suggests that Agca had been supplied information based on observation of other apartments. More important, the defense was able to establish that at the time of Agca's visit at which he met Mrs. Antonov, she was out of the country. Following newspaper publicity given these defense con- tentions, on June 28, 1983, Agca retracted his claims that he had visited
154 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
the apartment and met Antonov's family. The details he had given about apartment and family then became inexplicable, except on the supposition that Agca had been fed information while in prison. In a number of other instances Agca provided information that bore strong suspicion of having been provided by officials and agents of the court or the police. The London Sunday Times reporters, who interviewed one of the accused Bulgarians in Sofia, wrote that "When asked by Martella in Bulgaria whether he had any salient physical features, Vassilev said that he had a mole on his left cheek. In a subsequent confession, as Vassilev points out, 'Agca described my mole in the very same words which I used in describing it here. ' "23
During the course of the Rome trial in 1985-86, no trace was ever found of the money that Agca claimed he had received from the Bul- garians. The car that Agca indicated the Bulgarians had used to escort him around Rome was never located. No witness was ever found who saw him in his many supposed encounters with Bulgarians. His gun was transferred to him through the Turkish Gray Wolves network, and there was no shortage of evidence of his meetings with members of the Gray Wolves in Western Europe. The note that was found on Agca's person on May 13, 1981, did not mention any collaborators, and sug- gested a loose timetable for the assassination attempt and a planned railroad trip to Naples.
In sum, it is highly probable that Agca was offered a deal to talk, and that it was made clear to him that the people with power over his well-being wanted him to implicate the Bulgarians and the Soviet Union in the assassination attempt. He had access to the SHK model even before he confessed. His confession was therefore suspect from the start, and an "alternative model" of inducement-pressure coaching was plausible and relevant, from the Agca's first implication of Bulgari- ans. This model became more cogent over time as Agca retracted strategic claims, and as no confirming evidence of a Bulgarian Connec- tion was produced. By the same token, the SHK model, implausible
from the beginning, became even less tenable.
4. 4. THE MASS MEDIA'S UNCRITICAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE BULGARIAN CONNECTION
Despite the implausibility of the SHK claim that Agca had been hired by the Bulgarians and the KGB to shoot the pope, and although it was
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 155
sustained by argument that amounted to sheer humbuggery, the Bul- garian Connection met the standard of utility. In this case, therefore, as a propaganda model would anticipate, the U. S. mass media accepted the SHK model as valid, ignored the alternative model, and par- ticipated in a classic propaganda campaign that got the message of Bulgarian-Soviet guilt over to the public. Some members of the mass media helped originate the claim of a Bulgarian Connection, while others participated only in disseminating the SHK line (and excluding alternative views and inconvenient information).
The campaign began with Sterling's Reader's Digest article of Sep- tember 1982, which was closely followed by the NBC-TV program of September 21, 1982. The outreach of these two statements asserting a Bulgarian Connection was great, and they were widely reported upon in the rest of the media in the form of a summary of their claims, with virtually no questions raised about their validity. With Agca's Novem- ber 1982 naming of Bulgarians, the mass media began to report the Bulgarian Connection intensively. This reporting was carried out ex- clusively within the frame of the SHK model, and for most of the mass media no serious departures from this model occurred through the conclusion of the Rome trial in March 1986. 24
Agca's naming of the Bulgarians was the key fact that generated news coverage, providing the basis for reiterated details about the Bulgarians, explanations of the Bulgarian (and Soviet) motive, and speculation about the political implications of the charges, if confirmed. A major characteristic of these news reports was their sheer superficiality, with the charges never seriously examined but merely regurgitated and elaborated with odd facts and opinion, and with no departures from the SHK frame (and no hints of the possible relevance of an alternative frame). The charges constituted a form of vindication of the SHK model if taken at face value and presented superficially-i. e. , if the media presentations never considered political convenience, prison conditions, possible deals, plausible deniability, etc. And this proce- dure-a reiteration of Agca claims, supplemented by extremely super- ficial pro-plot speculation-was the principal modality by which the mass media accepted and pushed the propaganda line.
Newsweek provides a prototype of news coverage within the SHK framework in its article of January 3, 1983, "The Plot to Kill Pope John Paul II. " The Bulgarian-Soviet motive as portrayed by SHK is reite- rated through quotes from congenial sources-"a precautionary and alternative solution to the invasion ofPoland"-while nobody is quoted discussing costs and benefits, the nature of the Soviet leadership, or Western benefits from Agca's confession. 25 In fact, Newsweek suggests
156 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
that this charging of the Soviet bloc with the assassination attempt is a painful embarrassment to Western governments (parroting the SHK line on this point). Newsweek nowhere discusses the seventeen-month lag in Agca's confession or his prison conditions, nor does it report in this (or any later) article the claims and information noted in the London Sunday Times and the Italian press about inducements or coercive threats that might have been applied to Agca while in custody.
Agca's evidence is given credibility by Newsweek through several devices: repeating his claims several times as the core of the story; stressing in two separate sequences investigative judge Martella's al- leged honesty, integrity, conscientiousness, etc. ; quoting from Italian officials who say they "have the evidence" that "Agca operated in close contact with the Bulgarians"; asserting that "all the evidence suggests" that Agca is "not crazy. " But most important is the previously men- tioned refusal to discuss the premises of the SHK framework or to use an alternative frame.
Newsweek swallows intact a series of SHK ideological assumptions, such as that "investigators [read "Paul Henze"] now think" Agca was probably using the Gray Wolves as a cover; Bulgaria and the Soviet Union have long been trying "to destabilize Turkey through terrorism" (quoting Henze directly); in Sofia, Agca's presence "must have come to the attention of the Bulgarian secret police" (duplicating the fre- quent SHK error of forgetting their claim that Agca had already been recruited for the papal assassination attempt in Turkey, as well as erroneously assuming that the Bulgarian secret police can easily iden- tify Turks passing through their country). Newsweek states as estab- lished fact that "Agca had help from a huge set of Bulgarians," although it provides no evidence for this except assertions by Agca, Italian officials, and Paul Henze. It reports Agca's numerous transactions with Bulgarians in Rome without mentioning the problem of plausible deni- ability and without batting an eyelash at the sheer foolishness of the scenario. This Newsweek article is nonetheless powerful, with its reiter- ation of many details, its confidently asserted plots and subplots, its
quotes from many authorities supporting the charges, and its seeming openness and occasional mention of lack of full proof-but it is a piece of uncritical propaganda that confines itself strictly within the SHK frame, with the exception of the single phrase cited earlier.
Initially, the other major media performed quite uniformly in the same mold-uncritical, trivial, working solely within the bounds of the SHK model, and entirely bypassing all the hard but obvious questions raised by the "alternative" model. Of the thirty-two news articles on, or closely related to, the plot that appeared in the New York Times
J
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 157
between November I, ! 982, and January 31, 1983, twelve had no news content whatever but were reports of somebody's opinion or specula- tion about the case--or refusal to speculate about the issue. (The Times carried one news article whose sole content was that President Reagan had "no comment" on the case. ) More typical was the front-page article by Henry Kamm, "Bonn is Fearful of Bulgaria Tie with Terrorists" (Dec. 12, 1982), or Bernard Gwertzman's "U. S. Intrigued But Uncertain on a Bulgarian Tie" (Dec. 26, 1982). In "news report" after news report, unnamed individuals are "intrigued," their interest is "piqued," evi- dence is said to be "not wholly convincing," or "final proof is still lacking! ' Four of the Dews articles in the Times were on peripheral subjects such as smuggling in Bulgaria or papal-Soviet relations. Of the sixteen more direct news items, only one covered a solid news fact- namely, Antonov's arrest in Rome. The other fifteen news items were trivia, such as Kamm's "Bulgarians Regret Tarnished Image" (Jan. 27, 1983), or another Kamm piece entitled "Italian Judge Inspects Apart- ment of Suspect in Bulgarian Case" (Jan. 12, 1983).
All of these expres- sions of opinion, doubts, interest, suppositions, and minor detail served to produce a lot of smoke-which kept the issue of possible Soviet involvement before the public. They steered quite clear of substantive issues that bore on motives, quality of evidence, and Turkish and Italian context.
During the years that followed, to the end of the trial in March 1986, the mass media, with only minor exceptions, adhered closely and un- critically to the SHK framework. 26 They not only failed to press alter- native questions, they also refused to examine closely the premises, logic, or evidence supporting the SHK case. Part of the reason for this was the media's extraordinary reliance on Sterling and Henze as sources (and Kalb's position as a news reporter on NBC-TV), and their unwillingness to ask these sources probing questions.
4. 5. BIASED SOURCING
Sterling and Henze, and to a lesser extent Michael Ledeen, dominated perceptions of the Bulgarian Connection in the U. S. mass media to a remarkable degree. Moreover, they affected the course of events in Italy, as their version of Bulgarian guilt was aired in the Italian media before Agca named the Bulgarians and may have influenced Martella as well. 27 Sterling and Henze dominated media coverage by virtue of the very wide distribution of their articles and books on the case, and
158 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
by their extensive and uncritical use as expens by the elite press, news magazines, and television news and talk shows. 28 Sterling, in addition to her Reader's Digest anicle, had three substantial pieces in the Wall Street Journal and several anicles in the New York Times. Her views were given repeated airing on CBS News, without rebuttal. Henze accounted for twelve of the fourteen articles on the Bulgarian Connec- tion case in the Christian Science Monitor between September 1982 and May 1985, and his articles were used widely elsewhere. The only opin- ion piece on the Bulgarian Connection that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer during that same period was by Michael Ledeen. Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen together accounted for 76 percent of the time in three shows on the subject on the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. " No tough questions were asked of them on these shows, and no dissident voices were heard, perhaps because Sterling and Henze refused to appear on television shows (or in college debates) with people who opposed their views, and Henze insisted on approving in advance any questions to be asked. Thus their initial dominance was
funher enhanced by coercive tactics. 29
If we ask the deeper question of why these expens should predomi-
nate in the first place, we believe the answer must be found in the power of their sponsors and the congeniality of their views to the corporate community and the mainstream media. Their messages passed quite easily through the filters of a propaganda system. Sterling was funded and published by Reader's Digest, which gave her enormous outreach and immediate brand-name recognition. The conservative network is fond of Sterling, so their large stable of columnists and think-tank affiliates, like the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute, pushes her views. The Reagan administration was also delighted with Sterling- despite her frequent denunciations of the CIA and the State Depart- ment for their cowardice in failing to pursue terrorism and the Bulgarian Connection with sufficient aggressiveness! -and so were the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and many others. Ster- ling was the outstanding popular expositor of the theme urged upon the conferees at the Jonathan Institute meeting ofJuly 1979 and advocated
by the Reagan administration team anxious to create a moral environ- ment for an arms race and global support of counterrevolutionary freedom fighters. 3o Henze, an old CIA hand and protege of Zbigniew Brzezinski, was also funded by the Reader's Digest, and Ledeen was affiliated with both the CSIS and the Reagan political team. If the media transmit literal lies by this Big Three-which they did fre- quently-the flak machines remain silent. As one network official told
r
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 159
one of the authors, if a critic of the Bulgarian Connection were allowed on the air, the official would "have to make sure that every i was dotted and l crossed; but with Sterling, there were no problems. "
Again in conformity with a propaganda model, it was of no appar- ent concern to the mass media that Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen were exceptionally biased sources, immune to the rules of evidence and, in fact, agents of disinformation. We discussed earlier Sterling's dismis- sal of Agca's commitment to Turkes and her handling of Agca's gun, and similar cases could be cited in large number. 3l Sterling's Terror Network is notable for its gullibility in accepting at face value claims fed her by Israeli, South African, and Argentinian secret police, and, most notably, the Czech Stalinist defector, Jan Sejna,32 whose evi- dence for a Soviet terror network came from a document forged by the CIA to test Sejna's integrity! 33 A remarkable feature of Sterling's Time of the Assassins and other writings on the Bulgarian Connection is her reiterated belief that the Reagan administration and CIA dragged their feet in pursuing the Red plot because of their interest in detente. 34 And despite her phenomenal sales and uncritical reception in the U. S. media, Sterling bemoaned the "accepted position, the so- cially indispensable position . . . if you care to move in certain circles and if you care to be accepted at your job professionally" in the West, of doubting the Bulgarian Connection, which she attributed to the success of the KGB in pushing a forty-page booklet on the plot by Soviet journalist lona Andronov. 35
These evidences of charlatanry did not impair Sterling's credibility with the U. S. mass media-in fact, the New York Times allowed her front-page space and a regular role as a reporter of news on the Bul- garian connection. By doing this, the Times guaranteed that editorial policy would control the news fit to print. This was displayed fully in Sterling's front-page news story of prosecutor Albano's report on June 10, 1984. The most important new information in that report-that on
June 28, 1983, Agca had retracted a substantial part of his evidence against the Bulgarians-was omitted from Sterling's story, although she coyly suggested that some undescribed points had been retracted that were already "corroborated. " This was seriously misleading. Agca's having visited Antonov's apartment and met with his family was never corroborated, and the details he gave on these matters had previously been cited by Sterling and Henze as crucial corroboration of his general claims. His retraction thus led to the important question of how Agca had learned details about Antonov's apartment without having been there. This issue was never seriously addressed in the New York Times. 36
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Paul Henze was a longtime CIA official who had been head of the CIA station in Turkey and a specialist in propaganda. Former Turkish head of state Bulent Ecevit even accused Henze of helping destabilize Turkey during his term of operations thereY Henze never refers in his "news" articles to his active participation in Turkish affairs as a CIA official. His writings are notable for their consistent apologetics for military rule in Turkey, for their dishonesty,38 and for the fact that Henze openly disdains the use of rules of evidence in proving Soviet villainy. 39
Michael Ledeen, as we saw in chapter I, contends that the mass media believe Qaddafi more readily than the U. S. government, and focus more heavily on the victims of state terror in U. S. client states (Indonesia in East Timor, and Guatemala? ) than in enemy and radical states (Cambodia and Poland? ). Again, such absurdities do not reduce Ledeen's access to the mass media as an expert on the Bulgarian Con- nection, or on anything else. 40
The mass media not only allowed these disinformation sources to prevail, they protected them against disclosures that would reveal their dubious credentials. That Henze was a longtime CIA official was almost never mentioned in the press (never, to our knowledge, on television), and his consistent apologetics for the Turkish military regime and frequent lies were never disclosed. In Sterling's case, her numerous errors of fact, foolish arguments, and wilder political opinions were not disclosed to readers of the New York Times, Time, or Newsweek, or watchers of CBS News or the "McNeil-Lehrer News Hour," and even "newsworthy" matters bearing on her qualifications were ignored. For example, Sterling's numerous attacks on the murdered French activist- radical Henry Curiel resulted in suits for slander brought against her in Paris. The New York Times has never mentioned these slander suits, which would put Sterling in a bad light not only because she lost them in whole or part, but also because of the insight they provide concerning her sources and methods. Sterling had gotten much of her information
from a French journalist, George Suffert, who was a conduit for French and South African intelligence, and who had obligingly placed the African National Congress at the top of his list of "terrorist" organiza- tions. In her Terror Network, Sterling strongly intimates that Curiel was a KGB agent, but the French court, on the basis of documents provided by French intelligence, found no support for this claim. Sterling re- treated to the defense that her insinuation of Curiel's KGB connection was merely a "hypothesis" rather than an assertion of fact. The case, in short, showed that she was a conduit of disinformation, quite pre-
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 161
pared to slander a murdered radical on the basis of claims by extreme right-wing disinformation sources.
Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative activist and disinformationist, with ready access to the Time~ has also received its close protection. His book Grave New World was reviewed in the Times by William Griffith, a Reader's Digest "roving editor" and right-wing MIT political scientist who found Ledeen's version of the Bulgarian Connection entirely convincing. 41 Ledeen was deeply involved with Francesco Pa- zienza in the "Billygate" affair and had numerous contacts with Italian intelligence and the Italian extreme right. The Italian Fascist and head of P-2, Lido Gelli, hiding in Uruguay, instructed one of his accom- plices to convey a manuscript to Ledeen. Pazienza claimed (and SISMI head Santovito confirmed) that Ledeen was a member of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI, with code number Z-3. Ledeen received over SlOO,OOO from SISMI for services rendered, including the supply- ing of stale U. S. intelligence reports that SISMI then passed off as its own. Ledeen funneled this money into a Bermuda bank account. His manipulative activities in Italy were on such a scale that in the summer of 1984 a newly appointed head of SISMI told the Italian parliament that Ledeen was a "meddler" and persona non grata in Italy. 42 None of these points was ever disclosed in the Times. 43
4. 6. THE PROPAGANDA AGENDA: QUESTIONS UNASKED, SOURCES UNTAPPED
There is a close linkage among sources used, frames of reference, and agendas ofthe newsworthy. When the mass media chose to use Sterling, Henze, and Ledeen heavily, they simultaneously adopted a frame of reference in which the Bulgarians and Soviets were presumed guilty, Agca was an apolitical mercenary, and justice was being promoted by diligent Judge Martella in free-world Italy. In the propaganda cam- paign that ensued, hard questions about the quality of the SHK model were simply not asked, and alternative sources and frames were ig- nored.
A distinction between matters on and off the agenda, such as we used in the previous chapter, is once again applicable and illuminating. "On the agenda" are statements by Agca and Martella about Agca's latest
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claims and proofs of Bulgarian involvement, Brzezinski's opinion on whether the Bulgarians arc likely to have engaged in such an escapade (they were), or Judy Woodruff's question to Paul Henze as to whether the Soviets "would have any notion, any desire to try this again" (they do this kind of thing all the time-just got a little careless here because "they had got away with so much in ltaly"). 44 As in the Third World election cases described in chapter 3, the media prefer to focus on superficial detail about the participants and opinions within a narrow range of establishment views (plus bluffdenials by Bulgarian and Soviet officials), along with each development supporting the accepted case (a defector's accusations, a further Agca confession, an investigator's or prosecutor's report, and leaks of alleged claims or expected new devel- opments), whatever its credibility_
"Off the agenda" are arguments and facts that would call into ques- tion the validity of the basic SHK model, and those relating to the "alternative model" (which starts with the question of why Agca con- fessed so late and the likelihood that he was encouraged and pressed to talk). We will run through only a few of the important questions and points of evidence that the mass media put off the agenda.
The basic SHK model rested its case on the Soviet motive, Agca's stay in Sofia, and the high professionalism of the Soviet and Bulgarian secret police, which made it likely that they were manipulating Agca if he stopped off in Bulgaria. Only the ABC "20120" program of May 12, 1983, explored the Soviet motive in any depth, despite the constant mass-media reiteration of the SHK line. ABC went to the trouble of asking the Vatican about the validity of Marvin Kalb's claim that the pope had written a note threatening to resign and to return to Poland to lead the resistance to any Soviet invasion. Cardinal John Krol, speaking for the Vatican, said that "Not only was there not such a letter, but such a letter directly from the Pope to Brezhnev would have been a total departure from all normal procedures. In no way could you conceive of the Holy Father saying, 'I would resign. ''' ABC's informa- tion from the Vatican too was that the pope's spoken message to Brezh- nev was conciliatory. This spectacular repudiation of an important element in the SHK case was unreported in the rest of the media, and simply died with the ABC broadcast. And any balancing of supposed gains against the costs and risks to the Soviet Union in sponsoring Agca was simply not undertaken in the mass media.
None of them stopped to evaluate Agca's 1979 letter threatening to kill the pope on his earlier visit to Turkey. Sterling's ludicrous claim that the KGB hired a Turk to kill the pope in order to damage Turkey's
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO Kill THE POPE r63
relation to NA TO was never discussed. The question of the authentic- ity of Agca's letter to Turkes, which bears on Agca's political commit- ments (and thus another SHK premise), was never discussed in the U. S. mass media. During the trial, Abdullah Catli's statement that Bulgaria was a preferred Gray Wolves route to Europe because of the relative ease of hiding in the heavy Turkish traffic-which directly contradicts the SHK claim that the Bulgarian secret police know everything, and that Agca's stay in Sofia must therefore have been by Bulgarian official plan-was never picked up in the U. S. mass media's coverage of the Rome trial.
The most striking deficiencies of the mass media's handling of the basic SHK claims, however, was their remarkable naivete in the face of the pseudoscientific speculations of SHK and the accumulating vio- lations of elementary principles of plausible deniability. The preposter- ous SHK claims-without a vestige of evidence-that Agca had been recruited by the KGB in Turkey for future work, and that he took on the appearance of a right-winger as a "cover," were not ridiculed, and were not evaluated when presented as purported truth. 4S There was never any discussion in the mass media of the fact that the thesis of prior recruitment and careful cultivation of Agca's cover in Turkey was flatly inconsistent with the claim that he was brought to Sofia for a lengthy stay for instructions. With regard to Agca's alleged open deal- ings with Bulgarians in Rome, the mass media simply refused to discuss the fact that the alleged professionalism and use ofthe right-wing Turk as a "cover" had disappeared.
As regards the alternative model, and the likelihood that Agca had been encouraged and coached, here also the mass media refused to explore these dissonant possibilities. They simply would not examine and discuss the convenience of the newly discovered plot for so many Western incerests; the huge time lag in the naming ofBulgarians; Agca's prison conditions and prison contacts; reports of meetings, offers, and threats to Agca to induce him to talk; and the compromised character of the Italian police and intelligence agencies. This involved the media in the suppression of important documents.
As one importanc instance, the July 12, 1984, Italian Report of the Parliamentary Commission on the Masonic Lodge P-2 describes in great detail the penetration of this massive neo-Fascist conspiracy into the military establishment, secret services, press, and judiciary, among oth- ers. This report was newsworthy in its own right, but it also had a bearing on the Bulgarian ConnectiOn case, as it addressed characteris- tics of Italian institutions that were directly involved in making and
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prosecuting the case against the Bulgarians. The New York Times, Time, ~ Newsweek, and CBS Evening News never mentioned the publication of
this report.
As a second major illustration, one year later, in July 1985, the Crjmi- nal Court of Rome handed down aJudgmenf in the Maner of FTancesco Pazienza et al. , which described repeated corrupt behavior by officials of the Italian secret-service agency SISMI, including the forgery and planting of documents. These officials were also charged with involve- ment in a cover-up ofthe agents carrying out the 1980 Bologna railway- station massacre, the kind of terrorist connection that attracts frenetic mass-media attention when attributable to suitable villains. As we noted earlier, SISMI officials had visited Agca in prison and SI8MI had issued a forged document implicating the Soviet Union in the shooting of the pope on May 19, 1981, only six days after the assassination attempt. This forgery was never mentioned in the Times, Tim~ and Newsweek, or on CBS News, and the July 1985 court decision was barely mentioned in a back-page article of the Times.
These blackouts are of materials that suggest a corrupt Italian pro- cess and the possibility that Agca was persuaded and coached to pin the plot on the East. A propaganda system exploiting the alleged Bulgarian Connection will naturally avoid such documents.
Agca's extremely loose prison conditions and the numerous claims in the Italian and dissident U. S. press of visits by Italian intelligence personnel were also virtually unmentioned by the U. S. mass media throughout 1982 and 1983. In June 1983, Diana Johnstone, the foreign editor of the newspaper In These Times submitted on Op-Ed column to the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that summarized the evidence and claims of intelligence-agency visits, the reported threats to Agca that his open and pleasant prison conditions might be terminated if he remained uncooperative, and Martella's proposed deal with Agca. This Op-Ed offering was rejected, and no commentary or news along these lines was permitted to surface in the Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer-or elsewhere, to our knowledge. Several years later, in an article in the New York Times of June 17,1985, referring to Pandico's detailed description of how Agca was coached in prison, John Tagliabue describes Agca's prison as "notoriously porous. " But the Times had never mentioned this notorious fact before, or considered it in any way relevant to the case.
When Agca identified the Bulgarians in November 1982, the integrity of the Italian investigative-judicial process in pursuing the case was already badly compromised for a wide variety of reasons,46 but the U. S. mass media weren't interested. Nor were they interested in the strange
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 165
circumstances of the famous Antonov photo, widely circulated in the Western press, which shows Antonov very clearly and in a remarkable likeness watching the scene at St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. This photo, Martella eventually claimed, was not of Antonov but an Ameri- can tourist. But this tourist, who apparently looked exactly like An- tonov, has never been located, and the film from which this shot was taken has unaccountably disappeared. 47 Agca's alterations in his claims about the Bulgarians, with Martella generously allowing him to change his recollections about the timing of events on May 13 whenever Bul- garian counter-evidence was too strong, failed to attract the media's attention. 48 Agca's June 28, 1983, retraction of his claim that he had visited Antonov's apartment and met his family was not mentioned in the mass media until a full year after the event, and even then suggested to the press no very serious problems with the case or with Martella's investigative work. 49 How could Agca know details about Antonov's apartment if he had never been there? An honest press would have pursued this relentlessly. The New York Times, with Sterling as its reporter, suppressed the issue. 5o The rest of the press simply wasn't
interested.
The media also weren't interested in Orsen Oymen's finding that the
Vatican had gone to some pains to try to implicate the Bulgarians, or the trial disclosure that the West German authorities had tried to bribe Gray Wolves member Oral Celik to come to West Germany and con- firm Agca's claims. Pandico's and Pazienza's insider claims of Mafia and 8I8MI involvement in getting Agca to talk were also given only the slightest attention, and this accumulating mass of materials on the Italian process was never brought together for a reassessment.
Perhaps the most blatant case of willful ignorance concerned the Italian fixer and former member of SI8MI, Francesco Pazienza. Wanted for several crimes, Pazienza had fled Italy, and in 1985 he resided in exile in New York City. Eventually he was seized and held there by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Pazienza had been a partner of Michael Ledeen in the "Billygate" affair in Italy, and retained his connection after Ledeen became General Haig's right- hand man in Italy in the early days of the Reagan presidency. Pazienza had also been a close associate of SISMI head Giuseppe 8antovito. From 1983 onward it was alleged in the Italian press that Pazienza had been involved in getting Agca to talk, and he himself eventually made detailed accusations of coaching by elements of 8ISMI. Although Pa- zienza was readily available for interviews in a New York City jail, the
New York Times ignored him. Our hypothesis is that they did this because if they had talked to him it would have been difficult to avoid
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discussing his connections with Ledeen and Sterling (both Times sources and under Times protection). This would not have reflected well on the quality of the paper's sourcing. Pazienza's story would also have highlighted the Times's suppression of facts concerning the cor- ruption of SISMI and raised questions about coaching. This would have disturbed the propaganda line.
The trial in Rome was awkward for the Western media, as Agea quickly declared himself to be Jesus and, more important, failed to produce any supportive evidence backing up his claims of Bulgarian involvement. The diligent and extensive court investigation found nu- merous Gray Wolves links to Agea in the period just up to his assassina- tion attempt, but no witness to his (allegedly) numerous meetings with Bulgarians in Rome, no money, no car, and, in the end, no conviction. As we have pointed out, in addition to the already available evidence of atrocious prison practice in dealing with Agca, and the 1981 meetings with intelligence officials and Martella's offer, there was a steady ac- cumulation of claims and evidence of pressures on Agca to implicate the Bulgarians. But, despite this evidence and the failure to convict the Bulgarians after a lengthy investigation and trial, the mass media of the West never provided any serious reevaluations of the case. Almost uniformly they hid behind the fact that an Italian court dismissed the case for lack of evidence rather than demonstrated innocence. They never hinted at the possibility that an Italian court and jury might still be biased against the Eastern bloc and protective of the powerful Western interests that had supported the Bulgarian Connection so
energetically.
The mass media also never looked back at their own earlier claims
and those of the disinformationists to see how they had stood up to the test ofaccumulated evidence. On January 3, 1983, Newsweek had quoted an Italian official who said that "we have substantial evidence . . . [that} Agca operated in close contact with the Bulgarians," and the New York Times editorialized on October 20, 1984, that "Agea's accounts of meet- ings with Bulgarian officials are verifiable in important details. " I f there was "substantial evidence" and "verifiable" details long before the trial, why was this evidence not produced in the courtroom? Why, after an enormous further investigative effort was there still not enough evi- dence to sustain a conviction? The u. s. mass media didn't even try to answer these questions. This would mean asking serious questions about the validity of the SHK model and considering alternatives, which the media have never been prepared to do. For them, the alterna- tive model, plausible from the beginning and, by March 1986, based on a great deal of evidence, was still the "Bulgarian view. " The questions
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE r67
raised by the "Bulgarian view," we believe. would have been applied by the U. S. mass media to analogous facts in a Moscow setting. This means that the view actually employed by the media from beginning to end was a "U. S. government view," as suggested by a propaganda model. That this was true even after the trial ended we show in a detailed analysis in appendix 3. "Tagliabue's Finale on the Bulgarian Connection: A Case Study in Bias. "
The Indochina Wars (I):
Vietnam
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE U. s. WARS TN INDOCHINA HAS EN- gendered a good deal of bitter controversy, some close analysis of several specific incidents, and a few general studies. ' It is widely held that the media "lost the war" by exposing the general population to its horrors and by unfair, incompetent, and biased coverage reflecting the "adversary culture" of the sixties. The media's reporting of the Tet offensive has served as the prime example of this hostility to established power, which, it has been argued, undermines democratic instirutions and should be curbed, either by the media themselves or by the state.
A propaganda model leads to different expectations. On its assump- tions, we would expect media coverage and interpretation of the war to take for granted that the United States intervened in the service of generous ideals, with the goal ofdefending South Vietnam from aggres- sion and terrorism and in the interest ofdemocracy and self-determina- tion. With regard to the second-level debate on the performance of the media, a propaganda model leads us to expect that there would be no condemnation of the media for uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of
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u. s. benevolence and for adherence to the official line on all central issues, or even awareness of these characteristics of media performance. Rather, given that the U. S. government did not attain all of its objec- tives in Indochina, the issue would be whether the media are to be faulted for undermining the noble cause by adopting too "adversarial" a stance and departing thereby from fairness and objectivity.
We shall see that all of these expectations are amply fulfilled.
5. 1. THE BOUNDS OF CONTROVERSY
"For the first time in history," Robert Elegant writes, "the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen," leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam.