No More Learning

Just before the 1996 elec- tion campaign, Yeltsin's popularity rating was 8 percent That he could win reelection in such circumstances suggests-and reflects-a seriously flawed election.
However, with the Yeltsin regime strongly backed by the U. S. govern- ment and its Western allies, the New YOrk Times once again found this election "A Victory for Russian Democracy," and so did the U. S. main- stream media in general. For that paper of record, electoral flaws were slighted or ignored, and its editors declared the very fact of holding an "imperfect" election "a remarkable achievement. "49 The same bias
INTRODUCTION xxvii
was evident in reporting on the March 2000 Russian election, won by Yeltsin's anointed heir and former KGB operative Vladimir Putin. Putin had built his popularity by conducting a brutal counterinsurgency war against Chechnya, and his electoral success rested heavily on the fact that the powerful state TV and radio stations campaigned furiously on his behalf and denigrated and gave no broadcasting time to his opponents. A September 2 0 0 0 expose of the Putin election campaign by the expatri- ate Moscow Times, based on a six-month investigative effort, uncovered compelling evidence of election fraud, including ballot stuffing, ballot destruction, and the creation of 1. 3 million "dead souls" inflating the election rolls. 50 The U. S. mainstream media, however, never found any evidence of fraud at the time of the election, and they have been reluctant to report the findings of the Moscow Times study. 5l Putin is another "re- former," like Yeltsin, supported by the West, so that it follows once again that for the mainstream media a flawed eIection~hardly admitted to be flawed~remainsbetter than none. 52
The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Assassinate the Pope
During the Reagan era (1981-88), there was a concerted effort to demo- nize the Soviet Union, in order to support a major arms buildup and a new, more aggressive policy in the Third World and globally. The Soviet Union was described as an "Evil Empire" and accused of sponsoring in- ternational terrorism as well as abusing its own and client-nation peo- ples. 53 \Vhen the would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981, this provided the basis for one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War era.
Although the pope's assailant was a Turkish fascist and member of a violently anti-left party in Turkey, after a seventeen-month stint in an Italian prison Agca "confessed" that he had been hired by the KGB and Bulgarians. This confession was convenient, fitting well the interests of the dominant Italian parties anxious to discredit the powerful Italian Communist party as well as the Reagan administration's "Evil Empire" campaign. It was extremely suspicious for other reasons, coming so belat- edly, and after numerous visits to Agca by Italian secret service represen- tatives, judges, and papal agents, all with a political ax to grind, and with the secret service notorious for ideological extremism and willingness to doctor evidence. 54
But the mainstream media accepted this story with astonishing gulli-
xxviii INTRODUCTION
bility-the possibility of coaching and pressure on Agca to name the KGB and Bulgarians, much discussed in the Italian media, was almost never mentioned as even a theoretical possibility. And the weakness of the alleged Soviet motive, the sheer stupidity of the enterprise if Soviet- based, and the complete lack of confirmatory evidence was almost en- tirely ignored by the media (as described in chapter 4). W'hen the case was lost in an Italian court in 1986, despite a substantial Italian govern- ment investment and effort, for the U. S. mainstream media this merely reflected the peculiarities of the Italian system of justice; the continued absence of hard evidence led to no reassessment of the case or reflections on their own role.
In the years that followed, two developments threw some light on the case. One is that the Soviet and Bulgarian archives were opened up, and Allen Weinstein of the Center for Democracy gained permission from Bulgarian authorities in 1991 for members of his investigative commis- sion to look at the Bulgarian Interior Ministry's secret service files. After a stint in Bulgaria, Weinstein returned home having failed to locate any confirmatory evidence of Bulgarian or KGB involvement. The Los Ange- les Times, New YcJrk Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time, each of which had reported Weinstein's initiative and impending trip to Bulgaria in 1991, all failed to inform their readers of his negative fmdings. 55
Later in 1991, at Senate hearings on the confirmation of Robert Gates as head of the CIA, former CIA officers Melvin Goodman and Harold Ford testified that the CIA's analysis of the Bulgarian Connection had been seriously compromised and politicized in support of the Reagan era anti-Soviet propaganda campaign. Goodm<tn testified that not only had the CIA found no evidence of Soviet or Bulgarian involvement in the shooting, but that based on the CIA's "very good penetration of the Bul- garian secret services" its professionals had concluded that a Bulgarian Connection did not exist. 56
This testimony, which was a brutal coup de grace to the claims of a connection, put the media on the spot. It was now clear that in their enthusiastic support of the plot they had seriously misled their readers and performed badly as news purveyors and analysts, although serving well the propaganda needs of their government. But as in 1986, after the case against the Bulgarians was dismissed in an Italian court for in- sufficient evidence, none of them felt any obligation to explain their fail- ures and apologize to their readers. They reported the CIA revelations tersely, with some still claiming that while the connection had not been proved it had not been disproved either (ignoring the frequent impos- sibility of proving a negative). 5i But in general the mainstream media
INTRODUCTIO~ XXIX
moved quickly on without reassessing their performance or the fact that they and their media colleagues had been agents of propaganda.
The New Thrk Times, which had been consistently supportive of the connection in both news and editorials, not only failed to report Wein- stein's negative findings from the search of the Bulgarian files, it also excluded Goodman's statement on the CIA's penetration of the Bulgar- ian secret services from their excerpts from his testimony. The Times had long maintained that the CIA and the Reagan administration "recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgaria's agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from MOSCOW . "58 But Goodman's and Ford's testimony showed that this was the reverse of the truth, and that CIA heads William Casey and Robert Gates overrode the views of CIA pro- fessionals and falsified evidence to support a Soviet linkage. The Times was not alone in following a misleading party line, but it is notable that this paper of record has yet to acknowledge its exceptional gullibility and propaganda service.
VIETNAM, LAOS, AND CAMBODIA
Vietnam: Was the United States a Victim or an Aggressor?
In chapters 5 through 7, we show that media coverage of the Indochina wars fits the propaganda model very well. The United States first in- tervened in Indochina immediately after World War II in support of French recolonization, after which it carried out a twenty-one-year effort (1954-75) to impose a government in the southern half ofVietnam that U. S. officials and analysts consistently recognized as lacking any substan- tial indigenous support, and in opposition to local nationalist-though Communist-forces that were understood to have a mass base. U. S. leaders operated on the belief that their overwhelming military might would not only enable them, but entitled them, to force submission to a minority government of U. S. choice.
By normal word usage this would make the U. S. effort in Vietnam a case of "aggression. " The mainstream media, however, rarely if ever found U. S. policy there to be other than highly moral and well inten- tioned, even ifbased on miscalculation ofits costs-to us (see chapter 5). The media readily accepted that we were protecting "SouthVietnam"-a
XXX INTRODUCTION
u. s. creation ruled by a dictator imported directly from the United States-against somebody else's aggression, vacillating in their identifica- tion of the aggressor between North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, or the resistance in SouthVietnam engaging in "internal aggression"! It is compelling evidence of the propaganda service of the mainstream media that throughout the war they accepted this basic propaganda assumption of the war managers, and from that era up to today, we have never found a mainstream editorial or news report that characterized the U. S. war against Vietnam, and then all of Indochina, as a case of aggression.
After the United States terminated the military phase of the war in 1975, it maintained and enforced an eighteen-year boycott of the coun- try that it had virtually destroyed. According to Vietnamese estimates, the war had cost them 3 million killed, 300,000 missing, 4. 4 million wounded, and 2 million harmed by toxic chemicals; and its land was left ravaged by bombs and Rome plows as well as chemical weapons. With 58,000 killed, the U. S. death toll from the war was under one-tenth of I percent ofits population;Vietnam's death toll was 17 percent ofits popu- lation, and only Vietnam's people were attacked by chemical warfare and had their countryside devastated.
Nevertheless, U. S. officials and the mainstream media continued to view the U. S. role in the war as creditable, the United States as the vic- tim. President George Bush stated in 1992 that "Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past. "59 That is, the Vietnamese had done things to us that might justify retribu- tion on our part, but we only seek answers regarding our men missing in action. 60 New lOrk Times foreign affairs commentator Leslie Gelb justi- fied classifyingVietnam an "outlaw" on the grounds that "they had killed Americans. "61 This reflects the common establishment view, implicit in Bush's comment, that nobody has a right of self-defense against this country, even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force a gov- ernment that the people of that country rej ecl.
U. S. Chemical Warfare in Indochina
It is also of interest how the media have treated the massive use of chemi- cals during the Vietnam War and the horrifying aftermath for the vic- tim country. In 1961 and 1962 the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops in South Vietnam-in violation of a U. S. tradition as well as international law (Admiral William Leahy, in response to a proposal to destroy Japanese rice crops in 1944, stated that this would "violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and
all known laws of war"). 62 Between 1961 and 1971, however, the U. S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of concentrated arsenic-based and dioxin-laden herbicides (mainly Agent Orange) on 6 million acres of crops and trees, besides using large quantities of the "super tear gas" CS and vast amounts of napalm and phosphorus bombs. "} An estimated 13 percent of South Vietnam's land was subjected to chemical attacks. This included 30 percent of its rubber plantations and 36 percent of its mangrove forests, along with other large forest areas, destroyed by toxic chemicals in programs that included multiple "large-scale inten- tional effon[s] combining defoliation with incendiaries to produce a forest fire in South Vietnam. "64 A 1967 study prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japanese Science Council concluded that U. S. anticrop warfare had already ruined more than 3. 8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam, killing almost 1,000 peasants and over 13,000 livestock. 65 This policy of attempting to force enemy capitula- tion by destroying its food supply was not only contrary to the rules of war,66 it was notable in that it "first and overwhelmingly affected small children. ,,67
Laos was also subjected to chemical attacks in 1966 and 1969, directed at both crops, and vegetation along communication routes. And in Cam- bodia, some 173,000 acres of rubber plantations, crops and forests were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange in the spring of 1969. 68 The Cambo- dian government complained bitterly at the violation of its neutrality by this inhumane and illegal action, but Cambodia was too small and weak for its voice to be heard or for it to be able to mobilize a legal or other defense. Although the U. N. General Assembly did strongly condemn the use of chemical agents as contrary to international law by an 83-to-3 vote in 1969,69 it was powerless to act against the United States, and there was no "international community" mobilization to halt its use of chemical warfare in Cambodia or elsewhere in Indochina.
During the Vietnam war, the use of chemicals was reported and criti- cized in the U. S. media when first disclosed in 1966, but the subject was quickly dropped. The illegality of chemical warfare and a poljcy of star- vation, and their effects on the victim population, were virtually unre- ported. There were exceptions, such as Orville Schell, Jr. 's 1971 Look magazine article "Silent Vietnam: How we invented ecocide and killed a country," but they were rare indeed. After the war, because of the effects of Agent Orange on U. S. soldiers, there was some coverage of this chem- ical warfare campaign; but the vastly greater impact on the direct targets ofrbis warfare in South Vietnam remained close to invisible. Of 522 arti- cles in the New lOrk Times, the washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Time during the 1990S that mentioned Agent Orange and
INTRODUCTION xxxi
xxxii INTRODUCTION
Vietnam together, the vast majority focused on the hann done to u. s. service personnel; only nine articles acknowledged the targeting of food crops (thiry-nine mentioned forest cover alone as the target); only eleven discussed in any detail the impact on Vietnamese and the Vietnamese environment; only three characterized the use of Agent Orange as a "chemical weapon" or "chemical warfare;" and in only two articles was it suggested that its use might constitute a war crime.
The wall Street Journal did have a lead story on this topic in February I997, reporting that as many as 500,000 children may have been born with dioxin-related deformities and that birth defects in the South were
four times those in the North. 70 The article did acknowledge U. S. re- sponsibility for this disaster but contended that "the United States, emo- tionally spent after losing the war, paid no heed. " But the United States did pay heed to the flight of the "boat people" and was not too exhausted to enforce a vigorous boycott of the target of its aggression, even ifit took no responsibility whatever for the condition of its victims.
The large-scale application of chemical weapons, and napalm, in Viet- nam was confmed to the South. One reason for this was that NorthViet- nam had a government with links to other countries, so that the use of these barbarous and illegal weapons against it would have been widely publicized. South Vietnam was occupied by the United States and its client regime, so that the victimized people of the South were voiceless and could be treated with unlimited savagery. This of course contra- dicted the claim that we were protecting them against aggression, but the media not only underplayed the savagery, they failed to call attention to the contradiction and its significance. New 10rk Times journalist Barbara Crossette did report that the U. S. failure to get involved in studying the effects of chemical warfare in Vietnam had been unfortunate, because as this country had used it heavily in the South but not in the North, this madeVietnam a controlled experiment in the effects ofdioxin on humans from which much could be learned of benefit to ourselves. 71 But neither Crossette nor any other mainstream reporter had anything to say about the fact that the United States had used dioxin only on the ones it was allegedly protecting against aggression, nor did they suggest that this constituted a serious war crime, or that this country might have an obli- gation to help those it had victimized.
During the 1980s, the Reagan administration mounted a major propa- ganda campaign over alleged victims of "Yellow Rain" in Cambodia and Laos, claiming that chemical warfare had been employed there by the Soviet Union through its Vietnam proxy. This propaganda effort eventually collapsed following the U. S. Army's own inability to confirm this warfare and, more important, the fmding that the alleged Yellow
Rain was bee feces, not chemicals. 72 Nevertheless, this campaign re- ceived vastly more publicity than the real and large-scale chemical war- fare carried out by the United States in Indochina. The wall Street Journal, which had heavily featured Yellow Rain and expressed the great- est indignation at this display of Communist evil, never mentioned the U. S. employment of chemicals in that area during its Yellow Rain cam- paign. The Joumafs publisher, Peter Kann, eventually wrote that the Vietnam war record had clarified "who were the good guys and who were the bad guys," definitively shown by "the poisoned fields of Laos" (his euphemism for Yellow Rain). 73 In short, Kann places the massive reaJ- world use of chemical warfare by the United States in Orwell's black hole and demonstrates Communist evil by purring forward the discredited claim of Yellow Rain that his paper has still not admitted to be fraudu- lent.
But the more important facts are these: that with the help of the media, the Soviet Union was effectively linked to the use of this ugly weapon, based on false evidence; while by treating the real and large- scale use of chemical weapons in Indochina by the United States in very low key up to this very day, the media have helped convey the impression that this country is a moral force on this issue and opposes use of this ter- rible weapomy. U. S. leaders have opposed the use of chemical warfare- by enemy states-but it is a different maner when they choose to use such weapomy themselves, or when a client state does the same. 74
Rewriting Vietnam War History
There have been thousands of books written on the Vietnam War,7S and that war has been a brooding omnipresence in the U. S. culture since its end in 1975. For the dominant elite the war represents an era in which resistance to national policy and the associated rise of formerly apathetic sectors of society caused a "crisis of democracy. ,,7fj Those unruly sectors and the dissidents are seen as having damaged the cultural and political framework and imposed unreasonable impediments to the use of force, the laner referred to as the "Vietnam syndrome. " Within the umuly sec- tors and among the dissidents, of course, the "Sixties" are viewed as an era of liberation, of cultural and moral advance, and a temporary surge of democratization.
The propaganda model would lead us to expect mainstream media retrospectives on the war to reflect elite perspectives, portraying the 1960s as a dark age and the U. S. role in the war as, at worst, a case of good intentions gone awry. Focusing here on their treatment of the war
INTRODUCTION xxxiii
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
over the past decade, we see that the media have mainly repeated and elaborated several apologetic themes already entrenched by the end of the war.
One theme has been that the U. S. intervention was justified by the fact of "communism on the march" (editorial, Washington Post, April 30, 2000). It was argued from the beginning that the Communist advance in Vietnam was part of a global communist conspiracy, a position main- tained in the face of the split and hostility between China and the Soviet Union, tension between China and North Vietnam, and the absence of any evidence that North Viemam was anybody's tool. In his book In Ret- rospect,77 former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admits that he and his colleagues made a serious error on this point. But neither he nor the other establishment figures who have used this argument have ever questioned the U. S. right to intervene by force to stop the "march of communism" in a country where the Communists had led a nationalist revolution, were recognized by all official and nonofficial authorities to command the suPPOrt of a large majority of the population, and where their defeat would require open aggression, mass killing, and the virtual destruction of a distant society.
Closely related was the theme that we were protecting "South Viet- nam" and the "South Vietnamese," who "let the Americans take over the fighting" (editorial, Washington Post, April 30, 1995). A subtheme ofthis line is that we "let down" the South Vietnamese. But as noted earlier, South Vietnam as a political entity was a U. S. concoction and the U. S. war managers recognized that most of the southern population sup- ported the side the United States was fighting. This explains why the main thrust of U. S. violence was directed to the South, where napalm, B-S2 bombing raids, chemical warfare, the institutionalized killing of civilians, and a scorched-earth policy were used to destroy the base of the popular movement. 78 We also noted earlier that this ferocious U. S. assault on the South-which contradicted the claim that we were pro- tecting South Vietnamese-remains invisible in the U. S. media.
Another important theme in the mainstream media for many years has been the notion that the United States was the victim in the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese the cruel villains. This remark. able inversion of reality has been accomplished by two processes: first, by a massive suppression of evidence on the consequences of the war for the Vietnamese; and second, by demonizing the victims, based in large measure on "the national beat- ification of POWs [prisoners of war] and the myth of POWs. as. martyrs. s. till being tortured byVietnam. "19
The onlyVietnamese allowed modest attention in the media have been those mobilized to fight the U. S. war and who were "let down";8o the vast
INTRODUCTION XXXV
numbers killed or damaged by the U. S. assault have been treated as "unworthy victims. " The overwhelming preoccupation of officials, jour- nalists, pundits, and intellectuals with media outreach has been on U. S. victims and the effects of the war on this country. Robert McNamara's widely publicized book, supposedly a mea culpa and moral tract, is no- table for the fact that his notion of the war's "high costs," and the error and guilt he feels, extend only to U. S. lives and the effects of the war on "the political unity of our society. "81 He offers neither regrets, moral reflections, nor apologies for his country having invaded, mercilessly bombed, ravaged the land, and killed and wounded millions of innocent people in a small distant peasant society in pursuit of its own political ends.
In a remarkable cultural process, also, the victims have been turned into the villains. As we describe in chapter 5, in an attempt to prolong the war President Richard Nixon seized on the question of the adequacy of Vietnamese accounting for our military personnel who were captured (POWs) and those missing in action (MIAs). He succeeded in keeping the war going, and some 16,000 more U. S. soldiers and untold numbers ofVietnamese died in the further fighting in the purported interest of missing paws. But although there has never been any credible evidence that a single POW was hidden by the North Vietnamese, this claim be- came an article of faith and cult that dominated U. S. policy toward Viet- nam for many years. 82
The mYth also became the basis ofpopular culture accounts in movies such as The Deer Hunter, Uncommon Jizlor, Ro.
W: The Escape, and Missing in Action, in which Rambo-like heroes slaughter evil Vietnamese as they save our betrayed and tormented POWs. These movies turned history on its head. As Vietnam war historian H. Bruce Franklin points out, "America's vision of the war was being transformed. The actual photographs and TV footage ofmassacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GI's screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for ship- ment back home were being repJaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian communists. "83 The powerful cul- tural myth of abused POWs as the central feature of the Vietnam war not only allowed the war to be extended; it helped justify the U. S. failure to aid its victim in accord with end-of-war promises and it provided the basis for an eighteen-year economic war against the victim country. It also functioned as a potent agent of militarization and force weakening the "Vietnam syndrome. "
In his recent book Vietnam and Other Ameman Fantasies, H. Bruce Franklin, who had previously exposed the fallacies and cult qualities of
xxxvi INTRODUCTION
the POW-MIA myth, addressed this issue once again, as well as other fantasies (such as the claim that the antiwar activists often spit at return- ing veterans). 84 Franklin's book was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times but was otherwise only twice mentioned in passing in the U. S. main- stream press. On the other hand, a book by Michael Lind, Vietnamj The Necessary Wilr,85 which explains that the war was justifiable because com~ munism was on the march, U. S. "credibility" was at stake, and the Viet- namese communists were cruel and ruthless-demonstrated in part by their refusal to surrender and consequent responsibility for those killed by U. S. bombs! -was treated differently. It received forty-four reviews and was mentioned twenty-seven other times in the mainstream media, and Lind was given Op-Ed space in both the New 'YOrk Times and the Wilshingwn Post, among other opportunities.
i "
l ,
In his review of Lind's book, Vietnam War historian Uoyd Gardner
noted that any U. S. "credibility" problem that arose in connection with
me Vietnam war was a creation of the war managers themselves and
flowed from their own decisions; and Gardner also comments, after ana-
lyzing a series of Lind arguments in defense of the war, that "the evidence j simply washes away his positions like a sand castle on the beach. "86 But
Lind was saying what the elite wants said, and Franklin was not, so that j mainstream media treatment followed accordingly.
1 1 1
Laos
j
I
t
Laos's Plain of Jars was subjected to some of the heaviest bombings of civilian targets in history, especially after 1968, when Washington was compelled under domestic pressure ro enter negotiations with North Vietnam and had ro terminate its bombing there. It turned to Laos, although that small peasant country was a marginal facror in the wars; but Nixon and Kissinger could hardly leave U. S. bombers inactive. Over- all, some 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. These raids wiped out 353 villages and killed thousands of civilians, and they con- tinue ro kill now, as the Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of "bombies"-tiny antipersonnel weapons specifically designed to kill and maim. With their 20-ro-30 percent failure-to-explode rate, they re- mained as potential killers, and their casualty rate is still high, estimates running from hundreds ro 20,000 or more per year, half of them deaths and half of the victims children. 87
There have been efforts to deal with this humanitarian catastrophe. The British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG) has been trying ro remove the lethal objects, but the British press reports that the United
States is "conspicuously missing from the handful of western organiza- tions that have followed . \1AG," though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. 58 The British press also reports, with some annoyance, that the United States has refused to provide. \1AG specialists with "ren- der harmless procedures," still treated as a state secret for weapons three decades old. 59 The U. S. mainstream media have treated in very low key the continuing human toll suffered in Laos and have maintained almost complete silence concerning the U. S. non-cooperativeness in attempts to alleviate a crisis dating back to the "secret war" against Laos, which again was "secret" only by tacit propaganda service of the mainstream media (see chapter 6).
C a m b o d ia
Important changes have occurred in Cambodia since 1988, including Vietnam's withdrawal from that country, elections held under UN aus- pices, and the death of Pol Pot. We noted in chapter 7 that, after the Viet- namese had ousted Pol Pot in December 1978, although the United States and its allies had denounced Pol POt as "another Hitler" commit- ting "genocide," they quickly became his supporter, allowing him to re- tain Cambodia's UN. seat and otherwise aiding and protecting him in his Thailand refuge. Vietnam was severely punished-by harsh sanctions and by U. S. support for a Chinese invasion to teach Vietnam a lesson- fOt having terminated Pol Pot's atrocities! President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in 1979 that "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help D. K. [Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot's forces]. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could. "9o In the late 1980s and early 1990$, as the Vietnamese sought to end their isolation by exiting from Cambodia, but insisted as a condition for withdrawal that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge be excluded from returning to power, the United States objected, and insisted, with eventual success, that the Khmer Rouge be included as a contestant party in the post-occupation settle- ment. 91
\Xlhat dominated U. S. policy and led to its support of Pol Pot was the classic rule that the enemy ofmy enemy (Vietnam) is my friend, and per- haps also the new tilt toward China, also hostile toward Vietnam. The support of Pol Pot was awkward, given the prior denunciations of his pOlicies, but the mainstream media handled it with aplomb, and the U. S. public was almost surely completely unaware that the United States had become his ally and supporter. (The explicit statement of support by
INTRODUCTION xxxvii
xxxviii INTRODCCTION
Brzezinski quoted above was never mentioned in the New 1{lrk Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek; it was quoted once in both the Los Angeles Times and Time. )
However, in the late 1990S, afterVietnam had left Cambodia and US. officials' anti-Vietnam passions had subsided, and Pol Pot was no longer a useful instrument of anti-Vietnam policy, U. S. officials and pundits rediscovered Pol Pot's and the Khmer Rouge's villainy and candidacy for war crimes trials. The media handled the previous "tilt" toward Pol Pot mainly by evasion, essentially blacking out the years 1979-95, or vaguely intimating that the US. had supported him for reasons of "realpolitik," but avoiding both details on the nature and magnitude of support as well as any reflections on the morality of backing "another Hitler. " The New 10rk Times's summary of "Pol Pot's Rise and Fall" (April 17, 1998) lists for "1979-1990: Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge are given refuge at Thai bor- der where they fight back against theVietnamese. " "Given refuge" is mis- leading: they were given economic and military aid and political support by the United States and its allies. The Times's main reporter on Cambo- dia in early 1998, Seth Mydans, repeatedly blacked out mention ofUS. support, referring to "the decade-long civil war that followed" Pol Pot's ouster (April 13), and a nineteen-year "guerilla insurgency in the jungles of western and northern Cambodia" (April 17).
The Boston Globe, New 10rk Times, W&shington Post, and Los Angeles Times, editorializing on the death of Pol Pot on April 17,1998, were uni- formly indignant over his crimes and regretful at his escape from justice, but all avoided mentioning the long US. support ofthe criminal-as well as the U. S. contribution to the first phase of a "Decade of Genocide. "92
The washington Post blacked out the inconvenient fifteen-year period of support of Pol Pot with this summary: "After the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule and genocide, the United States and its allies pumped mil- lions of donars into Cambodia to help rebuild and to hold elections. "9~
It is enlightening to compare the media's treatment of Pol Pot and Indonesian leader Suharto, who was also in the news in 1998, as Indone- sia suffered a financial crisis that-along with popular resistance to the dictatorship---eventually led to his ouster. Pol Pot was described in the editorials and news columns of April 1998 as "crazed," a "killer," "war criminal," "mass murderer," "blood-soaked," and as having engineered a "reign of terror" and "genocide. " But in 1998 and 1999, and in earlier years as well, while Suharto was occasionally referred to as a "dictator" and running an "authoritarian" regime, he was never a "killer" or "mass murderer" or one responsible for "genocide. " The terminological double standard is maintained reliably throughout the mainstream media. 94
Less obvious but equally interesting is the difference in willingness
to identify the responsible parties for the killings of Pol Pot and Suharto. In the case of Pol Pot, there is no uncertainty or complexity: editorials and news articles uniformly make him and the Khmer Rouge leadership clearly and unambiguously responsible for all deaths in Cambodia dur- ing the period 1975-78. He was the "man who slaughtered two million" (USA 1Oday), "the executioner" (Boston Glebe) who "presided over the deaths" of his victims (washington Post), "the man who drove Cambodia to ruin" (New Thrk Times).
But in Suhano's case, we move to an ambiguous responsibility, which means none at all: in the New Thrk Times, for example, "a 1965 coup led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of supposed communists" (edi- torial, Aug. 23, 1996), where we have no agent doing the killing; or "a wave ofviolence that took up to 500,000 lives and led Suharto to seize power from Sukarno in a military coup" (Seth Mydans, Aug. 7, 1996), where the massacre not only has no agent, but is falseLy situated before the takeover of power by Suharto. In a latcr piece, Mydans states that "more than 500,000 Indonesians are estimated to have died in a purge of leftists in 1965, the year Mr. Suharto came to power" (April 8, 1997). Note the passive voice, never used in connection with Pol Pot, the word "purge" instead of "slaughter" or "massacre," and the continued faillU'e to identify the agent.
In the case of East Timor, also, the Times is uncertain about the source of the killing: "This is one of the world's sadder places, where 100,000 to 200,000 people died from 1974 in a brutal civil war and the consequent invasion through combat, execution, disease and starvation. . . . " (Steven Erlanger, Oct. 2I, 1990). In addition to the lack ofa clear agent, this sen- tence seriously misrepresents the facts-the civil war was shorr and left small numbers dead; and the invasion was not "consequent" to a brutal civil war, except in Indonesian propaganda.
Another important difference in the treatment of the "worthy" victims of Pol Pot and the "unworthy" victims of Suharto is in the willingness to explain away the killings. With Pol Pot, as we describe in chapter 7, the background of the first phase of the genocide was completely blacked out in the mainstream account-there is no qualification to Pol Pot's respon- sibility as a killer because his forces had undergone terrible damage and sought vengeance for the crimes they had suffered; nor are any deaths in Pol Pot's years of rule to be explained by the starvation and disease already pervasive in April 1975. No, the only mentionable background is his Paris training and Communist fanaticism.
But with Suharto we encounter a whole new world of contextualized apologetics. For many years the main protective formula was that the 1965--66 killings were "a result of a failed coup," which "touched off
INTRODUCTION xxxix
xl INTRODUCTION
a wave of violence," or followed an "onslaught from the left. "95 This formula, invoked repeatedly, suggests that the mass killings were pro- voked and thus maybe justified by a prior "onslaught. " The v. rriters never explain why a failed coup could possibly justify a large-scale slaughter, but the hint is left hanging. In more recent years, usually in connection with the explanation and rationalization of the continuation of a dicta- torship, the media regularly juxtaposed political repression with "stabil- ity" and "growth": "the signs of his success are everywhere," although Suharto has brought these gains "by maintaining a tight grip on power and suppressing public criticism and political opposition. "96 These state- ments, from the New 1Vrk Times, offer a kind of context that the paper never gives to Castro, let alone a Pol Pot, and it shows an apologetic that runs deep.
This apologetic extends to the Suharto invasion and occupation of East Timor. For years, New Thrk Times reporters have claimed that In- donesia invaded in the midst of a civil war,97 when in fact that civil war was over well before the invasion. The paper's news coverage of East Timor actually fell to zero as the Indonesian attacks and killings in East Timor reached a deadly peak in 1977-78, a slaughter that elsewhere would be called "genocidal. " And although Indonesia occupied East Timor in violation of standing UN. rulings till its induced exit in 1999, the paper's reporters repeatedly referred to East Timor as a "disputed province" and East Timorese resistance as "separatist," thereby internal- izing and explicitly legitimizing the aggression and occupation. 98
The bias and gentle treatment of Suharto and the Indonesian govern- ment in the media is once again correlated with US. policy support that dates back to the military coup and slaughters of 1965. These were greeted with enthusiasm by US. officials-then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara referred to the events as one of the "dividends" of U. S. support for the Indonesian military-and the "boiling bloodbath" (Time) and "staggering mass slaughter" (New Thrk Times) were also seen in the media as a "gleam of light" Games Reston in the New Thrk Times). 99 U. S. military and economic aid and diplomatic protection continued throughout the years of the Suharto dictatorship, and the media's finding him a good genocidist followed accordingly.
New YOrk Times reporter David Sanger differentiated Suharto and post- 1990 Saddam Hussein-before 1990 he was a U. S. ally-saying "Mr. Suharto is not hoarding anthrax or threatening to invade Australia. "loo That is, Suharto's invasion, mass killing, and long illegal occupation of East Timor is given zero weight, and his slaughter of somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million people within Indonesia some years back is also
not mentioned. This tells us all we need to know about how good and bad genocidists fare in the Western propaganda system.
FURTHER APPLICATIONS
In his book Golden Rule, political scientist Thomas Ferguson argues that where the major investors in political parties and elections agree on an issue, the parties will not compete on that issue, no matter how strongly the public might want an alternative. He contends that for ordinary vot- ers to influence electoral choices they would have to have "strong chan- nels that directly facilitate mass deliberation and expression. "IOI These would include unions and other intermediate organizations that might, through their collective power, cause the interests of ordinary voters to be given greater weight in the political system.
The propaganda model, and the institutional arrangements that it re- flects, suggests that the same forces that preclude competition among the parties on issues on which the major investors agree, will also dominate media choices and rule OUt "mass deliberation and expression" on those issues. For example, polls regularly indicate that, except in periods of war and intense war propaganda, the public wants a smaller defense budget and favors a spending shift from defense to education and other civil functions. 102 But because the major investors agree that a large defense budget is desirable, the two dominant parties compete only on whether the one or the other is st. inting on military expenditures, with both prom- ising to enlarge it (as both George W. Bush and AI Gore did in the presi- dential election campaign of 2000). And the mainstream media do the same, limiting debate to the terms defined by the two parties and exclud- ing deliberation and expression of the position that large cuts are desir- able. The alternative presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, called for such cuts, but the media denied him a voice on the issues, some of them explicitly defending his exclusion from the presidential debates on the grounds that the options afforded by the two parties sufficed. 103
The U. S. corporate community has favored an immense defense budget. . -----eurrently more than five times the size of that of a steadily weak- ening Russia, the second biggest spender-because of the great benefits its members derive from military spending. These include weapons and other contracting business, direct and indirect subsidies in research,104 and the role played by military power in supporting the global economic expansion in which many U. S. transnational corporations are active
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participants and beneficiaries. Business also benefits from the market- opening actions of trade agreements and from the supportive operations of the \VTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. But these trade agreements and the activities ofthe international fmancial institutions have generated controversy and political struggle, because while their benefits to busi- ness are dear, their costs are borne heavily by workers forced to compete in a global job market. Furthermore, globalization and trade agreements strengthen the political as well as the economic power of the corporate community, in part because they shift decision-making authority from democratic polities to bankers and technocrats who more reliably serve the transnational corporate interest. Here also, as in the case of defense- versus civilian-oriented budgets, polls show a sharp dichotomy between corporate and public preferences, with the latter generally hostile to the agreements and institutional arrangements favored by business. lOS
The propaganda model fits well the media's treatment of this range of issues. Consider, for example, their coverage of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the subsequent Mexican financial crisis and meltdown of 1994--95. Polls taken before its enactment consistently showed substantial majorities opposed to N A FrA -and later to r. ""Ie bailout of investors in Mexican securities-but the elite in favor. Media editorials, news coverage, and selection of "experts" in opinion columns were heavily skewed toward the elite pref- erence; their judgment was that the benefits of NAFTA were obvious, were agreed to by all qualified authorities, and that only demagogues and "special interests" were opposed. 106 The "special interests" who might be the "losers" included women, minorities, and a majority of the work- force. 107 The media dealt with the awkward fact that poUs showed steady majority opposition to the agreement mainly by ignoring it, but occasion- ally they suggested that the public was uninformed and didn't recognize its own true interests. 108 The effort of labor to influence the outcome of the NAFTA debates was sharply attacked in both the lV. 'ew YOrk Times and the washington Post, with no comparable criticism of corporate or govern- mental (U. S. and Mexican) lobbying and propaganda. And while labor was attacked for its alleged position on these issues, the press refused to allow the actual position to be expressed. 10Q
In December 1994, only eleven months after NAFrA went into effect, Mexico suffered a major financial crisis, induding a massive flight of cap- ital, a devaluation ofthe currency, and a subsequent bailout by the IMF that required Mexico to carry out painful deflationary measures. Despite the fact that the meltdown occurred within a year of the introduction of NAFTA, which the media had portrayed as ushering in a prospective
golden age of economic advance, they were unanimous that NAFTA was not to blame. And in virtual lock-step they supported the Mexican (investor) bailout, despite poll reports of general public opposition in the United States. Experts and media pundits and editorialists repeatedly explained that one great merit ofNAFT A was that it had "locked Mexico in" so that it couldn't alter its overall policy direction or resort to controls to protect itself from severe deflation and unemployment. They were oblivious to the profoundly undemocratic nature of this lock-in, made more questionable by the fact that it had been negotiated by a Mexican government that ruled as a result of electoral fraud. 11o
More recently, when the growing global opposition to the policies of the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank led to mass protests at the WTO conference in Seattle in November and December 1999, and then at the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, D. C. , in April 2000, media coverage ofthese events was derisive and hostile to the protesters and almost uniformly failed to deal with the substantive issues that drove the protests. The media portrayed the Seanle protesters as "all- purpose agitators" (U:S. Neu's & WOrld Report), "terminally aggrieved" (Philadelphia Inquirer), simply "against world trade" (ABC News), and making "much ado about nothing" (CNN), but the bases of the protest- ers' grievances were almost entirely unexplored. lll Similarly, in the case of the Washington, D. C. , protests, the media repeatedly reported on activists' attire, looks, body odors, fadism, and claimed a lack of "any- thing that can coherently be called a cause" (Michael Kelly, journalist,
W&shington Post), and they continued their refusal to address issues. 112 There were many informed protesters with coherent agendas at Seanle and Washington-including reputable economists, social theorists, and veteran organizers from around the worldl13_but the media did not seek them out, preferring to stereotype antiglobalization activists as ignorant troublemakers. On op-ed pages, there was a major imbalance hostile to the protesters. TV bias was at least as great, and often misleading on the facts. In his November 29, t999, backgrounder on the WTO, Dan Rather explained that the organization had ruled on many environmental issues, implying that those rulings were protective of the environment when in fact they generally privileged trade rights over environmental needs.
Another notable feature of media reporting on both the Seattle and Washington, D. c. , protests, and a throwback to their biased treatment of the protests of the Vietnam War era (1965-75),114 was their exaggera- tion of protester violence, their downplaying of police provocations and violence, and their complaisance at illegal police tactics designed to limit all protestor actions, peaceable or otherwise. IIS Although the Seattle
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police resorted to force and used chemical agents against many nonvio- lent protesters well before a handful of individuals began brealting win- dows, both then and later the media reversed this chronology, stating that the police violence was a response to protester violence. In fact, the van- dals were largely ignored by the police, while peaceful protesters were targeted for beatings, tear g:1S, torture with pepper spray, and arrest. 1I6 One New 10Tk Times anic1e went so far as to claim that the Seattle pro- testers had thrown excrement, rocks, and Molotov cocktails at delegates and police officers; the Times later issued a correction acknowledging that these claims were false. ll7 Dan Rather, who had falsely alleged that the protesters had "brought on today's crackdown" at Seattle, later suggested that the \);Tashington protesters were possibly "hoping for a replay of last year's violence in Seattle," setting this off against "those charged with keeping the peace" who "have other ideas. "118
In their eighty-seven-page report, Out of Control: Seattle's Flawed Re-
sponse to Protests Against the WOrld Trade Organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated that "demonstrators [in Seattle] were overwhelmingly peaceful. Not so the police. " The response of the Seattle
police to the protests was characterized by "draconian" violations of civil liberties, including widespread use of <" chemical weapons, rubber bullets
and clubs against peaceful protesters and bystanders alike. " But NBC, 1 ABC, CBS, CNN, and the New 10rk Times and washington Post all ig- I nored the release ofthe ACLU's fmding<3, which ran counter to their own uniformly pro-police and ami-protester line.
The media's reversal of chronology and inflation of the threat of ac- tivist violence, and their low-keyed treatment of numerous illegal police actions designed to instill fear in those wanting to protest peaceably,ll9 provided the enabling ground for both police violence and serious restrictions on free speech. These increased in scope and sophistication between Seattle and Washington, and were then applied TO squelch pro- test at the Republican and Democratic conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles in July and August 2 0 0 0 . 120 The corporate media's hostility to the goals of the protests, closely aligned with that of the rest of the cor- porate establishment, caused their devotion to the First Amendment to flag in a way it never has when their own rights and privileges have been at stake.
As is suggested by the media's treatment of NAFT A and of labor's right to participate in its debates, as well as the media coverage ofWater- gate, COINTELPRO, and major events in the earlier history of labor- management conflict (the Haymarket affair, the Homestead strike, the post-World War I "red scare"),l2l the propaganda model applies to do-
mestic as well as foreign policy issues. Labor has been under renewed siege in the United States for the past several decades, its condition adversely affected by the deflationary policies of the early 1980s, corpo- rate downsizing, globalization, a vigorous business campaign to defeat unions, and government support of, or indifference to, the damage being inflicted on unions and workers. There was a major drop in union mem- bership from the beginning of the Reagan era, with union density falling from 25 percent in 1980 to J4-5 percent in J996 (and only JO_2 percent in the private sector). This reflected weakened labor bargaining power and was accompanied by significant concessions in wages and benefits, more onerous working conditions, and greater worker insecurity.
President Reagan's firing of ! I,OOO striking air? controllers in 1981 "put the government seal of approval on strike-breaking and a new era of industrial relations opened. "I22 But you would hardly know this from reading or listening to the mainstream media. An exceptional t994 Busi- ness week article noted that "over the past dozen years .