Page 209 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 188

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
to concern themselves unduly with matters of public opinion. The US
administration, on the other hand, could not pursue what had by the late
1960s become a bloody and intense military campaign without at least the
passive consent of the population, who had routine access to television
images of the war. The conflict became, therefore, the ‘Madison Avenue
war’, in which ‘the authorities attempted to put a gloss on US efforts in the
field and promote an image of progress at the expense of all else’ (ibid., p.
235). The government embarked on an effort ‘to sell the war through a high-
powered public relations campaign’ (ibid., p. 254).
In 1967 the Johnson administration launched ‘Operation Success’, setting
up a ‘Vietnam Information Group’ in the President’s executive office with the
specific remit to supply good news stories to the media. Propaganda and
disinformation about the successes of the South Vietnamese, and the failures
of the North, was constantly disseminated.
Despite the public relations effort, as is well known, the intervention of
the US in Vietnam failed, and President Nixon ordered the first withdrawals
of troops in the early 1970s. Moreover, military failure was attributed by
many in the US political establishment to a failure in political communi-
cation: specifically, to the excessively rigorous journalism of the US media
corps as it recorded the horrors of the conflict for daily transmission on
prime-time news. From this perspective, shared by conservatives such as
Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who applied it to their own pursuit of
military public relations when they came to power in the 1980s, the rise
of the anti-war movement among the young people of America and the
widespread revulsion which accompanied growing awareness of US military
brutality in South-East Asia were the product of a media out of control and
running loose on the battlefield.
As was noted in Chapter 4, this ‘common sense’ view of the media’s
relationship to public opinion about the Vietnam War has been challenged
by a number of authors (Hallin, 1986; Williams, 1993). Bruce Cummings
asserts that between 1961 and 1968 the US media, including television,
enthusiastically performed their patriotic duty on behalf of the government’s
war efforts, and that after 1968 ‘television brought into the home not the
carnage of war, but the yawning fissure in the American consensus that
underpinned this war in the previous period’ (1992, p. 84). Reportage of the
war in its latter stages was not ‘anti-government’ so much as reflective of the
divisions which afflicted the politico-military establishment on policy. Daniel
Hallin’s detailed study has established that Vietnam coverage was at its most
diverse, critical and negative during periods of political conflict around the
issue, but that journalists never challenged the fundamental legitimacy of US
war aims (1986). Even the My Lai massacre was virtually ignored by the US
media for two years after it happened.
While reportage of the Vietnam War does not merit the charges of
subversion made against it by some US politicians as they sought to find

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