Page 209 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 United States 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 communication: specifically, to
the excessively rigorous journalism of the US media corps as it
recorded the horrors of the conflict for daily transmission on
primetime 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 amongst the young people
of America, and the widespread revulsion which accompanied
growing awareness of US military brutality in South-East Asia, was
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, however, reportage of the Vietnam War does not merit
the charges of subversion made against it by some US politicians as
they sought to find explanations for their country’s humiliation at
the hands of the North Vietnamese, the information environment

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