Page 224 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

abroad of the legitimacy of US policy on Vietnam. The Americans
were hampered, however, by the fact that their ally in Vietnam, the
South Vietnamese government, was hostile to the media. As Mercer
et al. put it:

they did not see the need to provide the international news
media with necessary working facilities and were uneasy
with the tradition of granting journalists access to troops
and top civil and military officials. The South Vietnamese
armed forces had no concept of public relations. Their
official military spokespersons were usually difficult to
find, and military communiques appeared well after the
event.
(1987, p. 221)

The South Vietnamese authorities were not, unlike the Americans,
operating within the context of liberal democracy, and therefore
had no need 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 inter-
vention 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 estab-
lishment 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 prime-time
news. From this perspective, shared by conservatives such as
Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who applied it to their own

203