Media Massacres War Coverage

    After covering the war in Indochina for over a decade, last week Time and Newsweek joined forces for a last valiant fling at obscuring the issues of this war - they printed virtually identical covers of an anguished mother holding her blood spattered baby. My first thought was: Oh, this must have been the only photo the U.S. Embassy gave them.

    The news we are force-fed every day, the ghastly predictions of inevitable bloodbaths, are about as objective as the Exxon ads which accompany the NBC Nightly News.

    Last week, NBC produced a one hour special entitled, "Vietnam Now." Through the whole show, not one Vietnamese, not one refugee was interviewed; every bit of information was provided by U.S. officials, the same folks who brought us Vietnamization, the invasion of Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, the P.O.W. circus, and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi

    . The media that uncovered Richard Nixon are still covering up the war. Where were the covers of Time and Newsweek when the U.S. was dropping its bloodbath from the sky on the peoples of Indochina: 7.3 million tons of bombs, 16 million tons of bullets, and 6 million people made refugees. Where were the heart-rending sagas of orphaned children and fractured families when the USA1D Phoenix Program was disposing of NLF "infrastructure," by murdering 21,000 Vietnamese according to CIA estimates? Who wrote about those orphans? Not Time. Not Newsweek. Not the networks. Not the sacred New York Times. No one in the mainstream media.

    Why? This is the haunting question. The media have developed a decade-long blind spot where U.S. devastation of Indochina is concerned. Either our hallowed free press is not very free, or else, it's not particularly intelligent. Rather than gathering and digesting the news, the major role of the U.S. media in the war seems to have been national self-delusion.

    When Soviet Premier Kosygin met then President Johnson in New Jersey several years ago, he was quoted as asking: "How have you achieved such mind control without official press censorship?" But here in the forge of liberty. there is no need for anything so vulgar as official press censorship. Here the media are more than willing to parrot anything the Government says about the war, like a national face-saving device.

    Watching John Chancellor or Walter Cronkite, you might have absorbed the notion that the Khemer Rouge is leveling Phnom Penh with relentless rocket attacks. What John and Wally have failed to mention is the fact that all the rockets which the Khemer Rouge has hurled in the last month do not equal the destructive force of even one 3-plane B-52 bombing run. And. lest we forget, for several years, the U.S. flew over 200 B-52 missions against Indochina every day!

      In Phnom Penh, network correspondents play up the terror of Khemer Rouge rocket attacks. Western sources indicate that rocket attacks have killed about 100 people, mostly defenders of the Airport. So, where was Walter's crackerjack news team when for five years U.S. planes obliterated the Meo civilization on the Plain of Jars in Laos, where thousands were killed, and tens of thousands made refugees?

    The next time you watch the tv news, or read the paper, be sensitive to where the information comes from. It all comes from either the State Department or from the U.S. embassies in Phnom Penh or Saigon. There is never anything presented from the other side, from the PRG (Provisional Revolutionary Government) or the Khemer Rouge, organizations which now control over two-thirds of their respective homelands.

   Media in the U.S. have never come to terms with the phenomenon of People's War. Guerilla armies cannot possibly emerge victorious without the willing support and cooperation of the population. What can the PRG offer the Vietnamese that the mighty United States, the richest power in the world, cannot? Self-government, an end to corruption, an end to police terror, their  homes, their land, the reunification of Vietnam, and above all, peace. The war in Indochina is a social revolution. Ín this year of snowballing Bicentennial hucksterism, it is instructive to recall that many Tories were run off their lands into Canada by our own revolutionary forces of national liberation. At least as many refugees are fleeing into PRG-controlled zones as intoSaigon-controlled enclaves.

    As the refugees panicked in Da Nang, as ARVN soldiers beat and kicked them off evacuation planes and ships, the media trotted out their tired "analysis" of the situation, the same one they have been jawboning since Korea: '"Communist hordes" are engaged in "'aggression from the North." Haven't they heard that Vietnam is one nation, chopped in two by the Western Powers, and not by Vietnamese? Haven't they heard what President Eisenhower knew, that 80% of "South" Vietnam would have voted for Ho Chi Minh if the U.S. had alio wed free elections in 1956? 100 years ago, when the New York Times covered Sherman's march across Georgia, did they cali that "aggression from the North?" Will the media ever learn that the revolutions in progress in Indochina are civil wars, and that virtually every Vietnamese family has members on both sides of the 17th Parallel?

   No, our objective media prefer to concentrate on Ford's prophecies of an inevitable "Communist" bloodbath. And, once again we are reminded of tlhat archetypal bloodbath, that bloodbath U.S. officials love so much, the infamous Hue Massacre during the Tet Offensive of 1968, where 2800 Vietnamese were slaughtered by the Vee Cee. Where did this figure come from? From Douglas Pike, noted hyperbolist for that paragon of meticulous reporting, the U.S. Information Agency, the U.S.'s official propaganda machine.

   A Canadian doctor. Dr. Alje Vennema was working in Hue during Tet of 1968. Hue had always been sympathetic to the NLF, so much so, that in 1967, Saigon's Minister of the. Interior stated. "If the people of Hue revolt, there is only one thing to do. Wipe Hue off the face of the earth." Which is exactly what the U.S. did. After the NLF waltzed into the City, where in many quarters they were received as liberators, U.S. guns opened up for 26 days of non-stop shelling. 90% of the City was flattened. Dr. Vennema estimated that 10,000 people were killed by the bombardment. The NLF did in fact execute some people in Hue, 3-500 agents of the Saigon Administration: police, tax collectors, government officials. There's your commie bloodbath.

    The U.S. has pumped billions into South Vietnam. Much of this money has been used to create the mercenary army of South Vietnam. the ARVN. solders of fortune who usually desert after they've had thelr fill of fighting the volunteer forces of national liberation and raping and plundering their own people. Now, to put it gently, the ARVN is in "retreat." They are behaving as one would logically expect mercenaries to behave: they'll do anything to save their own skins. So, David Brinkley and Eric Sevareid observe: What's the point of more aid? The Vietnamese have no will to fight. These eminent journalists have somehow failed to notice that the Vietnamese have been fighting to free their homeland from foreign domination since the Japanese invaded during World War II. The Japanese and the French were routed; soon the U.S. will have to admit defeat. No doubt the last journalist out of Saigon will beat his gums about the impending inevitable bloodbath . . .

   But, let's wait and see what really happens when the PRG, together with the Third Force, and the non-Thieu elements of the Saigon government actually implement the Paris Peace Accords. This type of national reconciliation is already happening in Laos, and peace has finally returned to that craterized nation, though you'd never know it watching CBS.

    What will our glib media say when peace returns to Vietnam through implementation of the Peace Accords? On the basis of their performance over the past decade, informed sources indicate: probably not one word.