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Catering to the Silent Majority the My Lai Massacre As a Media Challenge JANA TOPPE Catering to the silent majority The My Lai massacre as a media challenge Free University of Berlin 10.10.2011 Intensive Program: "Coming Together or Coming Apart? Europe and the United States in the Sixties" September 12 – 24, 2011 Session 6: Lessons of Vietnam and Military Reform Session Chair: Professor Dr. Mark Meigs, Université de Paris-Diderot Table of contents 1 Introduction…………………………………………………..…1 2 Vietnam, the administrations and the media…………….….…..2 2.1 Bone of contention: media coverage of Cam Ne…….……..2 2.2 Nixon, Agnew and the troubles of television………………4 2.3 Expendable lives: Media dehumanization………...………..7 3 Uncovering the atrocities of My Lai……………………….….10 3.1 The media‟s role in publishing the massacre – a tale of hesitancy and caution……………………………....11 3.2 Source: “The My Lai Massacre” - Time, Nov. 28, 1969….17 4 Conclusion…………………………………………………….19 5 Bibliography…………………………………………………..22 5.1 Sources……………………………………………...……..22 5.2 Secondary Literature………………………………..……..22 6 Appendix………………………………………………………23 Jana Toppe 1 Catering to the silent majority 1. Introduction In March 1968, the men of Charlie Company entered the village of My Lai under the command of First Lieutenant William Calley with the objective to „search and destroy‟ the Viet Cong believed to reside there. The village was instead populated by unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, who were then massacred by Charlie Company. The incident was kept under wraps by the military for a year until an investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, uncovered the story in 1969. The revelation of the My Lai cover-up and the expanding press coverage was not the watershed moment or turning point in press coverage as one may be tempted to think. I propose that although the media slowly began to make use of the lack of censorship during the Vietnam War, the „othering‟ of who was believed to be the enemy - the Vietnamese in general – was dominant enough to dictate the hearts and minds of what Nixon referred to as the „silent majority‟. This paper intends to show that despite the extremity of the events at My Lai, the press remained cautious about criticizing the war. While the critical content of broadcasts increased, the professional notion of objectivism in journalism as well as the deferential relationship to official sources remained. In the first part, I will provide some background of the American media‟s role in the Vietnam War after 1965 and the moments perceived to be turning points, pointing out the important aspects regarding media coverage and the respective administrations. I will attempt to examine some of the reasons for this kind of „othering‟ of the enemy by referring to Judith Butler‟s theory of „expendable lives‟. The My Lai massacre will therefore be treated as a case study in the larger picture of media coverage during the war in Vietnam. Then I will describe the difficult journey of uncovering the My Jana Toppe 2 Catering to the silent majority Lai massacre and the press‟ usage of this information. In order to provide an in-depth look at how one medium handled the information, I will analyze an article from the magazine Time that was published on Nov. 28, 1969. The article is an attempt to lay open the disturbing facts that became known through Seymour Hersh‟s investigative journalism, yet apologetic tones linger throughout the account, as will be shown in chapter 3.2. Clearly the article‟s author, who is not named, is torn between challenging the military procedure in Vietnam and searching for reasons to excuse the actions of the men belonging to Charlie Company. Due to the limited space of this paper, detailed descriptions of the events at My Lai such as orders and procedures, the massacre‟s cover-up as well as the general make-up of Charlie Company will not be undertaken1. 2. Vietnam, the administrations and the media 2.1 Bone of contention: media coverage of Cam Ne The Vietnam War was the first to be captured by television cameras and broadcast into every home. Opinions about the amount and quality of coverage are contradictory: some scholars state that the media‟s portrayal of the war was one-dimensional with a focus on atrocities, while others contend that the media sanitized the horrific reality of war. The respective administrations had been frequently troubled by the media‟s treatment of events. A good example of this is the incident at Cam Ne, which occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson‟s term. On August 3, 1965, marines entered the hamlet of Cam Ne, ordered to eradicate Viet Cong troops, who – as CBS correspondent Morley Safer reported – had already deserted the village. The orders to destroy the village persisted, and the CBS camera team captured the marines torching huts. Safer commented on the action‟s precarious nature, criticizing 1 Michal R. Belknap gives a explicit illustration of training, environmental influence and group cohesion regarding this unit. Jana Toppe 3 Catering to the silent majority that “to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”2 This news coverage infuriated the administration, and President Johnson is said to have angrily insulted CBS president Frank Stanton repeatedly. The administration actually, and unsuccessfully, tried to pressure CBS into removing Stanton from his position. Criticism was therefore not directed at the war itself but much rather at the network for showing these disturbing images.3 The problem of differentiating soldiers from civilians already came to the fore here, foreshadowing the horrors to come less than three years later at the hamlet of My Lai. Safer‟s report was disturbing to audiences, since it presented a break from the television coverage of the war up to this point – magazines such as Newsweek and Life had offered more critical reports and imagery of civilian casualties, but television had pretty much steered clear of this. However, American soldiers were not portrayed as perpetrators. When South Vietnamese soldiers were shown abusing captured Viet Cong soldiers, the GIs were shown „merely‟ as accomplices who stood by. At the same time, stories of GIs warning villagers of an impending attack were circulated (even by Safer‟s CBS team), implying that the soldiers were going out of their way to protect civilians, and thereby blaming combat itself, not the soldiers‟ individual volition, for the atrocities.4 What the media coverage of Cam Ne managed to do was to deface the image of war that had been upheld for some time: “War was no longer a glorious distant thing; it was American 2 as cited in Huebner, Andrew J. "Rethinking American Press Coverage of the Vietnam War, 1965 - 1968." Journalism History 31.3 (2005): 154. 3 Cf. ibid. and Kinnard, Douglas. The War Managers (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977), 129. 4 Cf. Huebner Rethinking 154 and Kinnard War Managers 129 – 130. Jana Toppe 4 Catering to the silent majority boys burning down villages while you watched in your own living room.”5 2.2 Nixon, Agnew and the troubles of television The difficult relationship between the Nixon Administration and the media, especially television news, has been documented extensively. After the Tet Offensive of 1968, the press began featuring more critical installments on the war, greatly distressing Nixon. For instance, when CBS interviewed an American soldier in 1969 about the South Vietnamese army‟s efficiency with the outcome that the latter appeared unskilled and untrustworthy, the President was enraged. This was considered counterproductive to the strategy of Vietnamization that had been announced only a few days prior. Between 1969 and 1972, Nixon repeatedly insisted that journalists merely depicted the problems of Vietnamization, ignoring all achievements; he accused the media of “hoping for U.S. failure and enemy success in Vietnam”6. Nixon‟s ambiguous relationship with the media continued: on the one hand, the President recognized especially television to be the best medium to influence public opinion, while at the same time attempting to both intimidate the networks and decrease their credibility. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew supported this line of action by accusing the networks of a clear bias and stating that television only focused on a loud, protesting minority7. During the campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, Nixon even pressed his aides to steer clear of the media and refuse to support them: “Don‟t help the bastards ever because they‟re trying to stick the knife right in our groin. […] I respect people that are trying to kill me 5 Kinnard War Managers 130. 6 Pach, Chester. "'Our Worst Enemy Seems to Be the Press': TV News, the Nixon Administration, and U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Vietnam, 1969 - 1973." Diplomatic History 34.3 (2010): 555. 7 This was also in line with Nixon‟s Silent Majority speech on November 3, during which he addressed the “great silent majority” (as cited in Pach Enemy 557) of Americans that supported the war in Vietnam and did not protest. Jana Toppe 5 Catering to the silent majority […] (but) I don‟t give them the knife.”8 Especially after 1970, President Nixon‟s admonishing remarks give hints at the critical stance the media had taken after the Tet Offensive.9 Before 1968, the mainstream press was in line with the respective administration‟s viewpoint - not conveying an outright anti-war stance - but this does not mean that the news coverage was completely devoid of grisly images of GIs. The troublesome and confusing nature of the conflict was conveyed nonetheless before the Tet offensive, and reducing it by calling it all-over uncritical would not do this complex coverage justice.
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