About the Work
This book presents a systematic analytical framework for understanding how mass media function within modern democratic societies, particularly in the United States. The authors argue that media do not operate as independent, truth-seeking institutions but rather as systems that mobilize support for the special interests that dominate state and private activity. The work develops what it calls a “propaganda model” — an analytical structure explaining media performance through institutional relationships and economic constraints rather than through conspiracy or crude intervention.
“The Iran-contra scandals were blamed on the President’s easygoing habits, though the people had every opportunity to know this was his way of doing things or not doing before they put him in the White House, not once but twice.”
The book is organized around detailed case studies that apply this model to specific episodes of media coverage, including political murders in Poland and Central America, elections in client states versus disfavored nations, the alleged Bulgarian connection in the plot to kill Pope John Paul II, and the Indochina Wars. Each case study is examined in exhaustive detail, with tables quantifying media coverage and close readings of specific articles and broadcasts.
The authors describe their approach as closer to “free market” analysis than conspiracy theory. They argue that biased choices arise not from explicit direction but from the preselection of right-thinking personnel, internalized preconceptions, and adaptation to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship, they contend, is largely self-censorship, operating through a “guided market system” with guidance from government, corporate leaders, media owners, and executives.
The work includes an updated introduction written approximately twelve years after the original publication, assessing how structural changes in media ownership, globalization, and technology have affected the model’s relevance. The authors conclude that the propaganda model remains useful, perhaps more so than when first formulated, and that structural changes have increased its salience.
Context
The book emerges from a tradition of critical media studies that challenges the democratic postulate that media are independent institutions committed to truth. The authors invoke Walter Lippmann’s concept of the “manufacture of consent” and note that propaganda has become “a regular organ of popular government.” They draw on Jacques Ellul’s insight that propaganda must veil its true intentions to be effective.
The intellectual context includes analysis of how concentrated wealth and class conflict require systematic propaganda in societies where formal censorship is absent. The authors note that where state bureaucracy controls power, official censorship reveals media serving a dominant elite, but it is harder to see propaganda where media are private and censorship absent, especially where media compete and portray themselves as advocates of free speech.
The work engages with the historical development of the press, citing analyses of Great Britain showing that a radical press emerged in the early nineteenth century reaching working-class audiences and fostering alternative value systems. The authors describe how market forces succeeded where state intervention failed in suppressing this radical press, as rising capital costs accompanied the “industrialization of the press” and priced working-class publications out of existence.
The book also responds to contemporary developments, including the consolidation of media ownership documented by Ben Bagdikian, who noted that fifty firms dominated mass media in 1983 but only twenty-three remained by 1990. The authors describe how nine transnational conglomerates came to dominate the system, with two dozen firms controlling nearly all media Americans experience.
The context includes the end of the Cold War and the replacement of anticommunism with “market populism” as the controlling ideology. The authors note that Soviet stagnation was blamed on absent markets, while capitalist Russia’s disintegration was blamed on failure to let markets work — an example of how ideology shapes interpretation regardless of evidence.
Structure of the Book
The book opens with an introduction that defines the propaganda model and updates it for changed circumstances. This is followed by a preface that sketches the model’s application and acknowledges the assistance of numerous individuals.
Chapter 1, “A Propaganda Model,” provides the theoretical foundation. It describes mass media as a system for communicating messages and symbols, functioning to amuse, entertain, inform, and inculcate individuals with values that integrate them into institutional structures. The chapter details the five filters through which raw news material passes: concentrated ownership and profit orientation, advertising as primary income source, reliance on government and corporate information sources, “flak” as a disciplinary mechanism, and anticommunism as a control mechanism.
Chapter 2, “Worthy and Unworthy Victims,” applies the model to media coverage of political murders. It contrasts the extensive coverage given to the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko with the minimal coverage of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the four American churchwomen murdered in El Salvador, Rutilio Grande, and the twenty-three religious victims in Guatemala. The chapter includes detailed analysis of how the media conveyed outrage for worthy victims while suppressing details and context for unworthy ones.
Chapter 3, “Legitimizing versus Meaningless Third World Elections,” examines the double standard applied to elections in client states versus disfavored nations. It analyzes how elections in El Salvador and Guatemala were legitimized despite state terror, compulsory voting, and the exclusion of left parties, while Nicaragua’s 1984 election was dismissed as a sham despite more favorable conditions.
Chapter 4, “The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope,” traces how the media promoted a discredited theory of Soviet involvement in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The chapter details the origins of the theory, its problems, the alternative explanation, and the media’s uncritical acceptance and protection of disinformation sources.
Chapters 5 and 6, “The Indochina Wars,” apply the propaganda model to media coverage of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These chapters argue that media coverage fit the propaganda model, accepting U.S. policy as moral and rarely characterizing the war as aggression.
The book concludes with a chapter of conclusions that synthesizes the case studies and discusses implications for democratizing media.
Inside the Book
The Propaganda Model Defined
The book opens by introducing its central analytical tool, the “propaganda model,” which is offered as a framework for explaining the performance of the U.S. mass media. The authors argue that the media do not function as independent watchdogs but rather serve to “propagandize” on behalf of powerful societal interests that control and finance them. This is not achieved through crude, top-down censorship but through a more subtle process of selecting “right-thinking personnel” and the internalization of elite priorities by editors and journalists. The model identifies several structural factors that shape media behavior: concentrated ownership and control; a primary dependence on advertisers; the reliance on official sources for news; the ability of powerful actors to produce “flak” or complaints; and the provision of “experts” who confirm official slants. These forces fix the basic ideologies that media personnel take for granted, allowing for a limited degree of autonomy and dissent, but only within narrow bounds and at the margins of public discourse.
Updating the Model
Writing roughly a decade after the book’s initial publication, the authors assess how the model has fared. They note the accelerating consolidation of media ownership, citing Ben Bagdikian’s observation that the number of dominant firms controlling the mass media fell from fifty in 1983 to just twenty-three by 1990. Since then, a handful of transnational conglomerates—including Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, and General Electric—have come to dominate nearly all media Americans experience. This process has been aided by globalization, as U.S. and Western governments, along with the IMF and World Bank, have pressed for transnational corporate access to media markets, rationalized by a neoliberal ideology that has led to a “relentless, ubiquitous commercialism.” Public broadcasting has also declined under financial pressure, shrinking or commercializing in the face of a “tidal wave of commercialism.” The authors acknowledge the democratic potential of the Internet, citing its use by activists from Chiapas to Indonesia, but they argue that corporate consolidation, commercialization, and concentrated control of broadband threaten this potential. Finally, they note that the mechanisms of the model have strengthened: public relations agents now vastly outnumber journalists, and the old ideology of anticommunism has been replaced by a new “market populism” that blames any failure on insufficient market liberalization.
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
The authors demonstrate the model’s utility by contrasting the media’s treatment of victims of enemy states with those of U.S. client states. They point out that the 1984 murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko received far more coverage than the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and the deaths of over one hundred religious figures in U.S. client states. A table of “genocide” usage in major print media during the 1990s shows a stark disparity: Serbs in Kosovo received 220 mentions, while Indonesia/East Timor received only 33 and Turkey/Kurds just 14. The authors cite the case of Iraq sanctions, which they claim killed more Iraqis than all weapons of mass destruction in history, and quote Madeleine Albright’s infamous declaration that the deaths of 500,000 children were “worth it.” The most striking comparison is between the Racak killings in Kosovo, which received heavy coverage and helped justify NATO bombing, and the Liquica massacre in East Timor, which was indisputable but received minimal coverage. Racak was mentioned 4.1 times for every mention of Liquica, and the word “massacre” was used 6.7 times more often, with a word count disparity of 14 to 1.
Elections Double Standard
The propaganda model also explains the media’s double standard in covering elections. The authors contrast the legitimization of El Salvador’s 1984 election as “a step toward democracy” with the dismissal of Nicaragua’s 1984 election as a “sham,” despite more favorable conditions for honest elections in the latter. This pattern continued in later years: elections in Cambodia and Yugoslavia, ruled by parties objectionable to the U.S., were portrayed as flawed, while elections in Mexico, Turkey, Uruguay, and Russia were legitimized. The authors specifically cite the 1996 Russian election, which was won by Boris Yeltsin despite an 8% popularity rating, and the March 2000 election of Vladimir Putin, which was legitimized despite evidence of fraud, including 1.3 million “dead souls” voting.
The Bulgarian Connection Testimony
The authors revisit the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish fascist. After seventeen months, Agca “confessed” to KGB-Bulgarian involvement, a claim that was convenient for Italian parties seeking to discredit Italian Communists and for Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” campaign. The authors cite 1991 Senate hearings confirming Robert Gates as CIA head, where former CIA officers Melvin Goodman and Harold Ford testified that the CIA’s analysis of the “Bulgarian Connection” was compromised and politicized. Goodman testified that the CIA had found no evidence of Soviet or Bulgarian involvement and that, based on “very good penetration of the Bulgarian secret services,” professionals had concluded no connection existed. This testimony was a “brutal coup de grace” to the connection claims, putting the media “on the spot” for having misled readers. Yet, as after the 1986 Italian court dismissal, the media felt no obligation to apologize. The New York Times, which had been consistently supportive of the connection, failed to report on negative findings from Bulgarian files and excluded Goodman’s key testimony from its excerpts, instead having claimed the CIA and Reagan administration “recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgaria’s agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow.” The testimony showed the reverse: CIA heads William Casey and Robert Gates had overridden professional views and falsified evidence to support a Soviet linkage.
Vietnam War Framing
The authors argue that media coverage of the Vietnam War fits the propaganda model perfectly. They describe the U.S. intervention as a twenty-one-year effort to impose a government on southern Vietnam that lacked indigenous support, opposing nationalist-Communist forces with mass bases. By any normal definition, this constitutes “aggression,” yet mainstream media rarely found U.S. policy to be anything other than moral, accepting the framing of protecting “South Vietnam”—a U.S. creation ruled by an imported dictator—against aggression from North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, or China. The authors state they never found a mainstream editorial characterizing the war as aggression. They contrast the scale of suffering—with Vietnamese estimates of 3 million killed and 4.4 million wounded—against U.S. deaths, which were under one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population versus Vietnam’s 17 percent. They quote President George Bush in 1992 saying that “Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past,” and a New York Times commentator justifying classifying Vietnam an “outlaw” because “they had killed Americans.”
Chemical Warfare
The book details the U.S. use of chemical weapons in Vietnam, authorized by the Kennedy administration to destroy rice crops in 1961-62, a violation of international law that Admiral William Leahy had in 1944 called a violation of “every Christian ethic.” Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of herbicides, mainly Agent Orange, on 6 million acres, subjecting 13 percent of South Vietnam’s land to chemical attacks.
The Unworthy Seventy-Two and the Murder of Rutilio Grande
The media’s treatment of the murder of the Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko was marked by a sustained and forceful campaign of moral outrage. The U.S. press saturated its coverage with quotations and assertions of shock, indignation, and mourning, repeatedly demanding justice. Sympathetic attention was lavished on demonstrators, weeping mourners, and work stoppages, all drawn from nonofficial sources. This relentless repetition of outrage served to put the Polish government on the defensive and was credited with contributing to remedial action. Crucially, the media aggressively pursued the question of how high up the chain of command the murder was known and approved. The New York Times alone ran eighteen articles stressing this theme of higher responsibility, often with aggressive headlines, and some reports even attempted to drag in a Soviet link or the earlier plot to kill the pope. These connections were established by finding a source willing to say what the reporter wanted, with no trace of supportive evidence. Time and Newsweek played the same game, raising questions about “Hints of a Contract from the Top” and “Keeping the Lid on Murder.” The Times ran three editorials on the case, declaring that “A police state is especially responsible for the actions of its police” and applying words like “thuggery” and “shameless” to the Polish state. The swift identification, trial, and conviction of the police officers was attributed to the intense domestic and international agitation.
This treatment stood in stark contrast to the coverage of the “unworthy” victims of state terror in U.S.-backed client states. The seventy-two religious figures murdered in Latin America on Penny Lernoux’s list received a total of eight articles in the New York Times, one in Newsweek, and none in Time or on CBS News. Sixty-three of the murders were blacked out entirely. The few articles that did appear lacked the dramatic detail or emotional quality that might evoke sympathy, describing the murders as remote events. The New York Times had described Popieluszko’s body in graphic detail—badly bruised, gagged, and tied with a rope from neck to feet, with medical evidence confirming he was struck more than a dozen times with a club. In contrast, the unworthy victims received only the briefest of descriptions: a body found in a dynamited well, another with ten bullet holes in a river, an archbishop killed by a sniper, a woman’s body found in a ravine, and four American women found in a shallow grave, two with blood-stained underpants around their ankles.
The murder of Rutilio Grande was a landmark in the escalation of violence in El Salvador. Grande, a Jesuit priest and progressive who organized peasants in Aguilares, was shot to death along with a teenager and a seventy-two-year-old peasant in March 1977. A church autopsy showed the bullets were the same caliber as police guns. All telephone communications were cut off, and police patrols disappeared from the area. Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote to President Arturo Armando Molina urging an investigation, and when no action was taken, threatened to refuse church participation in official events. The murder and the church’s response were subject to a virtual blackout in the U.S. media, mentioned only in Newsweek.
The Murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero
Archbishop Romero was the foremost critic of the U.S.-supported military government’s repression. He had appealed to the army to refuse to kill, was on right-wing death lists, and had written to President Jimmy Carter opposing U.S. aid. The Carter administration had even secretly lobbied the pope to curb Romero. The media’s coverage of his murder reflected his threatening role. The details of the assassination were reported concisely, with few quotations of outrage from his supporters. The New York Times ran no editorial condemning the murder, and the story was placed within a framework of alleged killings by both the left and the right. The propaganda line, dutifully echoed by the media, was that the killing was the work of “extremists of the right and left.” A State Department official, John Bushnell, stated that the government was not repressive—a knowing lie contradicted by Romero himself, who had said power was in the hands of the army serving the oligarchy. A “reformist coup” in October 1979 had lost control to senior conservative officers backed by the U.S. Embassy, and José Napoleón Duarte had joined the junta as a “fig leaf.” The government then began a war of extermination, with 1,844 civilian deaths by the end of May.
The Four American Churchwomen and the Failure of Justice
The media’s treatment of the murders of four American churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 provided another stark contrast with the Popieluszko case. Time and the New York Times failed to mention the bruises on the bodies, the destruction of Jean Donovan’s face, the degrading use of the nuns’ underwear, or the account of the peasants who found them. The Rogers report, which noted that forensic surgeons sent by the junta refused to perform an autopsy, was omitted from U.S. media. In the Popieluszko case, the press conveyed intolerable outrage demanding justice; for the four women, the media did not declare the act intolerable, instead relying on “senior officials” who expressed a resigned view. Time called the women “victims of the mindless, increasing violence,” whereas Popieluszko was killed by live government officials. Newsweek even suggested the victims may have been “asking for it,” noting that many priests and nuns advocate reform and some are militant leftists. The media found it difficult to locate Salvadoran government involvement, following leads from Duarte and U.S. officials. A “damage limitation” process distinguished between the government and the National Guard, supporting the myth of a reformist, centrist government. Ambassador Deane Hinton stated the guardsmen “were acting on their own,” though State Department documents recognized the investigation was a joke. Reporter John Dinges found the murders were preplanned, with intercepted radio communications indicating military discussions of the women’s arrival, but his report was ignored by the major media. The Salvadoran justice process failed completely: prosecutors were ignorant of key testimony, judges resigned for fear of their lives, and a defense attorney who refused to accept the “thorough investigation” claim was seized and tortured by the National Guard. The U.S. government engaged in a cover-up, allowing a key suspect to emigrate to the U.S. and keeping reports under wraps. When the trial of five national guardsmen finally occurred 3.5 years later, the defense made no effort to argue “orders from above.” The trial was “thoroughly American in staging,” with security provided by a unit trained in Alabama and jurors driven in bullet-proof embassy vehicles. Congress had frozen $19.4 million in aid; within 24 hours of the verdict, the State Department released the money. Newsweek called the result a “remarkable achievement” in “A Defeat for a Death Squad,” failing to note the system’s nature.
Guatemala and the Rise of the Mutual Support Group
The passage then turned to Guatemala, a country whose history was shaped by the U.S.-organized invasion that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Since then, state terror was institutionalized, reaching catastrophic levels in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Stephen Kinzer’s Nicaragua Coverage
The text criticizes New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer for applying wildly inconsistent standards to Nicaragua’s 1984 election compared to elections in U.S.-backed Guatemala and El Salvador. Kinzer lavished attention on the U.S.-backed candidate Arturo Cruz in Nicaragua while ignoring small parties, union protesters, rebels, and human-rights groups in Guatemala. He reported that more Nicaraguans voted out of fear than Salvadorans or Guatemalans—a claim the authors find remarkable given the actual circumstances of state terror in those countries. Kinzer focused on Sandinista get-out-the-vote efforts, the foregone conclusion of results, alleged disruption of rallies, and opposition withdrawals, yet he never compared electoral modalities between Nicaragua and its neighbors.
Observer Delegations’ Findings
The Irish and Latin American Studies Association (LASA) delegations contradicted the media’s narrative. They noted voting was not compulsory in Nicaragua and was entirely secret. The Irish delegation argued the low abstention rate “invalidates predictions that large sectors of the population were opposed to the election.” Spoiled votes totaled 7.4 percent, comparable to European elections. An old man at a rural polling station, asked about differences from previous elections, replied “Everything” was different. The Irish delegation also countered claims of voter apathy by noting Americans showed no greater enthusiasm queuing to vote.
Superior Quality of the Nicaraguan Election
The text highlights a stark double standard in how the elections were covered. Time magazine praised El Salvador’s “tamper-proof procedures, transparent Lucite ballot boxes, and indelible-ink marking” without questioning that over half the population was illiterate or that these measures compromised secrecy. Nicaragua, by contrast, conducted a massive literacy campaign, created complete registration lists, used opaque ballots, and avoided ID stamping. LASA noted the contrast with Somoza-era translucent ballots and El Salvador’s transparent boxes. Nicaragua used proportional voting enabling smaller parties representation, while Guatemala required 4,000 signatures to qualify—a difficult feat amid daily political murders.
Rebel Disruption and Turnout
In El Salvador, rebel disruption made turnout an index of democratic triumph. In Nicaragua, the propaganda frame reversed—rebel opposition didn’t make turnout meaningful. The contras urged abstention and attacked polling stations, killing more than Salvadoran rebels. The media suppressed these facts. Kinzer never mentioned contra attacks or radio appeals for abstention. The Irish delegation noted eleven polling stations closed by counterrevolutionary activities. LASA cited radio warnings from Costa Rica threatening voters with death.
Coercion Double Standard
Time called Sandinistas “pugnacious” with an “awesome monopoly of force” while never applying such language to Salvadoran or Guatemalan governments. Time claimed citizens feared losing rationing cards and that the government considered nonvoting “counterrevolutionary.” LASA found no evidence of ration cards being withheld and noted five unsubstantiated allegations. Time quoted Daniel Ortega saying “All Nicaraguans who are Nicaraguans are going to vote”—an insult, not a threat, unlike Salvadoran and Guatemalan army warnings that nonvoting was treasonous.
The “Main Opposition” Question
Cruz, a longtime expatriate reportedly on the CIA payroll with no mass base, was labeled “main opposition” by media. Evidence suggested Cruz never intended to run. The Reagan administration tried to bribe other candidates to withdraw. Kinzer’s headline equated Sandinista aid to parties with U.S. intervention to boycott. LASA noted no major political tendency was denied access in Nicaragua, unlike El Salvador and Guatemala.
The Suppression of the LASA Report
The propaganda lies about the elections persisted because reports from the Irish delegation and LASA were ignored. LASA contacted major media outlets but was turned down by all of them. The text praises the LASA report as the best-documented observer report ever written, noting its authors were highly qualified, half with field experience in Nicaragua, and that it was an official report of a major scholarly organization. The authors, while liberal, had strong critical capability and lacked the bias of official observer teams. The report covers all issues, offering history, context, and comparisons. The media ignored LASA because its report contradicted the propaganda claims they were disseminating. Electoral conditions in Nicaragua in 1984 were more favorable than in El Salvador and Guatemala, with LASA finding the Nicaraguan election “a model of probity and fairness.” In El Salvador and Guatemala, none of the five basic preconditions for a free election were met, with state-sponsored terror ravaging the civilian population. The text asserts that U.S. mass media serve as “loyal agents of terrorism” by legitimizing and delegitimizing victims and supporting state terror and contra attacks.
The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope
The text contrasts the elections case with the shooting of the Pope, where the media played a larger role in originating claims. A dominant frame was produced that was helpful to elite demands, with alternative frames ignored and facts selected to fit. When the legal case in Italy was lost, the media rationalized it and dropped the story. The “Bulgarian Connection” is deemed an apt illustration of the propaganda model because there was no credible case from the beginning. The case began when Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish rightist and Gray Wolves associate, shot Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981. Initial reports noted his Fascist affiliations, making a Soviet link seem unpromising. Two factors allowed a KGB-Bulgarian plot theory to develop: Agca’s stay in Bulgaria and Western elite needs, including the anti-Communist fervor stoked at the Jonathan Institute meeting in Jerusalem in July 1979, where figures like Claire Sterling, George Will, and George Bush were present. Sterling’s 1981 book The Terror Network became a key text for the Reagan administration.
The Sterling-Henze-Kalb Model
The model was initiated by a fabricated SISMI document and popularized by Claire Sterling’s September 1982 Reader’s Digest article and an NBC-TV program narrated by Marvin Kalb. The SHK model’s essential elements included a Soviet motive to weaken NATO or quell Solidarity, proof based solely on Agca’s stay in Bulgaria and later his unsupported assertions, and ideological assumptions that the Soviets were capable of such acts and that Bulgaria’s secret police knew everything. The text lists several problems: the foolishness of the NATO motive; the implausibility of the Solidarity motive given timing and cost-benefit analysis; Agca’s prior threat to the Pope in 1979, which suggested independent motives; Agca’s committed right-wing background, which made him an unlikely Soviet agent; the unproven assumption of Bulgarian secret police efficiency; the fact that Agca got his gun through the Gray Wolves network, not the Bulgarians; and the extraordinary incompetence attributed to the Soviet and Bulgarian secret police, which contradicted the “plausible deniability” logic.
An Alternative Model
The text proposes an alternative explanation, suggesting the U.S. press would have been skeptical of a similar scenario in Moscow. This model interprets Agca’s stay in Bulgaria differently and highlights the convenience of his confession to various Western interests. It notes the seventeen-month lag in naming Bulgarians, his access to the SHK model in prison, and his desire for publicity. The text details the role of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI, its head General Giuseppe Santovito, and the right-wing Propaganda Due (P-2) lodge. It describes the “strategy of tension”
The Media and the War: From My Lai to the Paris Accords
The narrative turns to the My Lai massacre, arguing that its initial neglect and later dramatized coverage constituted a subtle cover-up. An honest accounting, the text contends, would have placed responsibility far higher than Lieutenant Calley, but the focus remained on “semi-crazed GI’s,” preventing a deeper examination of the war’s nature. This limited attention served to “demonstrate the conscience of America” without prompting an investigation into the massacre’s “unexceptional character.” A 1973 New York Times report on the “battered Batangan peninsula” noted that while villagers accused Americans of killings, they were “in no position to appreciate what the name My Lai means to Americans.”
The standard critique that television “lost the war” is examined through the work of analyst Edward Jay Epstein. This view holds that uncensored combat scenes nightly shaped public opinion. However, Epstein identifies a “logical problem”: polls from 1962 through 1967 showed public approval of the war, with a 1967 Harris poll finding 64% said television made them more supportive. Until 1965, network anchormen were unanimous in their support, with even the “dove” Walter Cronkite applauding the decision to stop Communism in Asia. Coverage was sanitized, with networks deleting “excessively grisly” shots and focusing on American progress, portraying forces as “builders” rather than destroyers. The famous exception was Morley Safer’s 1965 report of Marines burning huts in Cam Ne, which elicited a Pentagon campaign to vilify Safer as “unpatriotic.”
The Communist Tet offensive shattered this picture of progress, as the military lost control over the press. This brief moment of on-the-spot reporting convinced Cronkite the war was a “bloody stalemate.” Tet convinced U.S. elites the war was too costly, leading to “Vietnamization” and a shift in focus to the Paris negotiations. Epstein’s periodization distinguishes the controlled coverage of 1962-1967 from the later years, noting that apart from live Tet coverage, reporting rarely departed from the “standpoint determined by official Washington doctrine.” Daniel Hallin’s survey found pre-Tet coverage “lopsidedly favorable” to American policy, with editorial comments running nearly four-to-one in favor. This reflected establishment divisions, as New York Times editor Max Frankel admitted, “we’re an establishment institution, and whenever your natural constituency changes, then naturally you will too.”
The Tet Offensive and the “Stab-in-the-Back” Thesis
The passage refutes the “stab-in-the-back” component of the Freedom House thesis, which claims media misdeeds caused public opposition. A chapter by Burns Roper shows no direct relationship between media themes and public opinion, which showed a “slow drift toward the dove side.” The early response to Tet was increased belligerency, with a shift toward doves occurring only in April after the offensive ended. Faced with this, Freedom House analysts retreated to claiming media affected the “leadership segment,” a claim with no data. The text sarcastically notes this implies elite decisions were based on watching Cronkite rather than military briefings.
The media reported the war accurately in a narrow sense but within the government’s propaganda system, never questioning the framework. The destruction of Hue (80% destroyed) and Ben Tre, with its quote “We had to destroy the town to save it,” was reported, but the “enemy” were overwhelmingly NLF, not North Vietnamese. The media accepted the official claim that Tet was a military defeat for the Communists. The text contrasts the media’s focus on “who won” with the more important question of “how they won,” which involved destroying the country. Many officials were as pessimistic as the media, including Westmoreland, Bundy, and Acheson, suggesting the Freedom House thesis would indict them all.
The Paris Peace Agreements and Their Aftermath
The Tet offensive convinced elites the cost was too high, leading Johnson to step down. By October 1972, negotiators had reached a 9-Point Plan, but Nixon objected and delayed negotiations until after the election to allow a vast shipment of arms to the GVN. Kissinger’s “peace is at hand” announcement was a deception, and the Christmas bombings of Hanoi followed. The U.S. then signed January agreements virtually identical to the October ones but immediately nullified them by recognizing the GVN as the “sole legitimate government.” The media accepted the Kissinger-White House version, enabling them to blame the PRG-DRV for the subsequent breakdown of the cease-fire.
An honest press, the text argues, would have announced the U.S. intention to violate the agreements. After the signing, the Communists attempted “political struggle,” while the U.S. and its GVN client used military force to overturn the terms. The media blamed the Communists or GVN but not the U.S., which had announced its intention to disrupt the agreements. When North Vietnam finally responded, the GVN collapsed, leading to U.S. outrage that “Communists cannot be trusted.” This lesson was applied in August 1987 when Central American presidents adopted a political settlement, with the State Department presenting copies of the 1973 Paris agreement as a warning.
The Vietnam War in Retrospect
In April 1975, the war ended, and the U.S. faced the problem of overcoming the “Vietnam syndrome,” which Norman Podhoretz called “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force.” The ideological task was to convince the public the war was a “thunderously stupid military blunder” rather than fundamentally wrong or immoral. An ancillary task was hiding the devastation in Indochina, where the death toll may have passed three million. Crop-destruction programs and Rome plows obliterated agricultural lands, leaving a million widows and 800,000 orphans. The U.S. remained committed to ensuring its achievements were not threatened by recovery.
President Carter said “the destruction was mutual,” and the media portrayed the perpetrator as the injured party. Standard doctrine holds that South Vietnam lost to North Vietnam, with John Corry proclaiming “North Vietnam, not the Vietcong, was always the enemy.”
The Antiwar Movement and the War in Laos
Media retrospectives gave the antiwar movement “short shrift,” quoting activists only on tactical questions. The author argues that principled objection to the war is “inexpressible” and “unthinkable” in the media, revealing that the media is not a “free system of information” independent of state authority. The Geneva Accords of 1954 provided for a political settlement in Laos, but it was drawn into the U.S. attack on Indochina. A coalition government was established in 1958, but U.S. pressures led to a coup, and civil war broke out. U.S. clandestine military operations began in 1961, with regular bombing beginning in early 1964. Media coverage was often absurd, with reports of bombing directed at infiltration routes, though T. D. Allman’s accounts gave a glimpse beyond the approved version, concluding that “the rebel economy and social fabric” were the main U.S. targets.
Sihanouk’s Suppressed Protests
The narrative turns to the defense of the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia, focusing on the claim that Prince Sihanouk did not protest the attacks. Defenders and critics alike, including William Shawcross, adopted this position, arguing that Sihanouk had privately authorized the bombing of Vietnamese bases near the border. The authors contend this is irrelevant to the suppression of Sihanouk’s impassioned appeals, which concerned the bombing of Khmer peasants, not Vietcong sanctuaries. The crucial evidence being ignored was Sihanouk’s attempt to arouse international protest over the U.S. bombing of civilian society.
François Ponchaud, in Cambodia Year Zero, made a similar error, remarking that Sihanouk called the bombings of “Vietcong bases” a “scandal and a crime” over Radio Phnom Penh, but that “nobody was deceived.” The authors argue that Ponchaud and his readers are the ones deceived, as Sihanouk publicly denounced the bombing and attacks on Khmer peasants not only on the radio but in public documents and appeals to the international press. Shawcross’s claim in Sideshow that Cambodia “made no public protest that specifically mentioned B-52 attacks” is technically true but irrelevant, as it disregards the substance of Sihanouk’s protests.
William Beecher’s May 1969 report in the New York Times is held up as a prime example of this media failure. Beecher reported on the B-52 raids against “Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps,” citing U.S. sources and stating that “Cambodia has not made any protest.” This disregarded Sihanouk’s appeals and his protest against the murder of “Khmer peasants, women and children in particular.” Beecher’s headline falsely declared the raids “Unprotested,” and his article caused consternation in Washington, setting off the first stage of what became the Watergate scandal. The authors find it remarkable that this “unique though quite inadequate account” is held up as evidence that the press maintained its honor “despite the crimes of Richard Nixon.”
The 1970 Coup and the Radicalization of the Countryside
The U.S. escalation in Cambodia in 1969 coincided with similar efforts in Laos and Vietnam, yet the post-Tet pacification campaign that demolished the NLF civilian base was passed over in “virtual silence.” As the Air Force shifted its focus from North Vietnam after the “bombing halt,” the wars in Laos and Cambodia were virtually “invisible” in the mainstream media, apart from the “alternative press.”
On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was overthrown in “an upper-class coup, not a revolution,” carried out for “interests of domestic and political expedience,” with at least “indirect U.S. support.” Two days later, ARVN operations began in Svay Rieng Province, leading to the full-scale U.S.-ARVN invasion on April 29. The civilian toll from air power was immense. The invasion had two profound effects: it drove Vietnamese forces deeper into Cambodia, where they supported peasant resistance, and, as correspondent Richard Dudman observed, “the bombing and shooting was radicalizing the people of rural Cambodia and was turning the countryside into a massive, dedicated, and effective revolutionary base.”
By late 1971, the General Accounting Office concluded that U.S. and Saigon bombing was “a very significant cause of refugees and civilian casualties,” estimating that almost a third of the seven million population may have become refugees. U.S. intelligence itself reported that villagers feared “indiscriminate artillery and air strikes” most of all. Eyewitness reports from guerrilla-controlled regions, offered by Serge Thion to the Washington Post, were rejected. Media coverage in 1972 remained focused on military deaths in Vietnam, ignoring civilian deaths and refugees; Time magazine even had more coverage of civilian casualties in Northern Ireland than in the entire Indo-China War. Michael Vickery noted that the Lon Nol regime’s “client mentality” and “dependency led them to acquiesce in, or even encourage, the devastation of their own country.”
The Genocidal Bombing and the Rise of the Khmer Rouge
In the five months following the Paris peace accords, the bombing of Cambodia matched the level of the preceding three years, continuing until Congress forced a halt in August 1973. Over a million refugees fled to Phnom Penh as B-52s targeted “the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia.” It was during this period of saturation bombing that Khmer Rouge programs became extremely harsh. Analysts like Kenneth Quinn and Timothy Carney never consider a causal connection between the harshening of Khmer Rouge policy and the bombing that was devastating the countryside and its people.
The Myth of the “Silence” on Pol Pot
The narrative then addresses the claim that the West was silent about Pol Pot’s atrocities, a claim made at the peak of outrage over the genocide. David Aikman published an article in Time magazine on July 31, 1978, claiming the Khmer Rouge “experiment in genocide” was being ignored. Aikman added a new twist, arguing that Western intellectuals committed to “liberation” and “revolution” defended what happened in Cambodia, comparing them to George Bernard Shaw and others who had defended Soviet “social engineering” in the 1930s. No one was named because no one could be found to fit the claim, though Time tried to elicit positive statements from antiwar activists.
William Shawcross combined these two themes in what the authors call an “agitprop achievement,” which was received with enthusiasm by reviewers. His study argued that the West was silent about Khmer Rouge atrocities, a claim the authors say is refuted by massive evidence. Shawcross adopted Aikman’s second thesis, arguing that the “silence” resulted from skepticism displayed by the Western left toward stories from Democratic Kampuchea. He attributed this skepticism most fervently to Noam Chomsky, claiming Chomsky asserted the Western press colluded with Western and anti-Communist Asian governments to produce a propaganda campaign against the Khmer Rouge. The authors state that Shawcross provides a quote that does not exist, sourced from a work published almost a year after the fall of the Pol Pot regime. They note that Shawcross could have cited real examples of skepticism from State Department analysts or journalists, but the truth would not have served his purposes. Shawcross’s own primary source, Ponchaud, had praised Chomsky for his “responsible attitude and precision of thought” on Cambodia.
The authors defend their own record, noting their single 1977 article in The Nation praised Ponchaud’s book as “serious and worth reading” with its “grisly account” of refugee reports. Their skepticism was directed at Ponchaud’s estimate of casualties from American bombing and at quotes attributed to the Khmer Rouge, which Ponchaud later conceded had no basis. They argue that their skepticism about charges against the United States elicited no comment, while skepticism about charges against the Khmer Rouge aroused fury, because U.S. actions must be recounted with scrupulous care while acts of official enemies merit no such scruples. They call Shawcross’s thesis that left-wing skepticism silenced Western media “too ludicrous to merit comment,” noting he offered no proposals for what could have been done.
The Propaganda Model and the “Vietnam Syndrome”
The authors dissect the claims of Shawcross and others who accepted his thesis, such as David Hawk.
The Weight of Footnotes
The book’s final section is not a conclusion but a dense apparatus of endnotes and chapter notes, a scholarly foundation that reveals the immense labor behind the preceding narrative. These notes, numbered 64 through 102 and beyond, serve as a battleground where the book’s central arguments are defended and where the author engages in direct combat with his intellectual opponents. They are a testament to the idea that the history of the Indochina Wars is itself a contested narrative, shaped as much by the scholars who study it as by the generals who fought it.
The Battle Over Tet and the Atrocities
The notes on the Vietnam War and the Tet Offensive form a critical front. The author marshals a vast array of sources, from the New York Times reporters like David Halberstam and Homer Bigart to the diplomatic analyses of Wallace J. Thies and Kahin’s Intervention. The discussion of the Tet Offensive is particularly pointed, engaging with the major works of Braestrup (Big Story) and Oberdorfer (Tet!). The author, drawing on Porter’s critique, dismantles Braestrup’s conclusions, noting that his claims are attributed to “a consensus of historians without a single reference.” Porter’s own analysis of the 1968 Hue massacre is cited to show that Braestrup’s damage estimates fall far below the US AID’s figure that 77 percent of Hue’s buildings were destroyed. The notes also address the question of atrocities, referencing Seymour Hersh’s work on My Lai and My Khe, and criticizing Guenter Lewy as an apologist who accepts government claims that bombing was directed solely at military targets while discounting eyewitness reports. The author further details the presence of third-country forces, including Korean mercenaries and Taiwanese soldiers, some possibly seconded from Chiang Kai-shek’s army as early as 1959, often disguised as Nung Chinese.
The Suppressed War in Laos
The notes on Laos focus on the systematic suppression of information regarding the bombing of the northern part of the country. The author cites Elterman’s dissertation on state-media ideological hegemony to argue that the media failed in its duty. Refugee reports, which contradicted official claims that civilian areas were spared, are given prominence, alongside Fred Branfman’s Voices from the Plain of Jars and Senate subcommittee hearings on refugee casualties. A key detail is the misrepresentation of Haney’s conclusions by Ambassador William Sullivan, an act that exemplifies the official manipulation of intelligence and scholarship to maintain a false public narrative.
The Scholarly War Over Cambodia
The most extensive and contentious notes concern Cambodia. The author engages with the major scholarly works on the Khmer Rouge period, praising Michael Vickery’s Cambodia: 1975–1982 as the major scholarly study, one “virtually ignored in the United States.” In contrast, William Shawcross’s Sideshow is criticized for its reliance on Francois Ponchaud, described as “a highly dubious source.” The notes delve into the CIA demographic studies, which produced wildly varying estimates of deaths, from 50,000–100,000 executions to three million. Throughout, the author defends the work of Chomsky and Herman, noting Vickery’s observation of the “scurrilous,” “incompetent,” and “dishonest criticism” leveled against their Political Economy of Human Rights. The section concludes by documenting U.S. support for Khmer Rouge elements in the post-1979 phase, citing Chanda’s Brother Enemy and various journalists. The book ends not with a sweeping summation, but with this final, pointed citation, leaving the reader to confront the uncomfortable reality that the tragedy of Cambodia was not a simple story of a regime’s madness, but a complex geopolitical crime in which the United States played a direct and ongoing role.
Main Arguments
The central argument is that mass media serve to propagandize on behalf of powerful societal interests that control and finance them. This operates not through crude intervention but through the selection of “right-thinking personnel” and the internalization of priorities by editors and journalists. The system allows limited autonomy and some dissent, but such dissent is “kept within bounds and at the margins.”
The authors argue that the propaganda model is not a conspiracy theory but describes structural forces shaping media behavior. Five filters interact and reinforce one another: concentrated ownership with profit orientation, advertising dependence, reliance on government and corporate information sources, flak as discipline, and anticommunism as a control mechanism. These filters fix the premises of discourse and define newsworthiness so thoroughly that media workers with integrity convince themselves they choose news “objectively.”
A key argument concerns the differential treatment of worthy and unworthy victims. The murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko received vastly more coverage than the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the four American churchwomen, Rutilio Grande, and twenty-three religious victims in Guatemala. The authors argue that public silence regarding victims in client states is as important to supporting state policy as the focus on enemy victims. The Guatemalan government could not have murdered tens of thousands without U.S. press coverage comparable to that given to Andrei Sakharov’s difficulties or Popieluszko’s murder.
The book argues that media coverage of elections follows a similar pattern. Elections in El Salvador and Guatemala were legitimized despite conditions that made free elections impossible: state terror, compulsory voting, exclusion of left parties, and absence of freedom of speech and organization. Nicaragua’s 1984 election, conducted under more favorable conditions, was dismissed as a sham. The authors argue that propaganda lies about elections persisted because reports from observer delegations that contradicted the propaganda line were ignored by major media outlets.
The analysis of the Bulgarian Connection argues that the media promoted a theory with no credible basis because it served elite needs. The authors detail how the theory originated from a fabricated intelligence document, was popularized by disinformation sources with dubious credentials, and was accepted uncritically by major media. When the legal case collapsed, the media rationalized the outcome and dropped the story without reevaluation.
The chapters on Indochina argue that media coverage of the Vietnam War fit the propaganda model. The media accepted U.S. intervention as serving generous ideals, rarely characterized the war as aggression, and reported Washington pronouncements as fact even when false. The authors argue that the war would have been impossible if media had not portrayed murderous aggression as defense of freedom.
Key Concepts
The propaganda model is the book’s central analytical framework, describing how money and power filter out news, marginalize dissent, and allow government and dominant private interests to reach the public. The model traces the routes by which structural factors shape media performance.
The five filters constitute the model’s specific mechanisms. The first filter is size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of dominant mass-media firms. The authors document how capital costs rose with the industrialization of the press, pricing working-class publications out of existence. By the mid-1980s, twenty-nine largest systems accounted for over half of newspaper output, constituting what Ben Bagdikian called a “Private Ministry of Information and Culture.”
The second filter is advertising as the primary income source. Dependence on advertisers gives corporations leverage over media content and excludes publications that cannot attract advertising support.
The third filter is reliance on information from government, business, and approved “experts.” Media depend on official sources for news, and these sources have the resources to provide a steady stream of information that meets media needs for reliability and predictability.
The fourth filter is “flak” — the ability of powerful groups to produce complaints, threats, and other disciplinary responses to unfavorable coverage. Flak can be expensive and threatening, including libel suits, congressional pressure, and advertiser boycotts.
The fifth filter is anticommunism as a national religion and control mechanism. The authors note that this filter has been weakened by the end of the Cold War and partially replaced by “market populism,” the ideology that markets represent democracy and that any criticism of corporate power is antidemocratic.
The concept of worthy and unworthy victims describes how media coverage distinguishes between victims whose suffering evokes outrage and demands for justice and victims whose suffering is ignored or minimized. Worthy victims are those killed by enemy states; unworthy victims are those killed by client states under U.S. protection.
The concept of demonstration elections describes how the U.S. government employs symbol manipulation to legitimize elections in client states, associating them with democracy while keeping basic parameters off the agenda: freedom of speech, press, organization, party formation, and absence of state terror.
The “guided market system” describes how media operate with guidance from government, corporate leaders, media owners, and executives. Where powerful interests disagree, tactical diversity appears, but views challenging fundamental premises are excluded.
The concept of the “manufacture of consent,” drawn from Walter Lippmann, describes how propaganda operates as a regular organ of popular government in democratic societies.
Themes
A recurring theme is the relationship between democracy and propaganda. The democratic postulate holds that media are independent and committed to truth, but the authors argue that powerful groups fix discourse premises and manage public opinion. The book suggests that propaganda is not an aberration but a systematic feature of societies with concentrated wealth and class conflict.
The theme of veiled intentions runs throughout the work. Drawing on Jacques Ellul, the authors argue that propaganda must conceal its true purposes to be effective. Inconvenient facts appear only on back pages; fundamental dissent is marginalized, making the propaganda system more credible and effective. The media’s claim to objectivity is itself a mechanism of propaganda, since it allows media workers to believe they are choosing news fairly while actually serving dominant interests.
The theme of moral accounting examines how media assign moral worth to victims and perpetrators. The book quantifies this differential treatment extensively: the disputed Racak killings received 4.1 times more mentions than the indisputable Liquica massacre; the word “massacre” was applied 6.7 times more often; word count favored Racak by 14 to 1. Newsweek mentioned Racak nine times and Liquica never. This moral accounting serves to legitimize some violence and delegitimize others, supporting state policy regardless of the actual facts.
The theme of state terror and its legitimation is developed through the case studies of El Salvador and Guatemala. The authors argue that U.S. media serve as “loyal agents of terrorism” by legitimizing and delegitimizing victims and supporting state terror and contra attacks. The media’s refusal to publicize murders in client states gives leeway to murderous clients under U.S. protection.
The theme of historical amnesia appears in the treatment of the Vietnam War. The authors note that the media rarely viewed the war from the enemy’s perspective, unlike coverage of Afghanistan, and that the term “Viet Cong” was used rather than “National Liberation Front.” The war against South Vietnam and Indochina would have been impossible if media had not portrayed murderous aggression as defense of freedom.
The theme of expertise and its corruption examines how media rely on approved “experts” who confirm official slants. The book details how Paul Henze, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen dominated coverage of the Bulgarian Connection, with Henze writing twelve of fourteen articles on the case in the Christian Science Monitor. These sources’ dubious credentials and disinformation activities were protected by the media that relied on them.
The theme of commercialism and its effects on public discourse appears in the discussion of media consolidation and the decline of public broadcasting. The authors describe the “relentless, ubiquitous commercialism” of the global media system and the “tidal wave of commercialism” overtaking U.S. public broadcasting.
The Author’s Conclusions
The authors conclude that the propaganda model remains useful, perhaps more so than when the book was first published. Structural changes in media ownership, globalization, and technology have increased the model’s salience. Media performance in covering the 1991 Iraq war and NATO’s 1999 Yugoslavia war surpassed expectations of subservience, confirming the model’s predictions.
The book concludes that real change requires democratizing media organization and goals. The authors suggest that grassroots movements should create independent media, citing Independent Media Centers from the Seattle and Washington, D.C., protests of 1999–2000, plus nonprofit community broadcasting, public-access channels, Internet, and independent print media.
The authors argue that the propaganda system is not monolithic. Where powerful interests disagree, tactical diversity appears, but views challenging fundamental premises are excluded. The system allows limited autonomy and some dissent, but such dissent is kept within bounds and at the margins.
The analysis of the Indochina Wars concludes that media coverage fit the propaganda model. The media accepted U.S. intervention as moral, rarely found U.S. policy other than moral, and never found a mainstream editorial characterizing the war as aggression. The authors argue that the war would have been impossible if media had not portrayed murderous aggression as defense of freedom, and that media only opened doors to disagreement when costs to elite interests became too high.
The book’s final conclusions emphasize that the propaganda model describes forces shaping media behavior, not necessarily effective propaganda. The system is not all-powerful; it has vulnerabilities. The authors point to grassroots media initiatives as evidence that alternatives are possible. The democratization of media requires both structural change and the creation of independent institutions that can challenge the dominant system.
Significance
The book represents a major contribution to critical media studies, providing a systematic framework for analyzing media performance that goes beyond individual cases of bias or distortion. The propaganda model offers a structural explanation for why media consistently serve dominant interests, grounded in the economic and organizational realities of media institutions.
The work’s significance lies partly in its methodological rigor. The authors support their arguments with extensive quantitative data, including tables measuring column inches, article counts, and coverage comparisons. They provide detailed case studies that trace the mechanisms of propaganda in specific instances, showing how the five filters operate in practice.
The book has been influential in shaping debates about media ownership and regulation. Its documentation of media consolidation and its consequences has informed arguments for media reform and democratization. The concept of worthy and unworthy victims has entered the vocabulary of media criticism, providing a framework for analyzing differential coverage of human rights abuses.
The work’s analysis of the Bulgarian Connection case is significant for its detailed documentation of how media can promote a discredited theory when it serves elite interests. The authors show how disinformation sources were protected, how alternative explanations were ignored, and how the media rationalized the collapse of the case without reevaluating their own performance.
The chapters on the Indochina Wars challenge the conventional narrative that media “lost the war” through adversarial coverage. The authors argue instead that media coverage was largely supportive of U.S. policy, accepting official framing and rarely questioning fundamental premises. This revisionist account has contributed to ongoing debates about media performance during wartime.
The book’s significance also lies in its demonstration that propaganda operates differently in democratic societies than in authoritarian ones. The authors argue that propaganda is most effective when it is invisible, operating through structural constraints and internalized values rather than through explicit censorship. This insight has implications for understanding how consent is manufactured in societies that pride themselves on free speech and a free press.
The work concludes with a call for democratizing media, suggesting that grassroots movements should create independent media institutions. This emphasis on alternatives reflects the authors’ conviction that the propaganda system, while powerful, is not monolithic or invulnerable. The book’s significance lies not only in its critique but in its suggestion that change is possible through the creation of independent media that can challenge the dominant system.
