If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline
of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater
threat to our security….
Conflict between the media and presidential
administrations over foreign policy is nothing
new. The early escalation of American involve-
ment in Vietnam, as is now well known, pro-
voked a particularly intense conflict. 2 Reports
from the field in 1962-63 contradicted official
optimism, and tensions rose to the point that the
Kennedy and Johnson Administrations carried
out a public campaign to discredit the Saigon
press corps. The New York Times refused a re-
quest from the White House that it remove its
Saigon correspondent, David Halberstam; Time
correspondents Charles Mohr and Mert Perry
resigned when their own organization failed to
back them in the dispute over the accuracy-or
patriotism-of Vietnam reporting.
But as intense as these conflicts seemed to
those involved in them, they took place within
the narrow bounds of a powerful consensus.
Even in the later part of the Vietnam war, when
journalists were disillusioned with American
policy, discussion about the origins of revolu-
tion or the basic outlines of the U.S. relation-
ship to the third world were not a part of the
news agenda. Debate concerned the pace and
terms of American withdrawal, not the ideolog-
ical underpinnings of U.S. policy. This was the
so-called bi-partisan consensus of the Cold War,
a consensus the Reagan Administration has
John Kennedy, 1961′
been striving mightily to rebuild. Consider the
following background report on Southeast Asia
from The New York Times Sunday edition, Feb-
ruary 18, 1962:
HONG KONG, February 17-…As the
richest non-Communist power and as the prin-
cipal Western nation with a Pacific Ocean fron-
tier, the United States has inherited the chief
responsibility for confining Communist rule in
Eastern Asia to its present boundaries….
U.S. Problem
In none of these endangered nations can the
United States rely upon internal stability as a
Dan Hallin is assistant professor ofpolitical science and communications at the University of California, San Diego. This in-
terim report is based on an ongoing study, and includes the monitoring of about 30 hours of television coverage beginning with
the October 1979 coup in El Salvador, as well as a less systematic monitoring of major print media and interviews with more
than 30journalists, both in Central America and in Washington, New York and Miami. The decision to focus somewhat
more on television is motivated by studies which show that it is the most important influence on the perceptions of the mass
public, especially in the area offoreign policy.
2 NACLAReandJuly/Aug 1983
The White Paper was swallowed
whole and regurgitated in a fashion not
equaled since the Johnson Administra-
tion’s White Paper on Vietnam 15
years
ago.
Hodding Carter
basic source of strength in the free world’s fight
to contain aggressive Communism.
South Vietnam and South Korea are ruled by
authoritarian regimes whose roots haven’t
sprung from the people….
While the Kennedy Administration consid-
ered the media’s focus on “domestic instability”
a major political liability, at least the media were
not about to question the ideological assump-
tions that underlay U.S. involvement in Viet-
nam-i.e., that the question was fundamentally
one of outside Communist aggression, and the
role of the United States was to contain it.
The Turning of the News?
It is commonly assumed today that the media
were transformed over the course of the Viet-
nam-Watergate era from a relatively docile and
conservative institution to an assertive and gen-
erally critical one. In 1976, when the Trilateral
Commission released a report on the “govern-
ability of democracy,” the section on the United
States, authored by Harvard political scientist
Samuel Huntington, called the media “the most
important new source of national power in 1970
as opposed to 1950…. In recent years there has
come into existence a national press with the…
independence… to play a role with respect to
the President that a local paper plays with re-
spect to the mayor. This marks the emergence
of a very significant check on presidential
power. 3
The popular press has been full of such com-
mentary lately, and a good deal of it has focused
on the issue of Central America. Last August,
for example, TV Guide ran an article on Central
America coverage entitled “Patriotism to Skep-
ticism: The Turning of TV News.” 4
And indeed, it is harder today for a President
to “manage” the news than it was in the early
1960s. Journalists have in fact become more
skeptical and more sophisticated.
But the “turning of the news” should not be
exaggerated. In many ways, the political as-
sumptions and journalistic routines that made it
possible in the early 1960s for foreign policy
elites to finesse the country into one major war
and many minor interventions with hardly a
ripple of public debate have persisted remark-
ably intact. The President still possesses enor-
mous power to shape the news.
1965: “Framing” the Issue
A starting place that is as relevant as it is poet-
ically symbolic is a comparison of two adminis-
tration “White Papers”-one in 1965 and the
other in 1981-each aimed at building public
consensus for an escalation of U.S. interference
in a third world conflict.
On February 27, 1965, the State Department
issued a White Paper entitled “Aggression from
the North-the Record of North Vietnam’s
Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.” The
Johnson Administration had concluded that
U.S. involvement would have to be escalated
dramatically if the “loss” of South Vietnam
were to be prevented. Officials were busy plan-
ning the exact timing and form of the escalation
and worrying about public opinion.
The Administration’s public relations strategy
had two components. First, it was essential to
rally support by raising the specter of Commun-
ist aggression. This was the purpose of the
White Paper: to “frame” the conflict in South-
east Asia as a confrontation between East and
West, and thus a matter of national security. At
the same time, it was important not to arouse
what could be called the “Korea Syndrome”‘-
the fear of another inconclusive land war in
Asia. Thus, officials kept as quiet as possible
about the contemplated extent of U.S. involve-
ment. “The focus of public attention,” read a
Department of State cable sent to nine U.S.
posts in the Far East shortly after the White
Paper was released, “will be kept as far as possi-
ble on [North Vietnamese] aggression; not on
[U.S./South Vietnamese] military operations.
There will be no comment of any sort on future
actions except that they will be adequate and
measured and fitting to aggression.” 5
The New York Times of February 6, 1965, led
with a straight account of official statements:
The United States issued today a detailed,
documented indictment charging North Viet-
nam with flagrant and increasing aggression
against South Vietnam. The charge was accom-
panied by a warning that the United States might
be compelled to abandon its policy of “restraint”
and to expand the war in Vietnam if the Com-
munist aggression from the North did not cease.
The rest of the story summarized the State De-
partment document. It questioned neither the
3NACLA Report
accuracy of official information nor the motiva-
tions or implications of its release. This was the
standard convention of “objective” reporting,
making it easy most of the time for officials to
control the content of foreign affairs coverage.
1981: The Same Frame
Sixteen years later, the three-week-old Rea-
gan Administration released its own White
Paper, “Communist Interference in El Salva-
dor.”6 How did the media respond?
Nearly a decade after Watergate and the Pen-
tagon Papers, it was, for the most part, striking-
ly similar to the period of U.S. escalation in
Vietnam. 7 On February 6, for example, The
New York Times carried a lead story pre-dating
the official release of the White Paper which
began:
Indications that the Soviet Union and Cuba
agreed last year to deliver tons of weapons to
Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador are con-
tained in secret documents reportedly captured
from the insurgents by Salvadorean security
forces.
The documents, which are considered genuine
by United States intelligence agencies, say the
weapons came from stockpiles of American arms
seized in Vietnam and Ethiopia.
The documents, which were part of the
White Paper, had in fact been “leaked” to the
Times by the Reagan Administration. This is a
tactic familiar to journalists. Why settle for a
day of publicity when one can easily stretch it
out for several weeks? The Administration thus
not only got more mileage out of the documents
themselves, but set itself up for several weeks of
public statements about Communist interven-
tion which would be legitimized by a body of
evidence most of the media had not yet seen.
On February 12, for example, CBS State
Department correspondent Diane Sawyer
reported:
U.S. officials say the evidence is unmistakable
that the Cubans are re-supplying the guerrillas in
El Salvador under the direct sponsorship of the
Soviet Union …. Some of the evidence has come
from weapons and documents captured in El Sal-
vador .s
This acceptance of the leaked documents at
more or less face value was typical. By the day
the White Paper was released, Barrie Duns-
more’s ABC report included an animated map
showing the countries of Central America turn-
ing red one by one. In decidedly unqualified
language, Dunsmore summarized the White
The press play in the opening weeks of the campaign to convince us that E
Salvador is the place to roll back the Iron Curtain demonstrated that big government sets the terms of public discussion about major issues far more often than the press likes to admit or the public understands. Hodding Carter
Paper as containing “documents, photographs
and letters captured in November andJanuary,
which firmly establish the links between leftist
insurgents in El Salvador and Communist gov-
ernments worldwide.” Dunsmore, like other re-
porters, had not had time to read the docu-
ments, which were released just a few hours be-
fore his deadline; he was relying on an eight-
page summary released along with them by the
State Department.
It should be noted that it was possible, even at
this early date, to investigate the arms issue in-
dependently. The Times of London, for exam-
ple, sent a reporter to inspect captured weapons
displayed in El Salvador (the same ones shown
by Diane Sawyer): “…many were home-
made,” reported the Times, “belying the notion
of a sudden rush of sophisticated arms.” 9
More important, few reporters questioned the
relevance of the whole issue of “outside arms”
for understanding the insurgency in El Salvador.
President Kennedy addresses reporters, 1961.
4July/Aija 1983 S
“Maybe There’s Something to It”
Most Central American field journalists were
extremely skeptical of the White Paper’s Cold
War rhetoric. Juan Tamayo, formerly UPI bur-
eau chief in Mexico City and now with The
Miami Herald, describes his reaction this way:
When the Administration came out with this
White Paper all the news mentioned was Com-
munist intervention, Communist intervention.
Nobody in Washington bothered to mention that
this thing had been going on for years, that the
guerrillas have been around for a long time, that
the government itself in El Salvador… has been
accused of human rights violations and that is in
large part why people were rebelling against it.’ 0
Field reporters were by no means the only
ones who were skeptical. National Wirewatch, a
newsletter for the “wire editors” who select na-
tional and international news for most daily
papers around the country, criticized the wire
services for “heeding in lockstep fashion” the
“party line from Washington on Communist
infiltration.””
There were exceptions. For example, the day
before the White Paper was released, NBC’s
Bob Kur “balanced” a story on Administration
statements by citing an earlier State Depart-
ment report which had concluded that the in-
surgency in El Salvador resulted from “genera-
tions of inequality and repressive rule.” He
noted that many U.S. allies were uneasy that
the Administration “chooses to view what’s
happening in El Salvador exclusively in the
context of U.S./Soviet relations.” And The
Washington Post’s John Goshko wrote in a news
analysis:
Inevitably, this move toward increased U.S.
involvement in El Salvador’s bloody civil war
will provoke a major debate in this country about
whether Reagan and Secretary of State Alexan-
der M. Haig, Jr. are orchestrating the intelli-
gence at their disposal to whip up support for
their hardline attitudes and push the United
States into what many liberals fear could become
a Central American miniversion of Vietnam.12
As NBC’s Ike Seamans said, “Anybody
who’d been to Salvador as much as the people
who normally cover it knew it was a pretty sim-
plified view of the situation. But if the leader of
the Western world makes a statement, it’s policy
almost. You’ve got to follow it up … There’s
always a thing in your mind, ‘Well, maybe
there is something to it.’ “13
So for all intents and purposes, it was indeed
“Communist intervention, Communist inter-
vention” that dominated front page coverage.
“The whole issue of running the presidency,”
noted Reagan pollster Richard S. Beal, “… is
control of the agenda.”‘ 4 And control was pre-
cisely what the Administration had achieved.
The content of the news had shifted from
The Great Communicators: Reagan on El Salvador, Cronkite on Vietnam.
0
C”
‘U
a
July/Aua 1983 56
NACLARSoOuI
questions about right-wing death squads and
the degree of popular support enjoyed by the
Salvadorean guerrillas to arms supplies and
“Soviet expansionism.” The locus of coverage
had shifted from Central America itself to
Washington.
This success is perhaps best illustrated by the
graphic ABC News adopted a few days before
the release of the White Paper: a map of El Sal-
vador with the Stars and Stripes on one side,
the Hammer and Sickle on the other.15 The
networks also began to pair Central America
stories with reports on meetings of the Central
Committee of the Soviet Union, then taking
place in Moscow; Frank Reynolds introduced
one ABC report with the words, “And now, for
more on El Salvador and other aspects of U.S./
Soviet relations, here is Peter Jennings in
Moscow.”’16
Turning the Press On
Despite this initial success, it quickly became
clear that 1981 was not 1965; control of the news
on Central America was not going to be easy to
sustain. The very day after the release of the
White Paper, Administration statements began
to take on a distinctly defensive tone. The se-
quence of headlines in the Los Angeles Times the
week of the White Paper is revealing:
The day before: U.S. Warns Cuba to End
Subversion; ‘Necessary
Steps’ to be Taken to Stop
Arms, Meese Says
The day after: Salvador Role ‘No
Vietnam’–Reagan; U.S.
Considers More Military
Advisors for Embattled
Nation, Pentagon Says
Two days later: Given ‘Higher Visibility
Than It Deserves,’ White
House Believes; Press Cov-
erage Criticized” 1
Walter Cronkite was soon appearing before a
graphic not of hammers and sickles but of the
ominous profile of Vietnam.
LikeJohnson’s before it, the Reagan Admin-
istration was playing a delicate game, “turning
the press on” just enough to revive the faith of
the Cold War without raising the specter of a
major war. In this sense, its battle in Central
America is in part an ideological one, directed
at the American public-and media. But the
Administration quickly found that the legacy of
Vietnam and the changes in American political
consciousness that have occurred since then run
deep.
To a large extent, the Administration’s prob-
lems with the press have been of its own mak-
ing. “We did not appreciate how rapidly El Sal-
vador would take off in the minds of the press as
a Vietnam,” one White House aide admitted. 1 8
The Administration’s errors, in fact, were
much more severe than a mere failure to foresee
the reaction of the press. It was the Administra-
tion itself which first raised the comparison with
Vietnam. The week before the White Paper was
released, Alexander Haig had declared that
Central America would not be another Viet-
nam because the “source of supplies” [Cuba]
would not remain “outside the target area.”‘1
The day after its release, the President, award-
ing a belated Congressional Medal of Honor to
a veteran of Vietnam, made clear his intention
to reinterpret the meaning of that war: “They
came home without a victory, not because they
were defeated, but because they were denied per-
mission to win.” Ironically, it was only in
response to this Cold War rhetoric and the oppo-
sition it provoked in Congress that the media be-
gan to cover the Central America story heavily.
Does this mean that the Administration’s ini-
tial success with the White Paper was without
lasting significance? Does it prove that the news
has turned?
Not at all. In a sense what is really remark-
able is not the degree of skepticism one sees in
the press or the public or Congress, but the fact
that the Administration has succeeded as well as
it has at keeping the spotlight on “Soviet expan-
sionism” in Central America, despite the objec-
tive weakness of its case.
Furthermore, it has been able to add a cluster
of related themes to the top of the news agenda
that are equally weak-arms supplies to the Sal-
vadorean rebels, “totalitarianism” in Nicara-
gua, Nicaraguan military aggression, the
“democratic” motivation of U.S. objectives.
How can this be? Does it imply conspiracy
and collusion? Monolithic media? Heavy-
handed news management? Does it mean, in
short, that nothing is happening and nothing
can happen to affect the public news flow in this
country?
To understand the relationship of change to
continuity in the media, it is first necessary to
recognize the conventions and routines that
have evolved through many years. It is through
these that we can record change.
references
WHITE PAPER, RED SCARE
1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 1961,
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962),
p. 336.
2. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be, (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
3. Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji
Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, (New York: New York
University Press, 1975), pp. 98-99.
4. Edwin Diamond, “From Patriotism to Skepticism:
How TV Reporting Has Changed,” TV Guide, August 7,
1982.
5. The Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers, (Bos-
ton: Beacon Press, 1971), Vol. III, p. 324.
6. “Communist Interference in El Salvador,” Special
Report No. 80, Department of State, February 23, 1981.
7. A detailed critique of White Paper coverage can be
found inJonathan Evan Maslow and Ana Arana, “Oper-
ation El Salvador,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/
June, 1981.
8. CBS Evening News, February 12, 1981.
9. Quoted in Maslow and Arana, op. cit., p. 54.
10. Interview, Mexico City, July 15, 1981.
11. National Wirewatch, No. 35, April 30, 1981.
12. The Washington Post, February 22, 1981.
13. Interview, Miami, July 31, 1981.
14. Sidney Blumenthal, “Marketing the President,”
New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1981, p. 43.
15. ABC first used the graphic on February 18, 1981.
16. ABC World News Tonight, February 25, 1981.
17. Los Angeles Times, February 23, 25, 27, 1981.
18. Blumenthal, op. cit., p. 111.
19. The Washington Post, February 22, 1981.
references
WHITE PAPER, RED SCARE
1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 1961,
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962),
p. 336.
2. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be, (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
3. Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji
Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, (New York: New York
University Press, 1975), pp. 98-99.
4. Edwin Diamond, “From Patriotism to Skepticism:
How TV Reporting Has Changed,” TV Guide, August 7,
1982.
5. The Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers, (Bos-
ton: Beacon Press, 1971), Vol. III, p. 324.
6. “Communist Interference in El Salvador,” Special
Report No. 80, Department of State, February 23, 1981.
7. A detailed critique of White Paper coverage can be
found inJonathan Evan Maslow and Ana Arana, “Oper-
ation El Salvador,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/
June, 1981.
8. CBS Evening News, February 12, 1981.
9. Quoted in Maslow and Arana, op. cit., p. 54.
10. Interview, Mexico City, July 15, 1981.
11. National Wirewatch, No. 35, April 30, 1981.
12. The Washington Post, February 22, 1981.
13. Interview, Miami, July 31, 1981.
14. Sidney Blumenthal, “Marketing the President,”
New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1981, p. 43.
15. ABC first used the graphic on February 18, 1981.
16. ABC World News Tonight, February 25, 1981.
17. Los Angeles Times, February 23, 25, 27, 1981.
18. Blumenthal, op. cit., p. 111.
19. The Washington Post, February 22, 1981.