EYE ON THE MEDIA

Vietnam War News Still Touches a Nerve

By Danny Schechter

Danny Schechter, a former CNN and ABC producer, is
executive producer of Globalvision and author of "The
More You Watch The Less You Know."

THERE SEEMS to be a scandal a week in the press --
about the press. Now it is CNN's turn. The network has
retracted and apologized for a June 7 broadcast called
"Operation Tailwind," a heavily-hyped story charging
that a secret U.S. military unit deployed sarin, a
deadly nerve gas, against Vietnamese troops and
suspected U.S. defectors in the illegal war in Laos 28
years ago.

The debate over this story about nerve gas has
continued to rage because it has touched a deeper
nerve, raising questions not only about the state of TV
journalism but about the hidden history of American
military conduct overseas. CNN has not disavowed the
story totally, only saying it now believes the evidence
shown was insufficient. All of CNN's charges may not
have been proven, but how about some independent
analysis from war scholars, including critics, not just
the findings of high-priced lawyers on a mea-culpa
face-saving mission? One of the fired producers, April
Oliver, who I know personally, still stands by her
story. She says there's been a "deliberate attempt to
mischaracterize me. It's part of killing the
messenger." She was probing the secrets of covert
operations teams skilled in the art of plausible
deniability. Or as she put it, "These shadow warriors
don't like us looking into their dark spaces."

Credit CNN with the guts to go after them, but why cram
this blockbuster into 18 minutes, not the hour the
producers had sought and were denied? CNN has plenty of
airtime -- 24 hours a day, in fact. If the story was
bogus, why did it run? According to Oliver and her
supervising producer Jack Smith, who was also axed,
lawyers and top executives at the network all approved
the story, and key sources confirmed it. They say CNN
was pressured by media hysteria and political
intervention, including calls from former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the
Vietnam War, including the expansion into Laos. They
say a crime that has been covered up is being covered
up again.

So was nerve gas used? I'm still not clear, but I can't
rule it out, perhaps because I remember past cover-ups
of bombings, burnings, napalm, Agent Orange, the CIA's
use of poisons in assassination attempts, the murders
of civilians, the My-Lais, war crimes and blatant lies
that have made for a continuing credibility gap.

When the Pentagon starts denying Vietnam horrors, I
reach for my truth detector. The only way we will get
real facts about suppressed information is when we
establish a South Africa-style Truth Commission with
subpoena power. Then we can discover what the military
brass knew and when they forgot they knew it.

Remember the Pentagon Papers, 28 volumes of the secret
history of the war's origins filled with documents that
the American people hadn't seen until Daniel Ellsberg,
a former defense analyst, released them to the press?
They revealed what was being concealed -- the kind of
information that the CNN producers were after.
Ironically, Floyd Abrams, the lawyer who fought for
public disclosure on the case, is now convinced that
CNN's report is "flawed." But he does say the report
was not "fabricated." He also says that continued
investigation is justified. Will there be more in this
climate? I doubt it. It would be interesting to learn
more about the defectors we've never heard of before as
well as the Vietnamese side of the story.

And look who's bashing CNN. None other than that
paragon of truthful journalism, Rupert Murdoch, a long-
time enemy of CNN founder Ted Turner.

Within minutes of the retraction, Roger Ailes, a one-
time media advisor to Presidents Richard Nixon and
Ronald Reagan and now chief of Murdoch's conservative
Fox News Channel, circulated an internal memo praising
his staff's "meticulous reporting efforts"
investigating CNN's investigation. "We were the first
major news organization," he boasted, "to raise
questions about the accuracy of that story." Murdoch's
Post went further, giving CNN, the network Murdoch has
denounced as "too liberal," a full-scale tabloid
trouncing. His New York Post frontpage screamed: "WHAT
NERVE!" Make no mistake: CNN is being targeted for
prying into Pentagon secrets. It's fair to ask whether
this attack is orchestrated. It sure feels like a rerun
of "The Empire Strikes Back." Behind this scandal are
rarely covered institutional forces. There are few TV
shows about what's really driving the fever to get
sensational news on the air before it is checked
carefully. Corporate media strategies are sabotaging
serious journalism by diverting resources away from
reporting to enrich shareholders. Pressures for the Big
Scoop are evident in CNN's exploitation of this story
to launch its "NewsStand" newsmagazine series in a
collaboration with Time. It was about satisfying
demands for profitable cross-promotional "synergy"
within the TimeWarner media empire. To prime the profit
pump, news is turning into a stew of half-truths,
speculation and tantalizing tidbits gussied up with
slick packaging.

CNN has been a leader in covering Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction. Let's hope that my colleagues will
focus more attention on "weapons of mass distraction"
-- TV news itself.

Copyright 1998, Newsday Inc.

EYE ON THE MEDIA:
Vietnam War News Still Touches a Nerve.
07-08-1998, pp A39.

Published with the permission of Danny Schechter