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Bad news: The foreign policy of the New York times

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Rarely does there appear a serious work that raises troubling and legitimate questions about how historical events are interpreted. Often over the years we have had to rethink interpretations of certain historical events, but more rarely have we pondered how we arrived at an interpretation that turned out to be inaccurate.

The recent revelation that CNN and Time magazine essentially fabricated a tale of the use of poison gas by the US in the Vietnam War brings to mind the mindset which took root in coverage of that war at the time. The New York Times was and remains the most influential newspaper in the US, and its presentation of world events has often made for a near-universal view in this country of certain international events. It is not a pleasant thing to question how a newspaper of such stature might have gotten it wrong, but it is necessary if an inaccurate view of the world reverberates through a paper's coverage for many decades.

Russ Braley, a foreign correspondant with the New York Daily News from the 1950s onward, reexamines NY Times coverage of a variety of post-World war II international events, from the simultaneous conflicts in Hungary and the Suez Canal in 1956 through Israel's Operation Peace For Galilee invasion of Lebanon in 1982. His extensive footnotes help ad substance to his basic contention that the Times, colored by an inaccurate mindset of the world, misinterpreted a great many world events to the detriment of the United States in its international standing.

It has now been well established, through such works as Peter Braestrup's superlative work Big Story, that overall press coverage of the Vietnam war left a great deal to be desired. Braley probes further, by going to the events that helped shape the mindset that led to such later coverage. He examines David Halberstam, whose 1963 reportage on South Vietnam's leadership portrayed Saigon's president, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his family and closest advisors, as buffoonish, dictatorial, and repressive incompetents. ! Braley notes that Halberstam had far less experience with Vietnam than did Marguerite Higgins, the famed New York Herald-Tribune foreign correspondant who at the time was making her seventh trip to Vietnam, yet his sensational stories, in contrast to the more mundane analyses Higgins produced for the Herald-Tribune that August, caught the imagination of the country, and also the Kennedy White House, which arranged for Diem's overthrow that November, barely three weeks before John Kennedy's own assassination. Braley notes that Halberstam got glory and a Pulitzer for his 1963 Vietnam work, while Higgins' far more reliable analyses went unread, even after the famed Pentagon Papers proved her right all along.

Braley's strongest Vietnam-related chapters deal with the Pentagon Papers, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's 1968 study of how America got to where it was in Vietnam. Braley is especially strong in picking apart the assumptions made by Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND Corporation employee who illegally made the Pentagon study available to Neil Sheehan of the Times. Ellsberg was obsessed with the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officers in charge of the Holocaust and other atrocities, an obsession that had very little to do with Vietnam. Braley's best line is in a footnote where he notes that, following the controversy over the Times' publication of the Papers, the Defense Department declassified the entire study and made it available for reading, yet was disingenuously accused by the Times of censorship.

Braley's Vietnam chapters are good, but he concentates on Israel. Here he is on his most solid footing, having made several tours of Israel during the 1960s and '70s. Braley interweaves his analysis of the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Watergate, convincingly arguing that the Watergate controversy had less to do with political crimes than with a widespread media desire to overthrow Richard Nixon, a desire whetted when the media saw Nixon accomplish in foreign affairs what they said he could not, such as his orde! rly withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam and his staunch support for Israel. The media refused to give Nixon credit for anything, even when it was quite obvious - Nixon was responsible for overcoming bureaucratic resistance to resupplying Israel in the disasterous early phase of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel itself was threatened with possible destruction, yet the Times and the rest of the media would not give Nixon credit for any of that.

The Times' influence has waned in recent years, so it makes it somewhat difficult to appreciate just how strong that influence truly was over interpretations of international events. Braley's last chapter shows what may have been the beginning of the waning of Times influence. Media coverage of Israel's 1982 military push to destroy Palestinian warbases in Lebanon was often horribly anti-Israel - Braley notes that pro-PLO ads in the Times were reminiscent of the "halcyon days of the Vietnam war" - to the point that a great many embarassments occurred, such as a widely circulated photo of a child in Beirut who appeared to have lost both arms to Israeli munitions; it turned out the child had been injured by the PLO. Another embarassment was a widely circulated figure that over 50,000 civilians had been killed by the Israeli push, a figure attributed to the International Red Cross but which actually came from the PLO. Times and television coverage became so bad that, for the first time, media bias became an unfront political issue.

Though the proliferation of media outlets since then has helped make the press more honest, episodes such as the CNN/Time magazine poison gas in Vietnam story, and the even more outrageous elevation of recidivist thief and wife-beater Rodney King into a quasi-civil rights saint, still recur, fed by a mendacious worldview that Russ Braley nicely refutes in his book.