Strategic Plan Part 2 SWOT Analysis paperConduct an internal .docx

Strategic Plan Part 2: SWOT Analysis paper
Conduct an internal and external environmental analysis, and a
supply chain analysis for your proposed new division and its
business model.
Create a SWOT table summarizing your findings. Your
environmental analysis should consider, at a minimum, the
following factors. For each factor, identify the one primary
strength, weakness, opportunity, threat, and trend, and include
it in your table.
External forces and trends considerations:
· Legal and regulatory
· Global
· Economic
· Technological
· Innovation
· Social
· Environmental
· Competitive analysis
Internal forces and trends considerations:
· Strategy
· Structures
· Processes and systems
· Resources
· Goals
· Strategic capabilities
· Culture
· Technologies
· Innovations
· Intellectual property
· Leadership
Write a synopsis of no more than 1,050 words in which you
analyze relevant forces and trends from the list above. Your
analysis must include the following:

· Identify economic, legal, and regulatory forces and trends.
· Critique how well the organization adapts to change.
· Analyze and explain the supply chain of the new division of
the existing business. Share your plans to develop and leverage
core competencies and resources within the supply chain in an
effort to make a positive impact on the business model and the
various stakeholders.
Identify issues and/or opportunities:
· Identify the major issues and/or opportunities that the
company faces based on your analysis.
· Generate a hypothesis surrounding each issue and research
questions to use for conducting analysis.
· Identify the circumstances surrounding each issue; classify the
circumstances; attribute the importance of each classification;
and test the accuracy of the importance for each classification.
Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines.
Click the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment.
The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the
Jewish State
Author: Mead, Walter Russell
ProQuest document link
Abstract: In the US, a pro-Israel foreign policy does not
represent the triumph of a small lobby over the public
will. It represents the power of public opinion to shape foreign
policy in the face of concerns by foreign policy
professionals. To understand Washington's support for the
Jewish state, one has to understand the depth,
breadth and venerability of gentile American Zionism.
Links: Check Article Linker
Full text: ON MAY 12, 1948, Clark Clifford, the White House
chief counsel, presented the case for U.S.

recognition of the state of Israel to the divided cabinet of
President Harry Truman. While a glowering George
Marshall, the secretary of state, and a skeptical Robert Lovett,
Marshall's undersecretary, looked on, Clifford
argued that recognizing the Jewish state would be an act of
humanity that comported with traditional American
values. To substantiate the Jewish territorial claim, Clifford
quoted the Book of Deuteronomy: "Behold, I have
set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the
Lord sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them."
Marshall was not convinced and told Truman that he would vote
against him in the upcoming election if this was
his policy. Eventually, Marshall agreed not to make his
opposition public. Two days later, the United States
granted the new Jewish state de facto recognition 11 minutes
after Israel declared its existence as a state.
Many observers, both foreign and domestic, attributed Truman's
decision to the power of the Jewish community
in the United States. They saw Jewish votes, media influence,
and campaign contributions as crucial in the tight
1948 presidential contest.
Since then, this pattern has often been repeated. Respected U.S.
foreign policy experts call for Washington to
be cautious in the Middle East and warn presidents that too
much support for Israel will carry serious
international costs. When presidents overrule their expert
advisers and take a pro-Israel position, observers
attribute the move to the "Israel lobby" and credit (or blame) it
for swaying the chief executive. But there is
another factor to consider. As the Truman biographer David
McCullough has written, Truman's support for the
Jewish state was "wildly popular" throughout the United States.
A Gallup poll in June 1948 showed that almost
three times as many Americans "sympathized with the Jews" as
"sympathized with the Arabs." That support

was no flash in the pan. Widespread gentile support for Israel is
one of the most potent political forces in U.S.
foreign policy, and in the last 60 years, there has never been a
Gallup poll showing more Americans
sympathizing with the Arabs or the Palestinians than with the
Israelis.
Over time, moreover, the pro-Israel sentiment in the United
States has increased, especially among non-Jews.
The years of the George W. Bush administration have seen
support for Israel in U.S. public opinion reach the
highest level ever, and it has remained there throughout Bush's
two terms. The increase has occurred even as
the demographic importance of Jews has diminished. In 1948,
Jews constituted an estimated 3.8 percent of the
U.S. population. Assuming that almost every American Jew
favored a pro-Israel foreign policy that year, a little
more than ten percent of U.S. supporters of Israel were of
Jewish origin. By 2007, Jews were only 1.8 percent
of the population of the United States, accounting at most for
three percent of Israel's supporters in the United
States.
These figures, dramatic as they are, also probably underestimate
the true level of public support for Israel.
When in a poll in 2006 the Pew Research Center asked whether
U.S. policy in the Middle East was fair, favored
Israel, or favored the Palestinians, 47 percent of the respondents
said they thought the policy was fair, six
percent said it favored the Palestinians, and only 27 percent
thought it favored the Israelis. The poll was
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conducted during Israel's attacks against Hezbollah in southern
Lebanon, when U.S. support for Israel was
even more controversial than usual around the world. One must
therefore conclude that many of those who tell
pollsters that the United States' policies are fair to both sides
actually favor policies that most non-U.S.
observers would consider strongly and even irresponsibly pro-
Israel. The American public has few foreign policy
preferences that are this marked, this deep, this enduring-and
this much at odds with public opinion in other
countries.
In the United States, a pro-Israel foreign policy does not
represent the triumph of a small lobby over the public
will. It represents the power of public opinion to shape foreign
policy in the face of concerns by foreign policy
professionals. Like the war on drugs and the fence along the
Mexican border, support for Israel is a U.S. foreign
policy that makes some experts and specialists uneasy but
commands broad public support. This does not
mean that an "Israel lobby" does not exist or does not help
shape U.S. policy in the Middle East. Nor does it
mean that Americans ought to feel as they do. (It remains my
view that everyone, Americans and Israelis
included, would benefit if Americans developed a more
sympathetic and comprehensive understanding of the
wants and needs of the Palestinians.) But it does mean that the
ultimate sources of the United States' Middle

East policy lie outside the Beltway and outside the Jewish
community. To understand why U.S. policy is pro-
Israel rather than neutral or pro-Palestinian, one must study the
sources of nonelite, non-Jewish support for the
Jewish state.
THE CHILDREN OF DAVID
THE STORY of U.S. support for a Jewish state in the Middle
East begins early. John Adams could not have
been more explicit. "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an
independent nation," he said, after his presidency.
From the early nineteenth century on, gentile Zionists fell into
two main camps in the United States. Prophetic
Zionists saw the return of the Jews to the Promised Land as the
realization of a literal interpretation of biblical
prophecy, often connected to the return of Christ and the end of
the world. Based on his interpretation of
Chapter 18 of the prophecies of Isaiah, for example, the Albany
Presbyterian pastor John McDonald predicted
in 1814 that Americans would assist the Jews in restoring their
ancient state. Mormon voices shared this view;
the return of the Jews to the Holy Land was under way, said
Elder Orson Hyde in 1841: "The great wheel is
unquestionably in motion, and the word of the Almighty has
declared that it shall roll."
Other, less literal and less prophetic Christians developed a
progressive Zionism that would resonate down
through the decades among both religious and secular gentiles.
In the nineteenth century, liberal Christians
often believed that God was building a better world through
human progress. They saw the democratic and
(relatively) egalitarian United States as both an example of the
new world God was making and a powerful
instrument to further his grand design. Some American
Protestants believed that God was moving to restore
what they considered the degraded and oppressed Jews of the
world to the Promised Land, just as God was

uplifting and improving the lives of other ignorant and
unbelieving people through the advance of Protestant and
liberal principles. They wanted the Jews to establish their own
state because they believed that this would both
shelter the Jews from persecution and, through the redemptive
powers of liberty and honest agricultural labor,
uplift and improve what they perceived to be the squalid morals
and deplorable hygiene of contemporary
Ottoman and eastern European Jews. As Adams put it, "Once
restored to an independent government and no
longer persecuted they would soon wear away some of the
asperities and peculiarities of their character and
possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians." For such
Christians, American Zionism was part of a
broader program of transforming the world by promoting the
ideals of the United States.
Not all progressive Zionists couched their arguments in
religious terms. As early as 1816, Niles' Weekly
Register, the leading American news and opinion periodical
through much of the first half of the nineteenth
century, predicted and welcomed the impending return of the
Jews to an independent state with Jerusalem as
its capital. The magazine projected that the restoration of the
Jews would further enlightenment and progress-
and this, clearly, would be good for the United States as well as
for the Jews.
Prophetic Zionists, for their part, became more numerous after
the American Civil War, and their views of the
role a restored Jewish state might play in the events leading up
to the apocalypse became more highly
developed. Books and pamphlets highlighting the predicted
restoration of the Jews and speculating on the
identity and the return of the "lost tribes" of the ancient

Hebrews were perennial bestsellers, and the association
between Dwight Moody, the country's leading evangelist, and
Cyrus Scofield, the important Bible scholar, put
the future history of Israel firmly at the center of the
imagination of conservative American Protestantism.
These groups of gentile Zionists found new, if sometimes
unsavory, allies after 1880, when a mass immigration
of Russian Jews to the United States began. Some of them and
some assimilated German American Jews
hoped that Palestine would replace the United States as the
future home of what was an unusually unpopular
group of immigrants at the time. For anti-Semites, the
establishment of a Jewish state might or might not "cure"
Jews of the characteristics many gentiles attributed to them, but
in any case the establishment of such a state
would reduce Jewish immigration to the United States.
In 1891, these strands of gentile Zionists came together. The
Methodist lay leader William Blackstone presented
a petition to President Benjamin Harrison calling on the United
States to use its good offices to convene a
congress of European powers so that they could induce the
Ottoman Empire to turn Palestine over to the Jews.
The 400 signatories were overwhelmingly non-Jewish and
included the chief justice of the Supreme Court; the
Speaker of the House of Representatives; the chairs of the
House Ways and Means Committee and the House
Foreign Affairs Committee; the future president William
McKinley; the mayors of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago,
New York, Philadelphia, and Washington; the editors or
proprietors of the leading East Coast and Chicago
newspapers; and an impressive array of Episcopal, Methodist,
Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic clergy.
Business leaders who signed the petition included Cyrus
McCormick, John Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. At a
time when the American Jewish community was neither large
nor powerful, and no such thing as an Israel lobby

existed, the pillars of the American gentile establishment went
on record supporting a U.S. diplomatic effort to
create a Jewish state in the lands of the Bible.
ANY DISCUSSION of U.S. attitudes toward Israel must begin
with the Bible. For centuries, the American
imagination has been steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures. This
influence originated with the rediscovery of the
Old Testament during the Reformation, was accentuated by the
development of Calvinist theology (which
stressed continuities between the old and the new dispensations
of divine grace), and was made more vital by
the historical similarities between the modern American and the
ancient Hebrew experiences; as a result, the
language, heroes, and ideas of the Old Testament permeate the
American psyche.
Instruction in biblical Hebrew was mandatory for much of early
U.S. history at Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard,
Princeton, and Yale. James Madison completed his studies at
Princeton in two years but remained on campus
an extra year to study Hebrew. Colonial preachers and
pamphleteers over and over again described the United
States as a new Canaan, "a land flowing with milk and honey,"
and reminded their audiences that just as the
Hebrews lost their blessings when they offended God, so, too,
would the Americans suffer if they disobeyed the
God who had led them into their promised land. Today, Old
Testament references continue to permeate U.S.
political writing, oratory, and even geography-over one
thousand cities and towns in the United States have
names derived from Scripture.
The most dramatic religious expression of the importance of the
Old Testament in American culture today is the
rise of premillennial dispensationalism, an interpretation of
biblical prophecies that gives particular weight to Old
Testament religious concepts such as covenant theology and
assigns a decisive role to a restored Jewish state

(with Jerusalem as its capital) in future history. An estimated
seven percent of Americans seem to hold this
theological position (making this group almost four times as
large as the American Jewish community), and a
considerably larger group is influenced by it to a greater or
lesser degree. Proponents of this view often
(although not always) share the view of some Orthodox Jews
that the Jews must insist on a state that includes
all the territory once promised to the Hebrews; they oppose any
territorial compromise with the Palestinians and
support Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But this is a
minority view, even among U.S. supporters of Israel.
Progressive Christian Zionism, on the other hand, is related to
Christian ethics rather than prophecy. Much of it
is rooted in guilt and a sense that Christians' past poor treatment
of the Jews is now preventing Jews from
accepting Christianity. For well over a thousand years, the Jews
of Europe suffered extraordinary and at times
unspeakable cruelties at the hands of Europe's Christians.
Although some American Protestants perpetuated
this history of intolerance and anti-Semitism, many liberal
American Protestants from the nineteenth century
forward saw rejecting this past as one of the defining tasks of
the reformed and enlightened American church.
Such Protestants could (and comfortably did) deplore Catholic
anti-Semitism as a consequence of the
regrettable corruptions of the church under the papacy, but the
anti-Semitic words and deeds of reformers such
as Martin Luther could not be dismissed so easily. Many
members of the liberal American Protestant churches
considered it a sacred duty to complete the work of the
Reformation by purging Christianity of its remaining
"medieval" features, such as superstition, bigotry, and anti-

Semitism. Making amends for past sins by protecting
the Jews has long been an important religious test for many
(although by no means all) American Protestants.
By contrast, most American Christians have felt little or no
guilt about their communities' historical relations with
the Muslim world. Many Muslims view Christian-Muslim
conflict over the last millennium as a constant and
relatively homogenous phenomenon, but American Protestants
do not. They generally deplore the cruelties of
the Crusades and the concept of a holy war, for example, but
they see them as Catholic errors rather than more
broadly Christian ones, and in any case, they view the Crusades
as long past and as a response to prior Muslim
aggression. They also generally deplore the predations of
European powers in more recent centuries, but they
see them as driven by Old World imperialism rather than
Christianity and as such something for which they bear
no responsibility. (An important exception deserves to be
mentioned: Many U.S. missionaries active in the
Middle East forged deep ties with the region's Arab inhabitants
and strongly supported Arab nationalism, both
from a dislike of European colonialism and out of the hope that
a secular nationalist movement would improve
the position of Arab Christians. This missionary community
contributed both to the development of the Arabist
contingent in the State Department and to the backlash in
mainstream Protestant churches against Israeli
policies in the occupied territories after the 1967 war.)
By 1948, many Christians in the United States felt a heavy
burden of historical debt and obligation toward the
Jews, but not the Muslims. If anything, they believed that the
Islamic world was indebted to American Christian
missionaries for many of its leading universities and hospitals
and that American Christian support before and
after World War II had helped promote the emergence of
independent Arab and Muslim states that was then

taking place.
CHOSEN COUSINS
THE UNITED STATES' sense of its own identity and mission in
the world has been shaped by readings of
Hebrew history and thought. The writer Herman Melville
expressed this view: "We Americans are the peculiar,
chosen people-the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the
liberties of the world." From the time of the Puritans
to the present day, preachers, thinkers, and politicians in the
United States-secular as well as religious, liberal
as well as conservative-have seen the Americans as a chosen
people, bound together less by ties of blood than
by a set of beliefs and a destiny. Americans have believed that
God (or history) has brought them into a new
land and made them great and rich and that their continued
prosperity depends on their fulfilling their obligations
toward God or the principles that have blessed them so far.
Ignore these principles-turn toward the golden calf-
and the scourge will come.
Both religious and nonreligious Americans have looked to the
Hebrew Scriptures for an example of a people set
apart by their mission and called to a world-changing destiny.
Did the land Americans inhabit once belong to
others? Yes, but the Hebrews similarly conquered the land of
the Canaanites. Did the tiny U.S. colonies armed
only with the justice of their cause defeat the world's greatest
empire? So did David, the humble shepherd boy,
fell Goliath. Were Americans in the nineteenth century isolated
and mocked for their democratic ideals? So
were the Hebrews surrounded by idolaters. Have Americans
defeated their enemies at home and abroad? So,
according to the Scriptures, did the Hebrews triumph. And when
Americans held millions of slaves in violation of

their beliefs, were they punished and scourged? Yes, and much
like the Hebrews, who suffered the
consequences of their sins before God.
This mythic understanding of the United States' nature and
destiny is one of the most powerful and enduring
elements in American culture and thought. As the ancient
Hebrews did, many Americans today believe that they
bear a revelation that is ultimately not just for them but also for
the whole world; they have often considered
themselves God's new Israel. One of the many consequences of
this presumed kinship is that many Americans
think it is both right and proper for one chosen people to
support another. They are not disturbed when the
United States' support of Israel, a people and a state often
isolated and ostracized, makes the United States
unpopular or creates other problems. The United States'
adoption of the role of protector of Israel and friend of
the Jews is a way of legitimizing its own status as a country
called to a unique destiny by God.
More than that, since the nineteenth century, the United States
has seen itself as the chosen agent of God in
the protection and redemption of the Jews. Americans believed
that the Jews would emerge from their
degraded condition as they moved from city slums to the
countryside-just as American immigrants from all over
Europe had built better lives and sturdier characters as
Jeffersonian farmers. Liberal Christians such as Adams
believed that this would bring the Jews in time to the light of
liberal Protestantism as part of the general uplift of
humanity. And prophetic Zionists hoped that mass conversions
of Jews to revivalist Christianity would trigger
the apocalypse and the return of Christ. Either way, the United
States' special role in the restoration of the Jews
fulfilled gentile Americans' expectations about the movement of
history and confirmed their beliefs about the
United States' identity and mission.

SETTLER STATES
THE UNITED STATES and Israel also have in common their
status as "settler states"-countries formed by
peoples who came to control their current lands after displacing
the original populations. Both states have been
powerfully shaped by a history of conflict and confrontation
with those they displaced, and both have sought
justifications for their behavior from similar sources. Both the
Americans and the Israelis have turned primarily to
the Old Testament, whose hallowed pages tell the story of the
conflict between the ancient Hebrews and the
Canaanites, the former inhabitants of what the Hebrews
believed was their Promised Land. Americans found
the idea that they were God's new Israel so attractive partly
because it helped justify their displacement of the
Native Americans. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in his best-
selling history of the American West, "Many of the
best of the backwoodsmen were Bible-readers, but they were
brought up in a creed that made much of the Old
Testament, and laid slight stress on pity, truth, or mercy. They
looked at their foes as the Hebrew prophets
looked at the enemies of Israel. What were the abominations
because of which the Canaanites were destroyed
before Joshua, when compared with the abominations of the red
savages whose lands they, another chosen
people, should in their turn inherit?" (Roosevelt himself, like
his cousins Franklin and Eleanor, was a Christian
Zionist. "It seems to me entirely proper to start a Zionist State
around Jerusalem," he wrote in 1918.)
Besides a direct divine promise, two other important
justifications that the Americans brought forward in their
contests with the Native Americans were the concept that they
were expanding into "empty lands" and John
Locke's related "fair use" doctrine, which argued that unused
property is a waste and an offense against nature.
U.S. settlers felt that only those who would improve the land,

settling it densely with extensive farms and
building towns, had a real right to it. John Quincy Adams made
the case in 1802: "Shall [the Indians] doom an
immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation . . . ?" And
Thomas Jefferson warned that the Native
Americans who failed to learn from the whites and engage in
productive agriculture faced a grim fate. They
would "relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war
and want, and we shall be obliged to drive
them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains."
Through much of U.S. history, such views resonated not just
with backwoodsmen but also with liberal and
sophisticated citizens. These arguments had a special meaning
when it came to the Holy Land. As pious
Americans dwelt on the glories of ancient Jerusalem and the
Temple of Solomon, they pictured a magnificent
and fertile land-"a land flowing with milk and honey," as the
Bible describes it. But by the nineteenth century,
when first dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands of
Americans visited the Holy Land-and millions
more thronged to lectures and presentations to hear reports of
these travels-there was little milk or honey;
Palestine was one of the poorest, most backward, and most
ramshackle provinces of the Ottoman Empire. To
American eyes, the hillsides and rocky fields of Judea were
desolate and empty-God, many believed, had
cursed the land when he sent the Jews into their second exile,
which they saw as the Jews' punishment for their
failure to recognize Christ as the Messiah. And so, Americans
believed, the Jews belonged in the Holy Land,
and the Holy Land belonged to the Jews. The Jews would never
prosper until they were home and free, and the
land would never bloom until its rightful owners returned.

The Prophet Isaiah had described the future return of the Jews
to their homeland as God's grace bringing water
to a desert land. And Americans watched the returning fertility
of the land under the cultivation of early Zionist
settlers with the astonished sense that biblical prophecy was
being fulfilled before their eyes. "The springs of
Jewish colonizing vigor, amply fed by the money of world
Jewry, flowed on to the desert," wrote Time magazine
in 1946, echoing the language of Isaiah. Two years later,
following the Jewish victory in the 1948 war, it
described the Arabs in terms that induce flinching today but
represented common American perceptions at the
time: "The Western world tends to think of the Arab as a falcon-
eyed warrior on a white horse. That Arab is still
around, but he is far less numerous than the disease-ridden
wretches who lie in the hot streets, too weak, sick
and purposeless to roll over into the shade." Americans saw a
contest between a backward and incapable
people and a people able to settle the wilderness and make it
bloom, miraculously fulfilling ancient prophecies
of a Jewish state.
The Jews had been widely considered eastern Europe's most
deplorable population: ignorant, depraved,
superstitious, factionalized, quarrelsome, and hopelessly behind
the times. That this population, after being
subjected to the unprecedented savagery of Nazi persecution,
should establish the first stable democracy in the
Middle East, build a thriving economy in the desert, and
repeatedly defeat enemies with armies many times
larger and stronger than their own seemed to many Americans to
be striking historical proof of their own most
cherished ideals.
THE RIGHT TURN
ALTHOUGH GENTILE support for Israel in the United States
has remained strong and even grown since World
War II, its character has changed. Until the Six-Day War,

support for Israel came mostly from the political left
and was generally stronger among Democrats than Republicans.
Liberal icons such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul
Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were
leading public voices calling for the United States to
support Israel. But since 1967, liberal support for Israel has
gradually waned, and conservative support has
grown.
A variety of factors had come together in the 19405 to make
progressive gentile Zionism a powerful force in
U.S. politics, especially on the left. First, the impact of the
Holocaust on American Protestantism was
extraordinary. Germany had once provided intellectual
leadership for the American Protestant church, and the
passive acquiescence with which most German Protestant
churches and pastors greeted Nazi rule shocked
mainstream American Protestantism to its core. Anti-Nazi
German Protestants became moral and theological
heroes in the postwar United States, and opposition to anti-
Semitism became a key test by which mainline
American Protestants judged themselves and their leaders. This
profound shock intensified their humanitarian
response to revelations about the death camps and the mass
murder. The suffering of the displaced, starving,
and impoverished Jewish refugees in chaotic postwar Europe
made it inevitable that American Protestants, who
had for a century campaigned for Jewish rights, would
enthusiastically support steps seen as securing the
safety of Europe's Jews.
A second factor was the strong support of African Americans
for the Jews at a time when blacks were beginning
to play a larger role in U.S. electoral politics. During the 19303,
the African American press throughout the

United States had closely followed the imposition of Hitler's
racial policies. African American leaders lost no
opportunity to point out the similarities between Hitler's
treatment of the Jews and the Jim Crow laws in the
United States' segregated South. For African Americans, the
persecution of the Jews was made real to them
through their own daily experiences. It also provided them with
important talking points to persuade whites that
racial discrimination violated American principles, and it thus
helped build the strong alliance between American
Jews and the civil rights movement that existed from 1945
through the death of King. Even during World War II,
the black activists W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston,
Langston Hughes, and Philip Randolph supported the
precursor of the Israeli Likud Party in its effort to create a
Jewish army. The civil rights leader Adam clayton
Powell, Jr., went further, raising $150,000 for the militant
Zionist group the Irgun Zvai Leumi-which he called "an
underground terrorist organization in Palestine"-at a New York
City rally.
The Soviet Union's support for an independent state of Israel
also helped. At Yalta, Joseph Stalin told Franklin
Roosevelt that he, too, was a Zionist, and in May of 1947,
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko announced
before the United Nations that the Soviet Union supported the
creation of a Jewish state. This backing, however
short-lived, strengthened the view of many American leftists
that the establishment of a homeland for the Jews
was part of the general struggle for progress around the world.
Indeed, in the decades after the war, many
American liberals saw their support for Israel as part of their
commitment to freedom, anticolonialism (the Jews
of Palestine were seeking independence over British
opposition), the struggle against racial and religious
discrimination, secularism, humanitarianism, and the
progressive tradition in U.S. politics. Israel at the time

seemed to be an idealistic secular experiment in social
democracy; American Jews and American gentiles alike
went to Israel to experience the exhilarating life of labor and
fellowship of the kibbutz. In 1948, therefore, when
Truman decided to support the creation of Israel, he was
thinking about not just the Jewish vote. Support for
Israel was popular with the blacks in the North, who were
attracted to the Democratic Party by the New Deal
and Truman's own slow progress toward supporting civil rights.
The cause of Israel helped with voters on the
left otherwise tempted to support Henry Wallace and the
Progressives. And it also helped Truman compete
among conservative, churchgoing, Bible-reading southern voters
against Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats. Support
for Israel, in fact, was one of the few issues that helped pull the
fractious Democratic Party coalition together.
Since the 1967 war, however, the basis of Israel's support in the
United States has shifted: backing for Israel
has tended to weaken on the left and grow on the right. On the
left, a widespread dislike of Israel's policies in
the occupied territories and a diminished concern for its
security in the wake of its triumph in the war led many
African Americans, mainline Protestants, and liberal
intellectuals, once among Israel's staunchest U.S. allies,
toward growing sympathy with Palestinian views. Increased
identification on the part of blacks with anticolonial
movements worldwide, the erosion of the black-Jewish alliance
in U.S. domestic politics, and the rising appeal
of figures such as Malcolm X and the leaders of the Nation of
Islam also gradually reduced support for Israel
among African Americans. The liberal Protestant churches, for
their part, were newly receptive to the
perspectives of those missionaries sympathetic to Arab
nationalism, and as the mainstream churches became
more critical of traditional American ideas about the United
States' national identity and destiny, they distanced

themselves ever further from traditional readings of the Old
Testament. (On the other hand, relations between
American Catholics and the Jews began to improve after the
1967 war, largely due to the Catholic Church's
new theological approach toward the Jews since the Second
Vatican Council.)
On the right, the most striking change since 1967 has been the
dramatic intensification of suppport for Israel
among evangelical Christians and, more generally, among what
I have called "Jacksonian" voters in the U.S.
heartland. Jacksonians are populist-nationalist voters who favor
a strong U.S. military and are generally
skeptical of international organizations and global humanitarian
aid. Not all evangelicals are Jacksonians, and
not all Jacksonians are evangelicals, but there is a certain
overlap between the two constituencies. Many
southern whites are Jacksonians; so are many of the swing
voters in the North known as Reagan Democrats.
Many Jacksonians formed negative views of the Arabs during
the Cold War. The Palestinians and the Arab
states, they noted, tended to side with the Soviet Union and the
Nonaligned Movement against the United
States. The Egyptians responded to support from the United
States in the 1956 Suez crisis by turning to the
Soviets for arms and support, and Soviet weapons and Soviet
experts helped Arab armies prepare for wars
against Israel. Jacksonians tend to view international affairs
through their own unique prism, and as events in
the Middle East have unfolded since 1967, they have become
more sympathetic to Israel even as many non-
Jacksonian observers in the United States-and many more
people in the rest of the world-have become less so.
The Six-Day War reignited the interest of prophetic Zionists in

Israel and deepened the perceived connections
between Israel and the United States for many Jacksonians.
After the Cold War, the Jacksonians found that the
United States' opponents in the region, such as Iraq and Iran,
were the most vociferous enemies of Israel as
well.
Jacksonians admire victory, and total victory is the best kind.
The sweeping, overwhelming triumph of Israeli
arms in 1967 against numerically superior foes from three
different countries caught the imaginations of
Jacksonians-especially at a time when the United States' poor
performance in Vietnam had made many of them
pessimistic about their own country's future. Since then, some
of the same actions that have hurt Israel's image
in most of the world-such as ostensibly disproportionate
responses to Palestinian terrorism-have increased its
support among Jacksonians.
When a few rockets launched from Gaza strike Israel, the
Israelis sometimes respond with more firepower,
more destruction, and more casualties. In much of the world,
this is seen as excessive retaliation, an offense
equal to or even greater than the original attack. Jacksonians,
however, see a Palestinian rocket attack on
Israeli targets as an act of terrorism and believe that the Israelis
have an unlimited right, perhaps even a duty, to
retaliate with all the force at their command. Since the 19505,
when Palestinian raiders started slipping across
the cease-fire line to attack Israeli settlements, many
Palestinians and Arabs have, with some justification, seen
these incursions as acts of great courage in the face of
overwhelming power. But such sneak attacks against
civilian targets, and especially suicide bombings, violate basic
Jacksonian ideas about civilized warfare.
Jacksonians believe that only overwhelming and total retaliation
against such tactics can deter the attackers
from striking again. This is how the American frontiersmen

handled the Native Americans, how the Union
general William Sherman "educated" the Confederacy, and how
General Douglas MacArthur and Truman
repaid the Japanese for Pearl Harbor. Jacksonians genuinely
cannot understand why the world criticizes Israel
for exercising what they see as its inalienable right of self-
defense-for doing exactly what they would do in
Israel's place.
In the eyes of the Palestinians and their supporters, the
Palestinians-exiled, marginalized, occupied, divided-are
heroic underdogs confronting the might of a regional
superpower backed by the most powerful nation on earth.
But for Jacksonians, Israel, despite all its power and all its
victories, remains an endangered David surrounded
by enemies. The fact that the Arabs and the larger community of
one billion Muslims support, at least verbally,
the Palestinian cause deepens the belief among many
Jacksonians that Israel is a small and vulnerable country
that deserves help. Ironically, some of the greatest military and
political successes of the Palestinian movement-
developing an active armed resistance, winning (largely
rhetorical) support from organizations such as the Arab
League and even the General Assembly of the United Nations,
shifting the basis of Palestinian resistance from
secular nationalism to religion, and winning support from
powerful regional states such as Saddam's Iraq and
Iran today-have ended up strengthening and deepening
American gentile support for the Jewish state.
CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD
ANOTHER IMPORTANT factor leading to increased American
support for Israel is that since 1967 a series of
religious revivals have swept across the United States, with
important effects on public attitudes toward the
Middle East. One consequence has been that even as the
mainline, liberal Protestant churches have become

more critical of Israel, they have lost political and social
influence. Another consequence has been a significant
increase in prophetic Zionism, with evangelical and
fundamentalist American Christians more interested now in
biblical prophecy and Israel's role in the lead-up to the
apocalypse than ever before.
Many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians had shown
relatively little interest in Israel immediately after its
war of independence. Biblical prophecy, as they understood it,
clearly predicted that the Jews would rebuild the
Temple on its original site, and so with the holy sites of
Jerusalem in Arab hands, the countdown to the end of
time appeared to have slowed. Meanwhile, the secular and
quasi-socialist Israel of the 1950$ was less
attractive to conservative Christians than to liberal ones. With
their eyes fixed on the communist menace during
the peak years of the Cold War, evangelical and fundamentalist
Christians were less actively engaged in U.S.
policy in the Middle East than they had been in the nineteenth
century.
The Six-Day War changed that; it was a catalyst both for the
evangelical revival movement and for the renewal
of prophetic Zionism. The speed and decision of the victory of
Israel looked miraculous to many Americans, and
Israel's conquest of the Old City meant that the Temple site was
now in Jewish hands. The sense that the end
of time was approaching was a powerful impetus for the
American religious revivals that began during this
period. Since then, a series of best-selling books, fiction and
nonfiction alike, have catered to the interest of
millions of Americans in the possibility that the end-time as
prophesied in the Old and New Testaments is now
unfolding in the Middle East.
Since the end of the Cold War, an additional force has further

strengthened the links between the state of Israel
and many conservative American Christians. As the religious
revival gave new power and energy to evangelical
and fundamentalist churches, their attention turned increasingly
outward. Past such revivals led to waves of
intense missionary interest and activity; the current revival is
no different. And as American Christians have
taken a greater interest in the well-being of Christians around
the world, they have encountered Christianity's
most important rival worldwide, Islam, and have begun to learn
that the conditions facing Christians in a number
of Muslim-majority countries are not good.
Interest in the persecution of Christians around the world is a
longterm feature of Christianity, and not only in the
United States. The same church leaders involved in efforts to
protect Jews in Europe and the Ottoman Empire
were often engaged in campaigns to protect Christians in China,
Korea, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire,
among other places. The rise of communism as the twentieth
century's most brutal enemy of religion ultimately
led American Christians to build organizations aimed at
supporting believers behind the Iron Curtain. Since
1989, the persecution of Christians by communists has
diminished (although not disappeared), and so
increasingly the center of concern has been the Muslim world,
where many Christians and people of other faiths
or of no faith suffer legal and social discrimination-and where,
at times, Christians are beaten and murdered for
what they believe. Laws in many Islamic countries, moreover,
forbid proselytizing and conversion-issues of vital
concern for evangelical Christians, who generally believe that
those who die without accepting Christ will suffer
in hell and that spreading the Christian faith is one of their
central moral duties. Mainstream media generally do
not make the foreign persecution of Christians a major focus of
their news coverage, but that does not prevent

this issue from shaping the way many Americans look at Islam
and, by extension, at the conflict between Israel
and some of its neighbors.
U.S. opinion on the Middle East is not monolithic, nor is it
frozen in time. Since 1967, it has undergone
significant shifts, with some groups becoming more favorable
toward Israel and others less so. Considerably
fewer African Americans stand with the Likud Party today than
stood with the Jewish army in World War II. More
changes may come. A Palestinian and Arab leadership more
sensitive to the values and political priorities of the
American political culture could develop new and more
effective tactics designed to weaken, rather than
strengthen, American support for the Jewish state. An end to
terrorist attacks, for example, coupled with well-
organized and disciplined nonviolent civil resistance, might
alter Jacksonian perceptions of the Palestinian
struggle. It is entirely possible that over time, evangelical and
fundamentalist Americans will retrace Jimmy
Carter's steps from a youthful Zionism to what he would call a
more balanced position now. But if Israel should
face any serious crisis, it seems more likely that opinion will
swing the other way. Many of the Americans who
today call for a more evenhanded policy toward the Palestinians
do so because they believe that Israel is
fundamentally secure. Should that assessment change, public
opinion polls might well show even higher levels
of U.S. support for Israel.
One thing, at least, seems clear. In the future, as in the past,
U.S. policy toward the Middle East will, for better
or worse, continue to be shaped primarily by the will of the
American majority, not the machinations of any
minority, however wealthy or engaged in the political process

some of its members may be.
Sidebar
Widespread gentile support for Israel is one of the most potent
political forces in U.S. foreign policy.
Sidebar
Americans found the idea that they were God's new Israel so
attractive partly because it helped justify their
displacement of the Native Americans.
Sidebar
Some of the same actions that have hurt Israel's image in most
of the world have increased its support among
Jacksonians.
AuthorAffiliation
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Henry A. Kissinger Senior
Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on
Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of God and
Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the
Modern World.
Subject: Zionism; International relations-US; Foreign policy;
Territorial issues;
Location: United States--US Israel
Classification: 9178: Middle East; 9190: United States; 1210:
Politics & political behavior
Publication title: Foreign Affairs
Volume: 87
Issue: 4
Pages: 28-46
Number of pages: 19
Publication year: 2008
Publication date: Jul/Aug 2008
Publisher: Council on Foreign Relations NY
Place of publication: New York
Country of publication: United Kingdom
Publication subject: Political Science--International Relations
ISSN: 00157120
CODEN: FRNAA3

Source type: Scholarly Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: Commentary
Document feature: Illustrations
ProQuest document ID: 214287781
Document URL:
8
Copyright: Copyright Council on Foreign Relations Jul/Aug
2008
Last updated: 2015-08-15
Database: ProQuest Central
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http://search.proquest.com/info/termsAndConditionsThe New
Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish
State
Southern Political Science Association
The Media, the War in Vietnam, and Political Support: A
Critique of the Thesis of an
Oppositional Media

Author(s): Daniel C. Hallin
Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp.
2-24
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the
Southern Political Science
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The Media, the War in Vietnam,
and Political Support:
A Critique of the Thesis
of an Oppositional Media
Daniel C. Hallin
University of California-San Diego
The issue of the relation of the media to political authority has
been approached by political
scientists mainly in terms of the effects of news content on
individual attitudes toward govern-
ment. This article addresses the institutional side of the
question. It offers a critique, based
on a case study of television coverage of Vietnam, of the thesis
that the media shifted during
the 1960s and 1970s toward an oppositional relation to political
authority. It concludes that
while there was a substantial increase in critical news content
during the Vietnam War,
changes in the professional norms and practices of journalism,
including the norms of "objec-
tive journalism" and journalists' relation to official sources,
were much less dramatic. A
model for explaining changes in the level of critical coverage is

offered, emphasizing media
response to the degree of consensus or dissensus among
political elites.
Since the late 1960s the thesis has been put forward repeatedly
in
academic and public discourse that the American news media
have been
transformed from a relatively passive and conservative
institution into an
institution of opposition to political authority. This
transformation, ac-
cordingly, is in large part responsible for the well-documented
decline of
public confidence in political institutions (Miller, 1974; Lipset
and
Schneider, 1983) and, more generally, for a weakening of
political
authority. "The most notable new source of national power in
1970, as
compared to 1950, was the national media," writes Huntington
(1975,
pp. 98-99). "In the 1960's the network organizations, as one
analyst put
it, became 'a highly creditable, never-tiring political opposition,
a
* I would like to thank Robert Entman, Gary Jacobson, David
Laitin, Robert Meadow,
Samuel Popkin, Michael Schudson, and "Reviewer #1" for
especially useful comments on
early drafts of this article, Neal Beck for advice on statistics,
and Christy Drale for assistance
with the data analysis.

THESIS OF AN OPPOSITIONAL MEDIA, 3
maverick third party which never need face the sobering
experience of
governing.' "1
THE STATE OF THE EVIDENCE
The most important empirically backed statement of this thesis
is
Michael Robinson's "Public Affairs Television and the Growth
of Political
Malaise" (1976). Robinson presented data to show that people
who relied
primarily on television for information about public affairs (like
most pro-
ponents of the oppositional media thesis, Robinson considers
television a
particularly important source of delegitimizing news coverage)
tended to
be more cynical about political institutions and more doubting
of their
own political capacity than those who utilized other media.
These dif-
ferences, according to Robinson, could not be explained by the
low educa-
tional level of those who depended on television; it was reduced
but not
eliminated by a control for education. The explanation,
therefore, had
to lie in the content of television news: "events are frequently
conveyed by
television news through an inferential structure that often
injects a
negativistic, contentious or anti-institutional bias. These biases

. . .
evoke images of American politics and social life which are
inordinately
sinister and despairing" (p. 430).
Robinson's study, however, has a critical flaw. It is based on the
association between political attitudes (efficacy and trust in
government)
and self-reports of media habits (reliance on television as
opposed to other
media), and it contains no measure of what according to
Robinson's
theory is the real independent variable: the content of television
news.2
A stronger test of the link between critical news coverage and
declining
support for political authority is Miller, Erbring, and
Goldenberg's
"Type-Set Politics: Impact of Newspapers on Public
Confidence" (1979).
In 1974 the CPS National Election Study included a content
analysis of
the front-page articles appearing in newspapers collected from
the areas
surveyed. This made it possible for the authors to assess
directly the
association between news content and the political attitudes of
those ex-
I Huntington is quoting from Robinson (1975). Other statements
of this perspective in-
clude Clarke (1974), Ladd and Hadley (1975), and Rothman
(1979).
2 There are other problems with Robinson's study as well, some

discussed in Miller et al.
(1976, 1979). Robinson used reliance on television as opposed
to other media as a surrogate
measure of exposure to television content. But in 1974, when a
direct measure of television
exposure was available in the CPS Election Study, it was not
associated with lower levels of
political trust or efficacy. Robinson's article also contains an
experimental study of the im-
pact of the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon on
subjects' political attitudes. The
Selling of the Pentagon, however, cannot be taken as
representative of television content in
general; and in any case Robinson's data show only slight
effects.
4 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 46, 1984
posed to it. The association proved substantial. News content
varied
considerably from paper to paper, and those whose newspapers
contained
more criticism of political authorities and institutions tended to
score
lower in indices measuring trust in government and, to a lesser
degree,
political efficacy. This finding persevered in the face of
numerous con-
trols. The authors concluded that there was a "significant
relationship
between negatively critical media content and evaluations of
govern-
ment"(p. 78).

Here, however, we run up against the basic limitations of the
media ef-
fects paradigm, with its focus on the link between news content
and in-
dividual attitudes. Establishing that critical news content does
indeed
affect popular attitudes toward government only takes us one
step toward
resolving the larger issue of the role of the media in the
legitimation or
delegitimation of political authority, and therefore whether they
can be
seen, in Huntington's terms, as institutions of political
opposition. Two
crucial questions remain unanswered.
The first is the question of aggregate news content, which
becomes
essential as soon as we attempt to move from statements about
the link
between content and individual attitudes to statements about the
impact
of the media on public opinion at the aggregate level. Given
that critical
news coverage leads to critical attitudes-and favorable content
to
favorable attitudes; i.e., that Miller, Goldenberg, and Erbring
could
have stated their conclusion in the opposite way: "There exists a
signifi-
cant relationship between positive media content and
evaluations of
government"-we need to know how much of news content,
overall, is
favorable and how much unfavorable to political authority.

Miller, Erbring, and Goldenberg do, in fact, provide interesting
evidence on aggregate news content. The papers in their sample
con-
tained more criticism of political authority than praise, but more
neutral
content than either of these: 31 percent of the stories contained
criticism,
6 percent praise, and 63 percent were neutral. Their data also
showed
that most criticism was directed at individuals rather than at
institutions
and that most came from other political authorities rather than
from jour-
nalists -both very significant findings, as we shall see below.
But theirs
was not primarily a study of news content, and Miller,
Goldenberg, and
Erbring are limited in the conclusions they can draw about the
political
messages to which the American public is generally exposed.
Most im-
portant, that analysis was confined to a relatively brief and
unusual
period of time, the denouement of the Watergate affair in the
middle of
1974. It thus contains no information about changes in news
content
over time, which is clearly important for assessing claims about
the role of
the media in a secular decline of public confidence.
The second question concerns the process by which news
content is pro-

THESIS OF AN OPPOSITIONAL MEDIA 5
duced - the functioning of the media as institutions, the
constraints under
which they operate, their relations with other political
institutions, and so
on. Does a high level of negative news content, for example,
reflect an
ideology of adversary journalism? Or does it simply reflect
policy failures
and conflicts between elites, faithfully recorded by an
essentially
apolitical news media? Certainly in the two cases our
assessment of the
media's role in the overall process of opinion formation would
be very dif-
ferent.
METHODOLOGY
This study addresses the relatively neglected questions of shifts
in news
content over time and the functioning of the media as political
institu-
tions.3 On the basis of a content analysis of television coverage
of the war
in Vietnam, it offers a critique of the thesis that the American
news media
shifted toward an oppositional stance during the Vietnam
period, and a
reinterpretation of their changing relation to political authority.
Vietnam and television are both obvious choices for a case
study of this
sort. Vietnam was the most extensively covered and the most
controver-

sial news story of the period from 1960-64 through 1976, during
which
the bulk of the decline of public confidence in American
political institu-
tions took place. The argument that the media were in large part
the
cause of that decline is essentially a historical one, and in that
sense this
study is less subject to the problems of generalizability that
often limit the
value of case studies. The argument made by Robinson,
Huntington,
and other proponents of the oppositional media thesis is not that
the
media have always played a delegitimizing role (though
Robinson,
perhaps, can be taken to imply that television is by its nature
destructive
of political support); it is that they began to play this role
sometime dur-
ing the middle or late 1960s. And for such a hypothesis Vietnam
is
clearly a critical case. It is, moreover, television which these
researchers
have generally singled out as the most important source of
delegitimizing
news coverage.
The data which follow are based on a stratified random sample
of 779
television broadcasts from the period beginning 20 August 1965
and
ending with the cease-fire on 27 January 1973. The analysis
begins in
August 1965, because archives of television news are not
available before

that date (the Vanderbilt Television News Archive was
established in
3 Two studies which address the content question (though not
over time) and which offer
critiques of the thesis of media opposition to authority are Pride
and Richards (1974, 1975).
There are a host of other studies, not necessarily in political
science nor directly addressed to
the oppositional media thesis which bear on these questions and
will be cited as this analysis
progresses.
August of 1968). All material after that date is taken from
Vanderbilt.
Interestingly, it is possible to extend this analysis back to 1965
only
because the Defense Department, alarmed by the now famous
report by
CBS correspondent Morley Safer which showed the Marines
burning
peasant huts with cigarette lighters, began filming news
coverage rele-
vant to military activities in August of that year. This material
is now in
the National Archives. It is unfortunately not as complete as the
Vander-
bilt collection is, at least for weekday news. It omits an
unknown
amount of coverage less directly related to the military,
including some
coverage of domestic debate, the actions of civilian

policymakers, and the
diplomatic and political sides of the war. When there is reason
to believe
these omissions might bias figures presented here, this will be
noted.4
The argument will proceed as follows. On the surface, the
pattern of
change in television content seems consistent with the thesis of
an increas-
ingly oppositional news media. The data suggest a dramatic
shift from
one-sidedly favorable coverage of U.S. policy in the early years
-before
the 1968 Tet offensive - to substantially more critical coverage
after Tet.
This change, moreover, cannot be dismissed as a mere reflection
of the ac-
tual course of events. In some cases the increase in negative
content
clearly has no relation to changes actually taking place in
Vietnam. So
one must conclude that the media were indeed applying
different jour-
nalistic standards in the latter part of the war.
When we probe more deeply, however, the thesis of an
oppositional
media begins to fall apart. The evidence does not suggest any
dramatic
shift in the basic ideology and newsgathering routines of
American jour-
nalism. The routines of objective journalism - routines which
are incom-
patible with an actively oppositional conception of the
journalists'

role - seem to have persisted more or less unchanged throughout
the Viet-
nam period. The media continued, in particular, to rely heavily
on of-
ficial information and to avoid passing explicit judgment on
official policy
and statements. Data will also be presented which suggest that
the
media were not inclined to favor opponents of administration
policy, and
it will be argued that critical coverage in the latter part of the
war did not
extend to the political system or to basic consensus beliefs.
4Eight, ten, or twelve dates were selected randomly from each
month during this period,
and for each date one network broadcast was then selected
randomly. The National Ar-
chives material was sampled more heavily (ten dates per month)
because, in part due to the
limitations of the Pentagon's archiving, certain types of stories
occur in it relatively rarely.
The 1968 campaign period was also sampled heavily to permit
separate analysis. All data
presented below are weighted to correct for these sampling
differences. The three networks
did not differ greatly in their coverage of the Vietnam War, and
they are combined in the
analysis which follows. More detailed information on the
content analysis is given in Hallin,
1980.

The concluding section presents a model for explaining changes
in the
level of critical coverage, emphasizing the response of an
objective media
to the degree of consensus or dissensus that prevails
particularly among
political elites.
NEWS CONTENT: THE GROWTH OF CRITICAL COVERAGE
The following four tables illustrate the shift in Vietnam
coverage from
a balance quite favorable to administration policy prior to the
Tet offen-
sive to a considerably less favorable balance after Tet.5 Table 1
gives a
summary of journalists' editorial and interpretive comments on
the news.
It includes all statements by journalists which offered explicit
opinions on
the war (commentaries included), drew explicit conclusions
about con-
troversial issues (e.g., a conclusion that one side or the other
was
winning), or used strong evaluative language (words like
"butchery" or
"massacre") without attribution. I shall return to this table on a
number
of occasions. Presently, it is enough to observe that the figures
show a
shift from a heavily favorable balance (by a ratio of 4-1, though
the Ns for
this period are small) before Tet, to an unfavorable balance of
more than
two to one.

Tables 2 and 3 chart the development of two important themes
in news
coverage which were lightly covered early in the war but
reflected un-
favorably on administration policy after 1968. These tables, in
contrast
to table 1, take into account not only comments made directly
by jour-
nalists, but also comments attributed to others and the subject
of the
stories themselves. Table 2, for instance, gives a count of
positive and
negative references concerning the status of democracy in South
Vietnam.
A reporter's observation that the South Vietnamese regime was
unpopular
would appear in this table as a negative reference, as would a
report on
antigovernment demonstrations. A report on administration
statements
lauding South Vietnamese democracy would appear as a
positive
5A word about statistical significance. Many cells in the tables
which follow have small
Ns, and for that reason the data should be interpreted
cautiously, particularly given the
limitations of the National Archive sample. Nevertheless, most
of the comparisons cited in
the text are statistically significant. Take as an example the first
column of table 1. The 4-1
favorable ratio in journalists' editorial comments on the
administration during the pre-Tet
period is significant at a level of better than .03 (if the null
hypothesis is a balanced 50-50
ratio); for the 2-1 unfavorable ratio in the post-Tet period, p <

.001, and for the difference
over time (eliminating the Tet period), p < .001 (x df = 12.83).
Ns for the Tet period are
clearly too small for statistical inference; data for this period
are presented separately for
illustrative purposes, and because that period is too distinctive
to be lumped with either of the
others. Ns for the pre-Tet period, incidently, are so much
smaller than those for the post-Tet
for three reasons: (1) the pre-Tet period is shorter; (2) there
were fewer news stories, in part
because the war was not as important a domestic issue; and (3)
the National Archives collec-
tion does not include every story.
TABLE 1
DIEcTION OF TELEVISION JOURNALISTS' EDITORIAL
COMMENTS
ON MAJOR ACTORS OF THE VIETNAM WAR
(PERCENTAGES DOWN)
FAVORABILITY TO ACTION OR POLICY OF:
ADMINIS- SOUTH DovE NORTH
TRATION, VIETNAM CRITICS VIETNAM,
PERIOD SUPPORTERS GOVT. OF WAR NLF
Pre-Tet

Favorable 11 2 0 0
Comment or 78.6% 50.0 0.0 0.0
Interpretation
Unfavorable 3 2 2 20
21.4 50.0 100.0 100.0
Tet
Favorable 0 0 0 2
0.0 0.0 0.0 40.0
Unfavorable 6 3 3 3
100.0 100.0 100.0 60.0
Post-Tet
Favorable 23 17 7 10
28.8 29.8 31.8 25.6
Unfavorable 57 40 15 29
71.3 70.2 68.2 74.4
Note: Pre-Tet period is 20 Aug. 1965-30 Jan. 1968 (about
thirty-six months); Tet, 31
Jan.-31 March 1968 (three months); post-Tet, 1 April 1968-26
Jan. 1973 (about fifty-one
months).
TABLE 2
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REFERENCES
TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH VIETNAM

POSITIVE NEGATIVE
REFERENCES REFERENCES
Prior to Tet Offensive 4.5 6.0
Tet Offensive 0.0 0.5
After Tet Offensive 3.5 37.0
Note: Figures are raw frequencies. For dates and relative
lengths of periods see note to
table 1.
reference. When a relevant statement or event is the major
subject of a
story, it is scored as one reference; when it is mentioned but is
not the
major subject, it is scored as half a reference. The table shows
that
negative references to South Vietnamese democracy increased
by an order
of magnitude after 1968. Table 3 shows a more modest but still
substan-
tial increase in negative references to the morale of U.S. troops.
These
figures reflect primarily an increase in stories about drug use,
attacks on
officers, protests by soldiers, and refusals to follow orders.
TABLE 3

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REFERENCES
TO MORALE OF U.S. TROOPS
POSITIVE NEGATIVE
REFERENCES REFERENCES
Prior to Tet Offensive 4.0 0.0
Tet Offensive 0.0 1.0
After Tet Offensive 2.5 14.5
Note: Figures are raw frequencies. For dates and relative
lengths of periods see note to
table 1.
Table 4, finally, shows how often representatives of different
points of
view on the war appeared on television. Briefly summarized, the
table
suggests that spokesmen for administration policy were heavily
predomi-
nant during the early period, while after Tet there was relative
parity be-
tween the administration and its critics.6
Similar patterns emerge for many dimensions of news content.
Before
Tet, for example, of those military operations reported on
television in
which some conclusion was offered as to who had won or lost,
62 percent
were reported as victories for the U. S. and its allies, 28 percent

as defeats,
2 percent as stalemates. After Tet the figures were 44 percent
victories,
32 percent defeats, and 24 percent stalemates. Before Tet
positive
assessments of the overall military situation in Vietnam
outnumbered
negative assessments by ten to one in television coverage; it
must have
been difficult for the average viewer even to conceive of the
possibility of
a U.S. defeat. After Tet positive and negative assessments were
roughly
balanced.
It could of course be argued that the increase in negative news
had
nothing to do with any change in the media, but simply
reflected the evi-
dent failure of U.S. policy and the growth of domestic
opposition. This is
the mirror theory of news - a theory cherished by news people
themselves. And there is a good deal of truth to it. The data
summa-
6 Figures for both administration representatives and domestic
opponents are probably
biased downward for the Tet and pre-Tet periods by the
limitations of the National Archives
data. See Hallin, 1980, p. 50.
TABLE 4

PEOPLE SPEAKING OR QUOTED BY REPORTERS
IN TELEVISION COVERAGE OF VIETNAM
PRIOR TO AFrER
TET TET TET
OFFENSIVE OFFENSIVE OFFENSIVE TOTAL
Administration 59 4 250 310
Representatives, 26.3% 13.8 28.4 27.5
Supporters'
South Vietnamese, 8 0 33 41
Laotian, Cambodian 3.6 0.0 3.8 3.6
Govt. Officials
Critics of 10 7 230 247
Administration 4.5 27.6 26.1 21.9
Policyb
North Vietnamese, 4 1 35 41
NLF, Officials 1.8 3.4 4.0 3.6
American Officers 110 11 152 273
and GIs in the 49.1 41.4 17.3 24.2
Fieldc
Others 34 4 179 216
15.2 13.8 20.3 19.1
Total 224 26 880 1128
100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Includes domestic but not foreign supporters of administration
policy.

Includes both "doves" and "hawks," though most are "doves."
Includes only domestic
critics of administration policy.
c Also includes lower-level civilian officials, e.g., pacification
advisors.
Note: Figures-including frequencies-may not add to totals
because of rounding. Fre-
quencies are rounded because of weighting (see note 4 in the
text).
rized in table 3, for instance, which show an increase in the
coverage of
morale problems among U.S. troops, more or less parallel the
actual
figures for fragging incidents (attacks on officers) and
insubordination
convictions.7 Table 4 similarly reflects the spread of public and
congres-
sional opposition to the war.
But this explanation cannot be carried too far. Consider table 2,
which shows a massive increase in negative coverage of the
South Viet-
7 Reported fragging incidents rose from 126 in 1969, the first
year data were kept, to 333 in
1971; insubordination convictions from 82 in 1968 to 152 in
1970 (Lewey, 1978, pp. 156-67).
namese political system. Did the South Vietnamese regime

suffer a
dramatic loss of public support between, say, 1966 and 1970?
Not at all;
indeed, 1966 was a year of intense political strife in South
Vietnam, more
intense than anything that occurred after 1968. In this case it
was clearly
the selection of news - rather than South Vietnamese politics -
which was
changing.
OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM
On the surface then, Vietnam seems to confirm the thesis of a
shift in
American journalism toward an oppositional stance: news
content
became substantially more critical as the war went on, and the
pattern of
change cannot be explained away as a simple reflection of the
course of
events. But as soon as one begins to probe beneath the surface
of news
content, to explore the production of news as well as the
ideology and
organization of American journalism, the thesis of an
oppositional media
begins to unravel.
It is true that during the Vietnam period journalists became
more in-
clined to report information critical of official policy. Any
history of
journalism in this period and any journalist's memoir will
confirm this. In
1961 the New York Times, showing the typical caution with

which the
media approached any story related to national security in the
early six-
ties, suppressed on its own initiative information on the
impending Bay of
Pigs invasion which was public knowledge in Miami and
Guatemala; in
1971 the Times was willing to defy threats of criminal
prosecution to
publish the Pentagon Papers (cf. Salisbury, 1980). But there
were certain
basic elements of the structure and ideology of American
journalism
which persisted more or less unchanged through the Vietnam
period, and
which make it very hard to sustain the thesis of an actively
oppositional
news media.
Most important here is the continuing importance of the
professional
ideology of objective journalism. What is most striking about
the
modern American news media, if one compares them with the
media of
other historical periods or other countries, is their commitment
to a model
of journalism which requires disengagement from active
political involve-
ment and assigns to the journalist the relatively passive role of
trans-
mitting information to the public. Studies of the socialization
and pro-
fessional ideology of the modern American journalist have
consistently
confirmed the centrality of the ideal of a politically neutral

press (e.g.,
Cohen, 1963; Tuchman, 1972; Gans, 1979), as have analyses of
news con-
tent. Miller, Goldenberg, and Erbring found that even at the
height of
the Watergate affair most news stories were neutral toward
political
authority. Studies of campaign coverage have generally found
rough but
consistent balance in coverage of the major candidates (e.g.,
Graber,
1980; Hofstetter, 1976).
Did the rise of critical news coverage during the later years of
Vietnam
represent a break with the tradition of objective journalism, a
return
perhaps to something resembling the partisanship of the
nineteenth cen-
tury press?8 That is not what the data on television coverage
suggest.
It will be useful here to reconsider table 1, which shows the
shifting
balance of journalists' editorial comments on the war. The table
seems to
indicate that journalists held strong and very imbalanced
opinions about
the war, though very different opinions in different periods.
And the
table may well reflect accurately journalists' personal attitudes

toward
U.S. policy in Vietnam. But those attitudes were expressed
infrequently:
table 1 represents a small proportion of news content. When
commen-
taries are excluded, only 8 percent of all Vietnam stories
contained ex-
plicit comments by journalists reflecting favorably or
unfavorably on
major actors: most coverage fit the traditional "who, what,
when, where"
model of objective journalism. This percentage changed over
the course
of the war, but only to a limited extent: from 5.9 percent in the
pre-Tet
period it shot up to 20 percent during the offensive, and then
settled back
to an average of 9.8 percent for the post-Tet period.
It is worth adding here a few words about the rise of what has
come to
be called investigative journalism. In the wake of Watergate
there has
been revival of interest in the muckraking tradition, which can
be seen as
the major rival to the principle of objectivity in the value
system of
American journalism. How extensive this revival has actually
been in the
post-Watergate period is beyond the scope of this study. But it
is impor-
tant to observe that investigative journalism played a very small
role in
Vietnam coverage. None of the major news stories which can be
con-
sidered especially damaging to the administration resulted

primarily from
initiatives taken by the media.9 The Tet offensive simply
erupted under
the noses of the journalists. The Pentagon Papers were leaked
unsolicited
by a disgruntled official. My Lai was not discovered by the
major media
until the story was broken by an independent reporter. The
secret bomb-
ing of Cambodia did not become a major story until it was
investigated by
8 On the decline of partisan journalism in the United States see
Schudson, 1978.
Newspapers in the nineteenth century were often vitriolic in
their denunciation of political
authorities whom they opposed. Toqueville (1969, p. 182)
begins his discussion of the
American press by quoting the first newspaper encountered,
which denounced Andrew
Jackson as a "heartless despot."
9 An important exception was Harrison Salisbury's trip to North
Vietnam for the New
York Times in 1966. Walter Cronkite's call for negotiations in a
CBS special following the
Tet offensive, though not an instance of investigative
journalism, was also an important ex-
ception in that it represented a departure from the normal
practice of avoiding political
stands.

Congress. The revival of the muckraking tradition was
essentially a post-
Watergate phenomenon, which means that it occurred after most
of the
decline of public confidence in American political institutions
had already
occurred.
To stress the professional ideology of objective journalism is
not to
imply that the news is literally objective or neutral. News
content is of
course shaped by many factors which can create a political slant
irrespec-
tive of journalists' commitment to objectivity. That commitment
does,
however, have important consequences, one of which is that it
generally
inhibits the journalist from taking sides openly and actively on
controver-
sial political issues. The persistence of this ideology through
the Vietnam
period (when it was challenged, for a time, by the idea of
advocacy jour-
nalism) is eloquent testimony to its centrality in the value
system of
American journalism.
THE USE OF OFFICIAL SOURCES
The damage to the thesis of an oppositional media becomes
increasingly
severe as we probe more deeply into the newsgathering
procedures of
American journalism. Once it is accepted that the task of
journalism is to

provide the public not with opinion but with information, the
crucial
journalistic choice becomes the choice of sources. And the
American
journalist in the twentieth century has solved this problem by
relying
primarily on official sources. Studies of American journalism in
the
1950s and early 1960s, when the consolidation of objective
journalism was
first being noted by observers of the press, were essentially
unanimous in
identifying as the most prominent characteristic of the
newsgathering
procedures the intimate connection between the media and
political
authority. The whole organization of journalism, centering
around a
beat system which located journalists at the points where
official informa-
tion was released, was geared toward covering the affairs and
perspec-
tives of government. In practice, therefore, the function of
objective
journalism was generally to transmit to the public the
government's
perspective on the world. There was, as Bernard Cohen
observed in a
1963 study of foreign affairs coverage, an irony in this:
The more "neutral" the press is - that is, the more it tries
faithfully to transmit a record of
"what transpires" (including therein the policy statements of
officials) and the more con-
strained it feels about making judgements on the meaning or
importance of "what

transpires" - the more easily it lends itself to the uses of others,
and particularly to public of-
ficials whom reporters have come to regard as prime sources of
news merely by virtue of their
positions in government. (Cohen, 1963, p. 28)
How much had newsgathering procedures changed by the latter
part of
the Vietnam War? Again, surface appearances are deceptive.
Table 4,
which gives a count of the kinds of people who appeared or
whose
statements were cited in television coverage, shows a
substantial increase
in the number of opponents of administration policy
represented. This
would seem to indicate a diversification of sources. But when
these data
are broken down it becomes clear that they mask an important
element of
continuity.
The evidence does not suggest that the reporters in Saigon and
Washington who covered the basic news of the Vietnam War did
their
work much differently in 1973 than in 1963. What happened
instead is
that a new issue arose alongside the basic Vietnam story: the
story of
domestic dissent. As domestic conflict increased, television
reported the

rising tide of dissent, and opponents of the war became
increasingly visi-
ble in the news. The news from the field and from executive
branch
beats in Washington - from which the hard news of the war was
pri-
marily covered -continued to reflect a heavy predominance of
official
sources. This can be seen in table 5, which presents the same
data as
table 4, but excludes from the analysis all purely domestic
stories,
primarily stories about the conflict on the home front.'0 These
findings
are supported by other studies of news coverage during the
latter period
of the Vietnam War. Leon Sigal, for instance, found in a study
of
Washington Post and New York Times coverage in 1969 that 72
percent of
the sources used in stories with Washington datelines were U.S.
govern-
ment officials, as were 54 percent of the sources used in Saigon
stories
(Sigal, 1973).
One way to summarize the contrast between tables 4 and 5 is to
say that
administration representatives and their opponents appeared in
different
kinds of television stories: dissenters appeared in stories
primarily about
dissent itself, while official spokespeople appeared in stories
which
reported the actual news of the war. This may seem at first
glance an ob-

vious and trivial finding. But it is more significant than it
appears.
Stories on domestic dissent, first, often did not give opponents
of ad-
ministration policy any real opportunity to present alternative
interpreta-
tions of the news. A large proportion of these stories focused on
the issue
of domestic dissent itself: the prospects for legislative
opposition, the tac-
tics of the demonstrations and how many people were attending
them,
10 Figures for administration representatives may be biased
downward for the pre-Tet and
Tet periods due to the limitations of the National Archives
sample. Officers and GIs in the
field were clearly another important part of television coverage.
About 45 percent of this
category were officers, upon whom journalists relied to explain
particular events and also, as
with pilots commenting on the air war, to explain the rationale
behind certain aspects of
policy. Officers were thus another important official source.
Enlisted men were generally
presented describing their own feelings or experiences, although
occasionally they were asked
their opinions about the war or about domestic dissent.
TABLE 5
PEOPLE SPEAKING OR QUOTED BY REPORTERS

IN TELEVISION COVERAGE OF VIETNAM, DOMESTIC
STORIES EXCLUDED
PRIOR TO AFrER
TETr TETr TETr
OFFENSIVE OFFENSIVE OFFENSIVE TOTAL
Administration 48 3 145 195
Representatives, 26.2% 18.8 32.4
Supporters"
South Vietnamese, 8 0 33 41
Laotian, Cambodian 4.4 0.0 7.4
Govt. Officials
Critics of 1 0 16 17
Administration 0.5 0.0 3.6
Policyb
North Vietnamese, 4 1 34 40
NLF, Officials 2.2 6.2 7.6
American Officers 101 11 143 255
and GIs in the 55.2 68.8 32.0
Field,
Others 22 1 75 96
12.0 6.2 16.8
Total 183 16 447 644
100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Includes domestic but not foreign supporters of administration
policy.

b Includes both "doves" and "hawks," though most are "doves."
Includes only domestic
critics of administration.
c Also includes lower-level civilian officials, e.g., pacification
advisors.
Note: Figures - including frequencies - may not add to totals
because of rounding. Fre-
quencies are rounded because of weighting (see note 4 in the
text).
whether violence would occur, and how order would be restored
(cf.
Gitlin, 1980; Paletz and Dunn, 1969-70). Opponents of
administration
policy would appear in these stories to explain and justify
themselves, not
to discuss the war in Vietnam. Only about 40 percent of all
stories on
domestic debate contained any substantive discussion of the
war, and
often this was extremely brief. Even to the extent that domestic
critics
did appear in stories that contained discussion of policy issues
(this hap-
pened most often in reports on congressional hearings), critics
and of-
ficials appeared in essentially different roles. Critics were
shown giving
their opinions about a political issue. Officials were shown
defending

their policies against criticism, but they also appeared in the
authoritative
and nonpolitical role of providing the basic information about
events in
Vietnam and explaining those events to the public.
This reliance on officials for authoritative information has
several im-
plications. First, it suggests that administration spokesmen were
likely to
have been taken more seriously by the news audience than their
critics.
One of the basic findings of the long tradition of media effects
research is
that a communicator presented in a nonpolitical, information-
providing
role has higher credibility than one presented as an exponent of
partisan
opinions (Hovland, Janis, and Kelly, 1953). Second, it means
that when
the administration decided to exploit fully its ability to initiate
news, it
was often very successful, even in the skeptical context of the
post-Tet
period. For example, the key element in the Nixon
administration's ef-
forts to sell its Vietnam policy to the American public was
Vietnamiza-
tion - the replacing of American with Vietnamese troops. The
data in
table 6 suggest that the initiation of Vietnamization not only put
the
South Vietnamese armed forces on the news agenda, but also
resulted in a
continued preponderance of favorable references to their

performance,
despite the generally more critical tone of coverage in the latter
part of the
war. These favorable references were largely the result of what
Boorstin
(1962) has called "pseudo-events": statements by U.S. officials,
ceremonies turning over U.S. bases to the South Vietnamese,
etc. which,
because they represented official policy, were considered
mandatory news
stories.
TABLE 6
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REFEENCES TO
PERFORMANCE
OF SOUTH VIETNAMESE ARMED FORCES, BEFORE AND
AFTER VIETNAMIZATION
POSITIVE NEGATIVE
REFENCES REFEENCES
Prior to Vietnamization 11.5 3.0
After Vietnamization 40.5 14.5
Note: For purposes of this table the beginning of
Vietnamization is dated 7 June 1969, the
day before the Midway conference at which Nixon announced
his first withdrawal of U.S.
troops. Figures are raw frequencies. The two periods are about
equal in length, forty-six
and forty-four months, respectively.
Finally, the practice of turning to officials as the primary source
of

authoritative information is an important symbolic recognition
of their
legitimacy: it is an affirmation both of their claim to superior
knowledge
("trust us -we have access to information you don't have") and
of their
right to be considered representative of the community as a
whole and
thus above politics. The right to be considered the primary
source of
authoritative information about world events should probably be
con-
sidered a central component of the legitimacy of modern
political institu-
tions, comparable in a secular age to the right of the Church in
medieval
Europe to interpret the scriptures (cf. Paletz et al., 1971).
Two further sets of figures illustrate the persistence of
journalistic
respect for official sources. It was not simply the use of official
sources
which, according to analysts like Cohen, gave officials so much
influence
over news content. It was the fact that the norms of objective
journalism
required the journalist to pass on official information without
comment
on its accuracy or relevance. Did these restraints also persist
through the
Vietnam period? The fact that only 8 percent of the stories

sampled con-
tained explicit commentary by journalists suggests that they did.
And
when that figure is disaggregated, it becomes clear that it very
much
overstates the willingness of journalists to comment on official
policy and
statements. The data in table 7 indicate that commentary was
substan-
tially less common in coverage of the U.S. executive than in
coverage of
other political actors relative to the amount of time devoted to
each.
Data on the frequency of news reports questioning the accuracy
of of-
ficial statements tell a similar tale. Fourteen and one-half such
references turned up in the sample for the post-Tet period (with
the half
references, again, scored when the theme was not the primary
subject of
TABLE 7
FREQUENCY OF EDITORIAL COMMENTS IN TELEVISION
COVERAGE
OF MAJOR ACTORS OF THE VIETNAM WAR
NUMBER OF COMMENTS PER
EDITORIAL COMMENTS HOUR OF COVERAGE
Coverage of U.S. 99 5.07
Policy, Activity

Coverage of Opposition 27 6.52
to Admin. Policy
Coverage of South 63 15.92
Vietnamese Government
Coverage of North 65 37.55
Vietnam, NLF
Note: Amount of time devoted to activities of various actors
must be estimated, since many
television stories deal with several actors at a time. Estimates
used here are based on Hallin,
1980, appendix II.
the story, and all references to inaccuracy or dishonesty of
official
statements counted, whether made by journalists or attributed to
others).
To put this figure in perspective, it can be estimated that a
faithful viewer
who watched the evening news every night would have seen an
average of
about one such reference a month - considerably more, no
doubt, than a
viewer would have seen before Tet (only three references
occurred in the
pre-Tet sample), but not a figure that suggests journalists were
going out
of their way to question official information, or even to air such
questions
raised by others. Of those 14.5 references only 3.5 involved

charges of
deliberate efforts to mislead the public.
COVERAGE OF THE OPPOSITION
If the media had become an oppositional institution during the
latter
years of the Vietnam war, it is reasonable to assume that they
would have
given relatively favorable coverage to other opponents of
administration
policy. But here again the data do not square with the thesis of
an op-
positional media.
The media did give increasing coverage to the opposition as the
war
went on. But this coverage was not particularly favorable. As
shown in
table 1, journalists' interpretive comments were unfavorable to
domestic
opponents of the war by roughly two to one in the latter part of
the war,
approximately the same ratio that prevailed in coverage of
administration
policy. A count of all statements about the antiwar movement
presented
on television, including both journalists' and attributed
comments, yields
a similar two to one negative ratio for the post-Tet period -
forty-eight
unfavorable comments, twenty-five favorable. Whatever
tendency there
may have been for journalists to become more skeptical of
administration
policy, it does not seem to have been translated into

sympathetic coverage
of the opposition.
COVERAGE OF "THE SYSTEM"
It is important to note, finally, that the increase in critical
coverage
during the latter part of the Vietnam War did not involve
coverage
critical of the political system in any meaningful sense of that
term. Just
as critical coverage during the immediate post-Watergate
period, as
measured by Miller, Goldenberg, and Erbring, was directed at
particular
incumbents rather than at the system or its major institutions,"
critical
coverage in Vietnam reporting was directed at the
administration and its
11 McLeod et al., 1977, found that those who followed
Watergate in newspapers were
more likely than those who did not to blame Nixon rather than
the system. See also Paletz
and Entman, 1981.
policies. For the most part, the political system was simply not
an issue
in Vietnam coverage, which, like most news coverage, focused
on what
journalists call hard news - news of specific events, policies,
and per-

sonalities. When the political system -or important consensus
beliefs,
like the belief that American foreign policy is motivated by a
concern with
democracy-did become an issue in the news, coverage was
generally of a
legitimating character. Journalists reporting on the antiwar
movement,
for example, often distinguished between those who, in the
phrase of the
day, "worked within the system" and those who did not, and
made clear
their preference for the former. Journalists also made a special
point on
certain particularly delegitimizing occasions (the Tet offensive
and the
evacuation of Saigon in 1975) to stress that the motives of U.S.
policy had
been good.'2 This finding parallels the evidence from public
opinion
surveys: despite their loss of confidence in the conduct of
government dur-
ing the sixties and seventies, the American public continued to
express a
high level of faith in the system (Citrin, 1974; Sniderman et al.,
1975).
CONCLUSION: OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL
SUPPORT
The case of Vietnam, in short, does not support the thesis that
the
American news media shifted to an oppositional role during the
1960s and
1970s. There was, to be sure, a very substantial turn toward
more

critical coverage of U.S. policy in Vietnam. But it is hard to
argue that
journalists began to take on an actively oppositional role; the
professional
ideology of objective journalism and the intimate institutional
connection
between the media and government which characterized
American jour-
nalism before the turbulence of the sixties and seventies both
persisted
more or less unchanged.
That conclusion made, however, we are left with an important
prob-
lem of how to account for the substantial change in news
content over the
course of the Vietnam War. The puzzle is the more acute as we
have
already rejected the most obvious alternative explanation: the
mirror
theory that changing news content reflected a changing course
of events.
As paradoxical as it may seem, the explanation for the media's
changing
level of support for political authority during the Vietnam War
lies in
their constant commitment to the ideology and the routines of
objective
journalism. Tom Wicker of the New York Times, referring to
the early
1960s, once observed that "objective journalism almost always
favors
Establishment positions and exists not least to avoid offense to
them"
(1978, pp. 36-37). He was, as we shall see, essentially correct.

But from
12 Thus Cronkite's farnous commentary following the Tet
offensive (27 February 1968) in-
cluded both a call for deescalation of the war and an affirmation
that its intent-to "defend
democracy" -had been honorable, whatever the outcome.
the point of view of a particular administration and its policies,
objective
journalism can cut both ways politically. A form of journalism
which
aims to provide the public with a neutral record of events and
which, at
the same time, relies primarily on government officials to
describe and ex-
plain those events obviously has the potential to wind up as a
mirror not of
reality, but of the version of reality government officials would
like to
present to the public. At the same time, objective journalism
involves a
commitment to the political independence of the journalist and
to the
representation of conflicting points of view. The journalist's
relation to
political authority is thus not settled in any definite way by the
profes-
sional norms and practices of objective journalism. It is on the
contrary
something of a paradox for the journalist, and it is resolved in
different

ways depending on political circumstances.
Consider the early period of the Vietnam War, when coverage
was by
most measures heavily favorable to administration policy. How
could
coverage so imbalanced be reconciled with a conception of
journalism
which requires neutrality and balance on controversial issues?
The one-
sided character of news coverage in this period is not hard to
understand
if one simply keeps in mind that Vietnam was not yet a
particularly con-
troversial issue within the mainstream of American politics.
There were
debates in Congress over certain tactical questions - whether the
military
should have greater freedom in selecting bombing targets,
whether
enough was being done on the political and diplomatic fronts,
and so on.
But on the broad outlines of U.S. policy there was still
relatively little
disagreement among the major actors of American politics. To
reflect
the official viewpoint did not seem in this context to violate the
norms of
objective journalism: it did not seem to involve taking sides on
a con-
troversial issue.
This consensus, of course, did not last forever. Its erosion
became
serious politically, by most accounts, about the middle of 1967,
and was

accelerated by the Tet offensive (Schandler, 1977). Given this
change in
the parameters of political debate it is perfectly reasonable to
expect that
the media, without abandoning objective journalism for some
more ac-
tivist and anti-establishment conception of their role, would
produce a far
higher quantity of critical news coverage. Here, then, is an
explanation
for the change in Vietnam coverage that seems to fit nicely both
with the
data on news content and with our knowledge of the
institutional rela-
tions between the media and political authority: the change
seems best
explained as a reflection of and a response to a collapse of
consen-
sus - especially of elite consensus - on foreign policy. One
journalist ex-
pressed it this way:
As protest moved from the left groups, the anti-war groups, into
the pulpits, into the
Senate - with Fulbright, Gruening and others - as it became a
majority opinion, it naturally
picked up coverage. And then naturally the tone of the coverage
changed. Because we're an
Establishment institution, and whenever your natural
constituency changes, then naturally
you will too. (Max Frankel, quoted in Gitlin, 1980, p. 205)

Strategic Plan Part 2 SWOT Analysis paperConduct an internal .docx

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