Nick Turse offers (Nation, 11/13/08) the latest contravention of the standard myth of strongly anti-war corporate media during the Vietnam era:
“Pacification’s Deadly Price,” a joint investigation into the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops during Operation Speedy Express, was the crowning achievement of [Newsweek Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley’s and stringer Alex Shimkin’s] working partnership. But the potentially explosive story was held for months and finally published only in gutted form [in the issue of] June 19, 1972. Further undermining their investigation’s impact, Newsweek allowed a former top U.S. official in Vietnam, who had secretly learned of the existence of “hundreds” of examples of the very kinds of killings Buckley and Shimkin sought to expose, to critique the story in its own pages, without allowing for a full rebuttal.
Crediting such “editing that excised… an entire sidebar of Vietnamese witnesses,” Turse relates how, “in the end, military officials were never pressed on the findings of the investigation and were able to ride out the minor flurry of interest it generated.”
Read of a modern corollary in this FAIR Action Alert: “60 Minutes: Shelving a Story to Boost Bush?: CBS Puts Niger Exposé on Hold as Boss Endorses Republicans” (9/28/04)
The corpress is nothing if not tradition-bound … everything old is new again.
And people die … just as they have, and just as they will.
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