The Quiet American on Media Coverage of Government

I recently read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and this old novel has a beautifully written passage about media coverage of government operations. As a classic work of fiction about the Vietnam War, published in 1955, just after the battle of Điện Biên Phủ, it’s set during the latter days of the French colony, before heavy American involvement. Though Vietnam was an incredibly divisive policy issue in America a decade later, it wasn’t at the time this novel became a best seller, and the Southeast Asian conflict is no longer divisive, given the fair amount of consensus in our collective historical memory of that war.

That helps make this caricature of an observation uncontroversial:

The Economic Attaché said hurriedly, ‘How’s the war, Bill?’

‘Great victory north-west of Hanoi. French recaptured two villages they never told us they’d lost. Heavy Vietminh casualties. Haven’t been able to count their own yet but will let us know in a week or two.’

The Economic Attaché said, ‘There’s a rumour that the Vietminh have broken into Phat Diem, burned the Cathedral, chased out the Bishop.’

‘They wouldn’t tell us about that in Hanoi. That’s not a victory.’

‘One of our medical teams couldn’t get beyond Nam Dinh,’ Pyle said.

‘You didn’t get down as far as that, Bill?’ the Economic Attache asked.

‘Who do you think I am? I’m a correspondent with an Ordre de Circulation which shows when I’m out of bounds. I fly to Hanoi airport. They give us a car to the Press Camp. They lay on a flight over the two towns they’ve recaptured and show us the tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that height. Then we have a Press Conference and a colonel explains to us what we’ve been looking at.

The favorable press coverage of the early years of the Vietnam War is not unique to that particular moment. The cozy relationship between government bureaucracies and their chattering class counterparts in well-established news organizations remains ubiquitous. What was the suddenly discovered hole in the ODOT budget in the past legislative session but a state transportation policy Điện Biên Phủ? Before that fiscal policy reality forced itself into public view, where was the scepticism in the Oregonian coverage of the last big state transportation bill? When Governor Brown told them she’s fixing bridges, filling potholes, and reducing congestion, they believed her and echoed that happy talk to Oregon voters. Yet reality has a tenacious tendency to eventually catch up with the carefully curated conventional wisdom.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.

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