It's from this spring edition of Critical Sociology, which is available for subscribers at http://tinyurl.com/ytqc8
The Valley of Death expose´ in June 1998 was a highly promoted kickoff edition of the program NewsStand: CNN and Time. The report was based on the memories of a number of vets who claimed to have participated in the raid and to have killed American defectors. It also highlighted the affirmation of their accounts by Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970 and John Singlaub, a former high ranking third chief for covert operations in Vietnam. Within 24 hours the spectacular revelations were being subjected to doubt and or were outright discredited. CNN conducted an in-house investigation that concluded the report was deeply flawed; fundamental weaknesses were cited in the way interviews were both conducted and interpreted to fit the producers’ understanding of what happened during the Tailwind raid, several important ‘witnesses’ it turned out were not actually present during the Tailwind operation, and key sources for the story backed away from the story as reported by CNN. The fallout brought a virtual end to the journalistic careers of the main source of the reportage, the program producers April Oliver and Jack Smith. Defenders of Valley of Death’s producers (especially of April Oliver who played the leading role in the interviews and script writing) cried foul, claiming that CNN caved into the loud and relentless roar that came from Veterans groups and important figures in the military and foreign policy establishment such as Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger. On the left, Oliver’s defenders were many and just as ardent, including Amy Goodman, producer of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now, media critic Alex Cockburn, the media watchdog FAIR among others in their rally against CNN’s ‘caving in’ and backing away from a story that incriminated the US military. They argue that this was the real reason for the almost immediate rebukes Oliver received from CNN and others, not the sources or how the sources were interpreted. Lembcke, in a review of the transcripts and Oliver’s rebuttals of the in-house rebuttal, shows that there was in fact considerable evidence that Oliver did engage in manipulation of her sources’ words and relied on persons whose claims were inflated to say the least. However, this is not the focus of Lembcke’s argument in Tailwind Tales. In fact, he spends only one small chapter critiquing the journalistic methods of Oliver. Instead, he focuses on what both mainstream critics and many of Oliver’s leftist supporters have overlooked, namely the backgrounds and political motivations of those who spun the Tailwind Tales in the first place. And it is this issue that makes up the bulk of Lembcke’s book and that makes it a very important contribution to the sociological imagination. In a nutshell, Lembcke demonstrates that instead of scrutinizing whether or not the sources for the CNN Tailwind story were misused, a far more important question, especially for opponents of US foreign policy on the left, should be, why Oliver and CNN chose to believe the claims of far-right paramilitary operatives who had a history of spinning all kinds of stories of paranoiac conspiracy and intrigue to promote a far right wing militarist-nativist political agenda. For that matter, why would supporters of Oliver want to ignore such an orientation and its contribution to the subtext of the CNN storyline? Lembcke then proceeds to root out, much as he did in Spitting Image, the contribution of impressions and national memory of the Vietnam War in popular culture sources that contributed to many of the claims that appeared in the Tailwind tale...