When the facts are in, it may well turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct. But even if that turns out to be the case, it w… - Edward S. Herman

The question of relative atrocities may be illustrated by this fact: a close examination by the author of newspaper files for 1966 alone disclosed somewhere between 600 and 1,000 reported South Vietnamese civilian deaths attributed to “errors” in the use of “allied” firepower. During the same year the number of NLF killings, including paramilitary personnel, according to official Saigon estimates, was 1,000. That is, our acknowledged accidental civilian killings were of the same order of magnitude as official claims of NLF killings. It should be obvious that U.S. bombings and killings in “unfriendly” villages were many times greater than killings by mistake.

In retrospect, [...] it is quite possible that nothing we could have done would have prevented our being labelled conspiracy theorists, rigid determinists, and deniers of the possibility that people can resist (even as we called for resistance). The propaganda model still seems a very workable framework for analyzing and understanding the mainstream media—perhaps even more so than in 1988. As noted earlier in reference to Central America, it often surpasses expectations of media subservience to government propaganda. And we are still waiting for our critics to provide a better model.

An earlier version of this volume was originally contracted for and produced as a monograph by Warner Modular Communications, Inc., a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate. The publishing house had run a relatively independent operation up to the time of the controversy over this document. The editors and publisher were enthusiastic about the monograph and committed themselves to put it out quickly and to promote it with vigor. But just prior to publication, in the fall of 1973, officials of the parent company got wind of it, looked at it, and were horrified by its “unpatriotic” contents. Mr. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, for example, was deeply pained by our statement on page 7 of the original that the “leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the single most important instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.” So pained were Sarnoff and his business associates, in fact, that they were quite prepared to violate a contractual obligation in order to assure that no such material would see the light of day. […] they decided to close down the publishing house […]. The history of the suppressed monograph is an authentic instance of private censorship of ideas per se. The uniqueness of the episode lies only in the manner of suppression. Usually, private intervention in the book market is anticipatory, with regrets that the manuscript is unacceptable, perhaps “unmarketable.” Sometimes the latter contention is only an excuse for unwillingness to market, although it may sometimes reflect an accurate assessment of how the media and journals will receive books that are strongly critical of the established order.