i of analysis reporting on democratic kampuchea...a textual analysis of u. s. reporting on...

5

Elizabeth (Elli) Lester

The "I" of the Storm:A Textual Analysis of U. S. ReportingOn Democratic Kampuchea

Elizabeth Becker told me that [she’d never felt more alive than when shewas right on the edge of death}. She was reporting for the Washington&a and a colleague of hers was killed by the Khmer Rouge in the housethey lived in. She felt remorse... but also an enormous sense of beingalive. She told me about it as we sat on the steps of her Washington housedrinking white wine, eating pati with white bread. And I was listening butI wasn’t looking at her.... I was watching some black ants crawl acrossthe brick walk to eat this small piece ofpaté that had fallen there. And intomy frame of vision came Elizabeth’s hand holding a white linen napkin.She just reached down and wiped out the entire trail of ants with onesweep of her hand. I appeared to be listening to her but inside I was weep-ing, oh Inv God all those ants. all those innocent ants dead for no reasonaLaU.-Spalding Gray (1985, 54), Swimming to Cambodia

This article is a textual analysis of the writings of Elizabeth Becker, cur-rent senior foreign desk editor for National Public Radio and formerreporter for the Washington Post. Becker covered the war in Indochina,specifically Cambodia, in the early 1970’s and later was one of twoAmerican journalists allowed to tour Democratic Kampuchea (DK) andinterview one of its leaders, Pol Pot, among other highly placed KhmerRouge officials. She is the author of a book on that country, When the WarWas Over (1986), as well as the author of numerous articles and book re-views on the subject. She is cited as an authority by others. I have chosento focus on her post-1975 writing on Cambodia, thus choosing the DK pe-riod and People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) period, rather than theperiod of direct U. S. military involvement.

The purpose of this article is to test the propaganda model of the mediaproposed by Herman and Chomsky (1988) in their book Manufacturing

at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on May 13, 2015jci.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://jci.sagepub.com/

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Consent. However, rather than adopt their methodology, I propose to un-dertake a textual analysis following the methods of Stuart Hall (1975;1978) and others of the Birmingham School in which one subject or themeis selected and then analyzed in a close reading of the text itself with littlereference to issues of production, author intention or audience readings.However, in spite of this difference of methodology which I will discussbelow, I believe that my findings support the thesis that Herman andChomsky propose. I also wish to highlight the issue of &dquo;experts,&dquo; as articu-lated by Said (1981) in Covering Islam, by focusing on what constitutes anexpert source, and what the relationships are between journalist as reporterand journalist as expert source.

WHY CAMBODIA?

It is not an accident that I have chosen the subject matter of Cambodia.First of all, Herman and Chomsky (1979; 1988) themselves have writtenextensively on the subject of U. S. coverage of Cambodia and have done aformidable job of showing how and why the reporting of Cambodian mat-ters is ideologically driven and, furthermore, how many inaccuracies offact occurred in that reporting.

At present, Cambodia has become a something of a cause celebre,noted as the spot where the worst case of &dquo;autogenocide&dquo;’ had taken placein a century known for genocidal tendencies of all sorts, and where shortly(as of this writing, elections were held in May 24,1993) U. N.-sponsoredelections will take place. Frequently compared with the holocaust ex-ecuted by National Socialism (by a plethora of authors who care to notesuch things), the devastation wrought in Cambodia (especially during the1975-79 Khmer Rouge period) has been written of extensively. In fact, ithas come to serve as a kind of emblem for mid-twentieth century catastro-

phe : war, genocide, famine, superpower intervention in an innocent ThirdWorld country occurring at a time when &dquo;an overabundance of technologi-cal wealth&dquo; exists in the &dquo;Imperium-the golden, distant city,&dquo; theopposite of Cambodia (Fawcett 1986).

Brian Fawcett (1986) describes the primary promise of the post-mod-ern world as &dquo;that [in which] the mass media... would decentralize theImperium, scattering it and its manna across the planet electronically ...[spreading] undreamed-of economic and cultural wealth on an equitable,democratic basis&dquo; (52). Thus, perhaps not unexpectedly, Cambodia, if itcame into the popular American consciousness at all, entered our con-sciousness through mass media, first perhaps with the media’s uncoveringof the &dquo;secret bombing&dquo; in 1969 and the Kent State killings viewed ontelevision and on the front of magazine covers of the same year, again per-haps in 1984 with the film The Killing Fields, which won three Academyawards and purported to document the events that took place during 1975-79. Although relatively little academic attention is devoted to Cambodian



7

studies, a plethora of popular material appeared during the Khmer Rougeera and after, including a series of articles in Reader’s Digest then ren-dered into a gruesome, extremely unpleasant, ill-documented but widelydiscussed book (Barron and Paul 1977)2 .

Brian Fawcett, in his book of essays and exegesis Cambodia: A Bookfor People Who Find Television Too Slow, points out that the twentiethcentury is one in which &dquo;the dominant political and social facts...are con-tradictory.&dquo; He describes unprecedented levels of both social control andofficial bureaucracy, universal phenomena which seem to have an &dquo;unex-pected twin: genocide.&dquo; He then claims that &dquo;Cambodia is not an isolatedhistorical aberration... [and] Cambodia is as near as [our] television set.&dquo;However, the tragedies in Cambodia have been written about as if theywere aberrations both in terms of global political-economy and in terms ofCambodia’s own history. Cambodia is commonly referred to as the&dquo;gentle land,&dquo; the phrase popularized by Barron and Paul upon whichwere writ &dquo;killing fields&dquo; primarily by the Cambodian people known asthe Khmer Rouge. The context of U. S. involvement (i.e., the deaths anddevastation wrought for close to a decade before DK) and other issues ofglobal political-economy are usually either downplayed or excused(Chomsky and Herman 1979).

Reporting on the activities of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia moregenerally were and continue to be of importance to U. S. citizens since wehave had and continue to play a role in the affairs of both the country andthe region. Michael Haas (1991) argues in his book Genocide by Proxythat Cambodia has been treated as a &dquo;mere pawn on a superpower chess-board&dquo; (xi). Theoretically, it should be important to U. S. citizens to have aclear understanding of the political-economic situation in that country, ofits history and culture, of its importance in the region and in the worldsince in our democratic environment citizens advise their governors on

issues of foreign policy as on others. Fawcett (1986) sums up the impor-tance of Cambodia:

We already know that forms of political authority that attempt to hide the con-nection between economic and political power, such as our own, are prone togenocide. What has never been determined... is that point at which genocidewill start. Certainly in mass societies ... authority [is] necessary.... But thereare structural reasons to distrust any and all authority, or at least to subject it to anongoing process of interrogation.... The two means that human societies havefound to resist the growth of authority are education and constitutional national-ism. The Global Village attacks both of these. (199)

What Fawcett is highlighting is that, in what is certainly a world system,what occurs in one particular place is inextricably and importantly inter-twined with the daily lives of others in other places. Cambodia does notonly exist on the television or film screen; it is in our own back yards.



8

METHODOLOGY

I have suggested elsewhere (1992) that the propaganda model of Hermanand Chomsky (1988; 1989) provides a useful model for understanding theperformance of the mass media in a democratic society. As I pointed out,the model contradicts both professional and public common sense as towhat our media do; specifically we assume (and/or hope) that the mediafulfill the democratic postulate by serving as a watchdog for citizens andhelping us know enough about the world to direct our governors. Hermanand Chomsky (1988) state that the &dquo;democratic postulate is that the mediaare independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, andthat they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to beperceived&dquo; (xi). They argue, however, that the media act not in our inter-ests but in the interests of the powerful among whom are the mediainstitutions themselves: &dquo;[the media act to create] a systematic and highlypolitical dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to im-portant domestic power interests&dquo; (1988, 35~-a statement whichgracefully includes both public and private arenas.

I have suggested elsewhere (1992) that an alternative way to test andsupport the propaganda model would be a radical focus on the text whichwould take into account two of Herman and Chomsky’s filters, sourcingand anti-Communism. I argued that a close textual analysis would focuson discursive strategies within the text that would help reveal how ideo-logical dimensions structure reporting of news and in fact narrow therange of discursive and democratic possibilities. One benefit of this ap-proach is that by remaining focused on the text itself one does not needoutside knowledge of the subject matter to discern the ideological contentof the text.

In this analysis I have elected to describe the discourse of a representa-tive reporter, Elizabeth Becker. Thus the text becomes the oeuvre ofBecker over a period of time, with close attention to her journalistic re-ports for the Washington Post, her book reviews, magazine articles andher own book-length treatment. Becker merits such attention for severalreasons. First, in common with numerous other U. S. reporters, she cov-ered Cambodia since the early seventies, a criterion which laterconstituted her as a regional specialist. Second, she was one of three West-erners (two Americans plus a British citizen) invited to visit and report onCambodia during the DK period. To quote Becker, she &dquo;became the onlyWesterner to witness Cambodia in all of its recent states of misery.... Icovered the war for the Washington Post.... I was one of two Westernjournalists allowed to visit... the Khmer Rouge.... I returned to theCambodia of today&dquo; (1986, 15). Third, she is consulted by others in themedia as a Cambodia expert and her book is cited in other works as au-thoritative. Finally, her reporting appeared in an elite newspaper of record,the Post, and she forthrightly states her own progressive journalistic prin-



9

ciples in When the War Was Over. Becker serves as an &dquo;exemplar&dquo; jour-nalist and her work as an exemplar of U. S. journalistic practice.

The method used in this study works to dissolve distinctions betweenjournalistic forms (i.e., I consider the &dquo;text&dquo; as Becker’s newspaper ac-counts, book reviews, magazine articles and her book-length treatment),recognizing that the text operates aggressively to assert relations betweensignifiers and signifieds, to construct a reality, and by doing so, to fashionhistory even as it attempts to record it. The making natural of the con-structed version is the principle work of journalism; the principle work oftextual analysis is to reveal, not how a version of the news compares withwhat really happened (although knowledge of what happened is impor-tant), but the constructed nature of reporting and, further, to indicate whatsome of the dimensions of that construction are.

I first read all of the articles on the DK period that appeared in theWashington Post during 1975-1979; these included news reports, editori-als, personal columns, letters to the editor, book reviews and advertising. Ithen selected the exemplar reporter and expanded my reading to includeher work published after the establishment of the PRK in 1979. This repre-sents my &dquo;long preliminary soak&dquo; as described by Hall (1975) in PaperVoices. After this preliminary work, I focused only on Becker’s work,considering any published form as part of my text. I analyzed her report-ing, book reviews, magazine articles and book, searching for thedimensions of her representations of reality. I took into account such is-sues as placement, accompanying material (e.g., photos, maps), relativeweight of headline, amount of space and surrounding materials (e.g., ads).Specifically, my question was &dquo;How does Becker’s discourse work topresent a version of Cambodian reality to her preferred reader, an elite U.S. national audience?&dquo;

Four discursive strategies appear in the text. These include: (1) anti-Communism (one of Herman and Chomsky’s five filters); (2)individualism and an Us/Other construction of individuals; (3) anthropo-morphism ; and (4) an objectification of the subject of study, apresumption that these &dquo;Others,&dquo; i.e., Cambodians, exist in a differenttime/space continuum than &dquo;Us,&dquo; i.e., the preferred reader of the text, theelite U. S. and Western audience. The following analysis will thereforeexamine the text in detail, showing how these strategies shape an under-standing of the situation in Cambodia in some highly specific ways, waysthat are predicted by the propaganda model, and that, in spite of the glossof journalistic independence, fully support the goals of the powerful whoinclude &dquo;the government, the leaders of the corporate community, [and]the top media owners and executives&dquo; (Herman & Chomsky 1988, xii).Also, as mentioned above, I will show how it is possible to discern thesestrategies and the purposes they serve primarily without reference to extra-textual material. To reiterate, it is unnecessary to know the &dquo;facts&dquo; aboutCambodia to understand how the text is ideologically constructed. This is



10

not to say that there is no truth of the matter, nor that it is impossible for adedicated U. S. citizen to discern those facts; Herman and Chomsky’s swork (1979) helps us do just that. For analytic purposes I discuss eachstrategy separately even though there is some overlap among them. In theconcluding section I will discuss how they operate together to shape andstructure the ideological text.

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Becker’s book When the War Was Over is the culmination of her (at thattime) over 15-year involvement with journalism and research on Cambo-dian issues. It also repeats, sometimes verbatim, her 1978 reporting thatappeared in a &dquo;Cambodia series&dquo; in the Washington Post and provides anextended journalistic treatment of her Cambodia reporting. Her purpose isto &dquo;tell the story of [the] revolution... an attempt to tell the full story ofthe Khmer Rouge&dquo; (14). Becker tells the reader that a large part of thebook is based on primary research and that she was &dquo;able to answer thecrucial questions about the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia&dquo; (15).

The outline of the book is as follows: twelve chapters chronicle the nar-rative of Cambodian experience primarily from the early 1970s throughthe Vietnamese &dquo;invasion&dquo; of 1979 with two early chapters providing abrief historical review of pre-Khmer Rouge twentieth-century Cambodia.The first chapter introduces Becker’s strategy of highlighting individualexperience as evidence of revolutionary change. It also introduces three ofher discursive strategies: anti-Communism, anthropomorphism and objec-tification of the subject.

Following her preface, but before the textual material, are eight pagesof photographs and captions. (Some of these also appeared in the Post.)Because some of the photographs precede the chapters, rather than beingpresented along with them as accompanying evidence, it is unclear as towhat purpose many of them serve for the text itself. The first page displaysthree snap shots, two of young boys, one of whom is identified as a&dquo;solider who fought against the Cambodian communists&dquo; and a young girldancer. Presumably, the girl is juxtaposed with the boys as an exemplarrepresentative of Cambodian &dquo;culture,&dquo; while the two boys convey howeven young children are exploited into the war effort. The second andthird pages show five photos, two of which are captioned &dquo;scenes wethought were eternal.&dquo; The text reads:

Young monks in the countryside, their sun-bleached saffron robes as distinctiveagainst the landscape as poppies in a meadow... a glimpse of a woman tendinga ricefield, her natural grace belying the back-breaking labor.... Under theKhmer Rouge all monks were disrobed and many murdered. The proud peasantsbecame indentured servants, their openness vanished along with all that was oncerural Cambodian culture. (no page number)



11

This is an example of the objectification of the presumed subject, wherereal people are abstracted from their environment and resituated into time-lessness that serves to distance and depersonify. As Fabian (1983) hasdiscussed, this method of objectification fits with the imperialist impera-tive of presuming an ahistorical seamlessness to the Other. Beckerclaimed in her preface that she considered the Cambodian tragedy in largepart due to &dquo;their own traditions and history&dquo; (16). Yet this caption denieshistory, with the self-serving concept of peasant dignity in the face of ines-capable hard labor. The following two pages show scenes from Becker’s strip to visit the Khmer Rouge in 1978. Although the pictures themselvesshow men and women employed in both factories and farm work, her cap-tions direct the reader to think of &dquo;child labor,&dquo; &dquo;potemkin villages&dquo; and&dquo;dark, drab clothing&dquo; (no page number). Also pictured are what appear tobe young male soldiers posing for her camera. The caption directs thereader to think that &dquo;[t]hese soldiers could have taken part in [the] purge&dquo;(no page number). These pictures then serve a textual purpose, to preparethe reader for information on devastation; yet, as examples of primary evi-dence, they are transparent, apparently meaningless but, in fact, full ofplural meanings without the interpretive text, while the &dquo;could have&dquo;stands for an immediate condemnation. The following pictures showBecker with her Western companions and some key Khmer Rouge lead-ers ; this is in addition to a sketch of a woman purged by the party and aphoto of skulls and bones that serves as a &dquo;primitive memorial to the vic-tims of the revolution&dquo; (no page number). The last two photos showsmiling women and children and a street poster, both dating from after theVietnamese &dquo;occupation.&dquo; The women and children are identified as &dquo;sur-vivors ... reminders of the spirit of the country&dquo; (no page number). (Thesepictures also appeared in Becker’s 1983 Indochina series in the Post.)

Becker clearly believes (again, in spite of her claim to focus on indi-viduals) that this country has a &dquo;spirit&dquo; although it is unclear as to whatthat &dquo;spirit&dquo; is: where it is located, who has it and who does not, or how itis actualized. As these photos and captions suggest, and as the followingmaterial makes clearer, Becker herself has made a &dquo;career out of the East&dquo;(Said 1978 citing Disraeli, no page number), constructing an object thatthen is endowed with meaning for her preferred readers, and ultimatelyendowing herself with meaning.3

(1 ) Anti-CommunismI now turn to the discursive material itself, highlighting sections from sev-eral key chapters. The first, &dquo;The Ultimate Revolution,&dquo; is Chapter 5(175-216). It begins, as all the chapters do, with opening quotes which setthe scene for material to follow. In this case, three quotations purport todescribe the radical revolutionary goals of three different revolutionarysites: Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and China. However, the parallel con-struction is not upheld. Pol Pot is cited from his &dquo;victory address&dquo; of July



12

1975, but the other two quotations are from academic experts viewing andcritiquing (distancing) the other two revolutions rather than from leadingrevolutionaries. The implication, therefore, is that Pol Pot is by associationlinked with what &dquo;we&dquo; have come to accept in critical terms, i.e. Stalinismand Maoism. No serious attention is given to communism, save to assumeit is &dquo;bad.&dquo; This guilt by association (i.e. Pol Pot=Stalin=Mao) sets &dquo;us&dquo; upto read the next several chapters in light of what we already believe aboutStalinism and Maoism, closing off our ability to question whether Pol Potis a communist and whether the Cambodian revolution is a communistone. These quotations are followed by a definitive statement: &dquo;Theypieced together a communist program for change....&dquo; (176). Becker con-tinues with a description of some Khmer Rouge policies: &dquo;[A]11 at onceprivate property was abolished. Everyone was evacuated from the city ...[everything produced... was subject to seizure....&dquo; (176). The aims ofthese policies were &dquo;self-sufficiency&dquo; and &dquo;self-protection,&dquo; and the coun-try would be &dquo;turned into a prison&dquo; (177). Becker says that the&dquo;communist tradition suited these aims,&dquo; but she does not explain, nordoes she present evidence for, how that &dquo;tradition&dquo; fulfills such aims.

Becker claims that communist traditions suited the aims of turning acountry into a prison, or stimulating xenophobia or extreme nationalismdemonstrates naivetd about communism generally and results in extremeanti-communist bias as predicted by the propaganda model. This kind ofbias is not part of the normative journalism theory within which Beckerwrites, yet it is evident throughout the text. Furthermore, the confusion ofnationalism and communism demonstrates a conflation of two contradic-

tory practices in the breathless denunciation of communism.This chapter contains many examples of such rhetoric. At one point she

writes: &dquo;the Khmer Rouge withdrew voluntarily... from the twentiethcentury.... Perhaps unconsciously, the Khmer Rouge took Cambodiabackwards into the nineteenth century in order to reconstruct a communist

society and achieve industrialization within a decade&dquo; (180). This kind oftemporal distancing is further evidence of anti-communism (where com-munism is conflated with nineteenth century communalism) but it is alsopart and parcel of the long-standing Western tradition of assuming that theWest exists within a modern time frame that excludes others, those of theso-called traditional societies (Third World) who exist within timelessnessand have no history save that of Western intervention, and those in theSecond World who have halted time. Becker’s radical denial of twentieth-

century time and space for the Khmer Rouge is, of course, contradicted byher comparison within the text of that government to National Socialismand Stalinism. Taken literally, then, her words lead to a kind of hysteriawhich cannot perceive the Other except in hysteric terms.

Contradiction as a tool of the anti-communism strategy also appears inthe terms used to describe the family life of Ieng Thirith and Ieng Sary.Becker’s descriptions are intended to discredit these &dquo;leading commu-



13

nists&dquo; by suggesting both that they live a bourgeois life and that their com-munism is too ascetic. &dquo;[’I~hey had the equivalent of private suites andmaids to clean their room and cook their meals.&dquo; It is not explained how-ever what the &dquo;equivalent&dquo; of a maid, for example, might be. Later, it issaid that &dquo;[t]here was an overall restraint about the luxuries the KhmerRouge leaders allowed themselves... [t]hey were a dour, puritanicalgroup... who were rarely seen drinking alcohol, although they offered itto guests; it is said they never drank in private. Very few smoked ciga-rettes&dquo; (186). The tone of the description of Khmer Rouge leaders, ofwhich these quotes form a small sample, is critical. The absence of drink-ing and smoking, behaviors that are rarely highly regarded, somehowbecomes cause for negative observation. &dquo;Cleanliness&dquo; is called an &dquo;ob-session.&dquo; And yet there is no documentation that Khmer Rouge leaderswere somehow pathological in their cleanliness, nor is it made clear whydrinking and smoking are prerequisites for proper governmental behavior.

In fact, Becker has created vice out of virtue, and, even more, she im-plies that because the Khmer Rouge leadership had been educated inFrance they were imposing &dquo;foreign&dquo; and, therefore, inappropriate values,even twentieth-century values, on this pristine, natural, timeless culture,this &dquo;gentle land.&dquo;

In Phnom Penh they would provide proper examples of the strict life they wantedto impose on the rich Khmer culture-purity, cleanliness, order, total loyalty andobedience, and denial of emotions that might lead to abandon. (187)

This discourse is redolent of the exoticizing of Other people but with aspecial twist since the vices attributed to the Khmer Rouge-purity, clean-liness, order, loyalty and obedience-are considered virtues within ourown society. We need look no further than the pledge of allegiance to theU. S. flag (or the Boy Scout pledge or the Bible) to find examples of mostof those &dquo;vices&dquo; enumerated with admiration. Also curious is the word&dquo;abandon&dquo; with its own rich association with Oriental laxness, whatSpalding Gray (1985) notes as the Asian &dquo;sanug,&dquo; the pleasure principle.Becker says, &dquo;The ‘modern’ revolution in Cambodia was without the ...

sweaty, raucous, exuberant crowds that once had filled Phnom Penh.&dquo; And

yet, in twentieth century terms, Phnom Penh was a city swollen to manytimes its normal size by refugees from civil war at the time Becker wasresident there. In twentieth century terms, that sweaty, raucous and exu-berant crowd was also, less romantically, impoverished, alienated fromtheir land, unemployed, hungry and in constant danger of their lives.

(2) Individualism [and Us/Other]In &dquo;Cambodia’s Reign of Terror&dquo; (Chapter 6, 217-70), Becker focuses pri-marily on the individual stories of four people affected by the revolution.Only the first four pages contextualize the organization of that revolution.In those four pages, the Khmer Rouge and &dquo;the party&dquo; are referred to inter-



14

changeably and both are anthropomorphized, a discursive strategy that Iwill discuss below. However, it is the stories of the four individuals andtheir strategic importance that is the subject of this section.

Each story has a theme: destroying personal life, breaking up the fam-ily, surviving racial pogroms, and dismantling the culture of thecountryside. Each of these themes is supported through the experience ofone &dquo;hero&dquo; (or &dquo;heroine&dquo;: three of these figures are women) who exempli-fies for the reader an ideal: of romantic love, of familial ties, of ethnicidentity, of timeless peasantry. Thus, there are four short stories, narrativesconstructed very much along the lines of a brief story. Little explanationand no evidence is offered as to why these might be representative storiesfrom which the reader should generalize. Yet the clear implication is thatthese four stand for Everyman, that the sample of four is representative ofa whole. The four narratives are preceded by this statement: &dquo;Here are thestories of the victims of that search for the pure revolution.&dquo; Purity is aconcept that is both denigrated when associated with the Communist revo-lution and valorized when it is associated with traditional life. Thesestories are stories of &dquo;worthy victims,&dquo; the traditional folk (Herman andChomsky 1988).

Each story begins with a title; the first is &dquo;THE ROMANCE OF COM-RADE DETH Destroying the Personal Life&dquo; (caps in the original). It is alove story, as Becker says, the story of &dquo;star-crossed lovers,&dquo; who cometogether briefly as young people in pre-revolutionary Cambodia, are sepa-rated by civil war, and then even more briefly find each other before beingseparated forever. At one point, describing the couple in 1974, Beckerwrites:

He was now a saffron-robed monk with the shaved head and timeless quiet man-ner of the Buddhist clergy. She was a poised, Westernized Cambodian. She hadshed her shy, provincial manner, cut her waist-length hair to her shoulders andadopted the direct gaze of a working woman. (225)

Deth declared the still-beautiful Bophana to be his long lost wife.... Foolishly,Deth decided to build a life with Bophana in the chaos of the revolution....

Deth and Bophana spent the rest of their short lives breaking the most sensitiveof Khmer Rouge rules. They plotted their reunion in revealing letters....

Bophana and Deth wrote as star-crossed lovers and... they wrote as Cambodi-ans ; he may have been a ranking Khmer Rouge cadre, she a Westernized reliefworker, but when their lives became a series of unending ordeals, they reachedback to the classic epic of their culture. (226-7)

The story of Deth and Bophana is engaging and it comes to a tragicconclusion, but clearly this is constructed in very personal and highlyemotional terms to suggest that the reader generalize from this individualaccount. But, how the reader should generalize, or to what, is never madeclear. The stereotypical descriptions such as &dquo;saffron-robed monk&dquo; or &dquo;di-rect gaze of a working woman&dquo; reconstruct these individuals as Everyman



15

and also set up the diametric oppositions of Other/CJs, Eastern/Western,timeless/timed.

Elsewhere I have discussed the concept of the ratio relationship thatthese diametric oppositions create (1991). Here I wish simply to point outthat insinuating this ratio, which in fact is a relationship of power, withinthis story of individuals recreates in a subtle and pernicious way the powerrelations that remain unspoken throughout most of this book. That rela-tionship is between the author and her subject of study which is objectifiedthrough the medium and conventions of reportage, and discerned throughthis discursive strategy. The medium of a love story, especially that of thestar-crossed lovers, suggests the victims belong to a universal categorythat transcends space and time, and evokes for us an ahistorical interper-sonal devotion. (It emerges that the sketch of the woman at the beginningof the book is this same Bophana.)

The second story is titled &dquo;THE JOURNEY OF THE MAY SISTERSAND BROTI~RS-Breaking Up the Family&dquo; (237, caps in original),&dquo;Even by Asian standards, Cambodians are extremely attached to theirfamilies&dquo; (227). This gratuitous statement is representative of how &dquo;thefamily&dquo; is portrayed in this section, another tragic story of loss, althoughone with a happy ending. The happy ending is &dquo;a family house, a brickrambler in the Washington suburbs, with five bedrooms and a large backgarden...

&dquo;

(448). But the notion of a common &dquo;Asian standard&dquo; is juxta-posed by a highly personal family story and the happy ending is simplyone bourgeois version of the American dream.

The third story is titled &dquo;‘CHALK FACE’-~urviving the Racial Po-grom&dquo; (253). Immediately, and not for the first time, the specter of &dquo;NaziGermany&dquo; is raised as an analogy of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary pro-gram.

[T]he Khmer Rouge adopted a philosophy of racial superiority and purity thatresembled that of Nazi Germany, including the use of pogroms to eliminate mi-norities. And the Khmer Rouge concept of a pure Cambodian people was asmonstrous and stupid as that held by the Nazis. The Cambodian people are amixture of racial stocks.... The idea of pure Khmer blood or a pure Khmer raceis based on superstition, not science. (253)

This is a curious statement. There is an implication that racialism itself ismerely stupid; it might not be so monstrous to try to preserve racial purityif in fact there was such a thing as &dquo;pure Khmer blood,&dquo; if, for example,there had been less immigration. Further, there is the implication that thereis a science of race, one that the Khmer Rouge were simply not privy to.This and similar paragraphs serve as an introduction to the story of a Chi-nese man who &dquo;managed to survive the pogroms of the unwanted races&dquo;(254). But, again, there is a contradiction or at least an imprecision. &dquo;Chi-nese man&dquo; identifies the &dquo;character&dquo; with a nationality, not a race; theKhmer Rouge revolution was nationalistic, as noted above. In spite of herremarks, it is Becker who makes &dquo;Chinese&dquo; into a &dquo;race,&dquo; as, for example,



16

in this statement: &dquo;In the case of the Chinese, race and class were indistin-guishable in the Cambodian revolution&dquo; (255), even though it is clear fromher description up to that point that her character, Han Tao, experiencestrauma based on nationality and class as well as the fact that he was anurbanite thrust into rural conditions. Moreover, it is interesting that of allfour narratives, this one focuses least on the main character, the only malehero. The Chinese communists (nationality plus ideology) are equallyconstructed as villain: &dquo;There are numerous stories of ethnic Chinese whorisked their lives by speaking Chinese to visiting Chinese delegations fromPeking... but those who were confronted by the Chinese of Cambodiabehaved as if there was not cultural or racial loyalty&dquo; (255). Becker alsochooses to discuss the situation of the Muslim Chams in this section. Sherefers to them as &dquo;exotic people&dquo; and their culture as &dquo;rich&dquo; (261).

In every case, this kind of individualism precludes other kinds of analy-ses. In part, this is because the reporter herself ties every issue to thepersonal. But even more, the reader is also distracted by the human inter-est value from questioning other aspects.

(3) AnthropomorphismThe strategy of anthropomorphism, that is attributing human qualities toinanimate objects or corporate entities, serves the function of relocatingthe locus of power and the level of analysis and understanding. Beckeranthropomorphizes Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge and the &dquo;people&dquo; ofCambodia, who exist not as individuals but as a mass.

For example, Becker writes:

Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea, perhaps unconsciously, at-tempted to take the place of god-kings who rule Cambodia for centuries.... TheCambodian people had not erased their cultural heritage of accepting all-power-ful rulers.... (202)

[TJhe Center never felt it truly controlled the country.... Purge followed purge,but the ’enemy’ grew ever more elusive, and ever more powerful in the party’smind. (221)

These two examples contain much of what is of import in this discursivestrategy. In the first example, the Communist Party is conflated with PolPot and leads to the conundrum of the Party behaving &dquo;unconsciously&dquo;while the &dquo;people&dquo; are unable as a corporate entity to erase history.Looked at carefully, these are nonsensical statements. Yet they serve afunction: if this situation can be analyzed at the individual level, blamecan be assigned without the more complicated analysis required for under-standing political-economy. In the second example, the party (note thechange from upper case &dquo;Communist Party&dquo; to the lower case, more ge-neric &dquo;party,&dquo; existing in the original) is endowed with a mind.

&dquo;[T]he Khmer Rouge developed a preoccupation with betrayal thatcame to be as intense as their appreciation of Cambodia’s lost honor&dquo;



17

(222). This kind of writing mystifies the processes under discussion andclouds any kind of rational understanding. Questions arise such as: whythis preoccupation, why this notion of honor, who within the KhmerRouge felt these emotions, and so forth. But the text suppresses thesequestions by writing as if &dquo;we&dquo; (i.e. the preferred reader) already know theanswers; we know &dquo;who&dquo; the party, or the Khmer Rouge, or the Commu-nist Party of Kampuchea are because they belong to nature.Anthropomorphism naturalizes what are, in fact, political, economic andcultural constructions--human inventions.

The Khmer Rouge is written about in the active voice frequently, withactions attributed to it: belief (240), adoption of a philosophy (253), turn-ing fears into hatreds (255). The revolution itself has feelings: &dquo;Nothingexemplified the revolution’s disdain for the traditional rural life ... morethan the regime’s destruction of... the Buddhist way of life&dquo; (264).

Attributing feelings to entities which, in fact, have none, is a trick oftext which encourages the reader to travel seamlessly between levels ofanalysis and therefore to personalize every issue. Structural constraintsand variables and system-level attributes are thus mentioned but not con-sidered, so it becomes very difficult for the reader to abstract knowledgeexcept at the level of feelings. And human feelings, while both importantin the first instance and as a contribution to the &dquo;human interest&dquo; newsvalue of liberal journalism, are not the only level at which history or newsshould be related.

Anthropomorphism can also serve to impose temporal distance. Forexample, it is possible to observe that &dquo;the Khmer Rouge took Cambodiabackwards into the nineteenth century&dquo; (180) because the Khmer Rouge inthis sense is an evil anti-hero, personified and then endowed with abilitiesthat a real person could not possess. However, at the same time that theKhmer Rouge altered time, the revolution had &dquo;disdain for the traditionalrural life of the vast majority of Cambodians&dquo; (264), and this contradictionis enabled because there is no way to document either &dquo;taking backwards&dquo;or &dquo;disdain&dquo; of a corporate entity. Conversely, writing of Cambodia,Becker states that &dquo;the heart of Cambodian country life [and] all of its cen-turies-old traditions&dquo; were destroyed. The metaphor of the &dquo;heart&dquo; and theattribution of tradition to &dquo;Cambodian country life&dquo; rather than to real

people creates a myth rather than documenting material conditions of ex-perience.

In one of Becker’s &dquo;Indochina Stalemate&dquo; columns she writes: &dquo;The

country is sinking again&dquo; (Feb. 28, 1983). The sentence personifies thecountry as an ailing person, suggesting that treatment of symptoms, whichis in fact what the following paragraph discusses, might be effective. Shequotes an unnamed &dquo;foreign expert&dquo; as saying &dquo;we were bringing thiscountry back to life.&dquo; Yet countries do not live or die and the implicationsupporting this discursive strategy is that &dquo;we&dquo; have the power of life anddeath over the country (meaning the geographic space, the state and the



18

people who occupy the space). This is perhaps a realistic estimate of U. S.power, but clearly it is not what Becker means to convey. And yet the pre-sumption is there within the text, suggestive of the unequal positions ofpower possessed by reporter and reported on, the subject and the object.

(4) SubjectlObjectBecker &dquo;Return[s] to Phnom Penh&dquo; in the l lth chapter, it is here that thenarrative reveals its discursive strategies most plainly. Indeed it is my the-sis that we learn as much about Becker and liberal journalism as we doabout the final days of Khmer Rouge rule.

The chapter is written in the first person, as are the front page Post col-umns that appeared originally; Cambodian landscape, history, culture,economics and politics are arrayed around the omnipresent and omniscient&dquo;we&dquo; by whom is literally designated Becker, Richard Dudman (a foreigncorrespondent for a competing paper) and Malcolm Caldwell (a Scottishacademic and activist thought to be sympathetic to the Cambodian revolu-tion), but who figuratively also encompasses &dquo;we&dquo; who are readers, weWesterners, we who possess qualities that Cambodians do not, we whocan buy the Washington Post.

Becker writes that she &dquo;came of age in Cambodia&dquo; (408). She made aneffort to retrieve &dquo;the Cambodia that I had known&dquo; (410).

The more I looked for the old Cambodia, the more it eluded me.... It was mylast naive attempt to recreate the old city I had known.... [I]t was impossible toreconcile the city I had known with this new [one]. Its open charm had been fa-mous throughout the region; Phnom Penh was synonymous with hospitality,grace, and the special seduction of a Buddhist, Asian city that had refused to be-come modem or Western.... It didn’t matter if one loved the country and itsmystery, as I did, or found it hopelessly decadent and superstitious, as did manyothers. Cambodia for everyone was unforgettable. (411)

This prose represents much of how this chapter is written; it is highlypersonal, interpreting the landscape, the political-economy and the culturein terms of its meaning and impact on the &dquo;I.&dquo; Key phrases give it away:for example, a city of two million, many refugees, is described as synony-mous with criteria of hospitality and grace (human qualities) and the twocriteria, &dquo;Buddhist and Asian,&dquo; are described as &dquo;seductive,&dquo; a sexually-loaded term related to &dquo;mystery&dquo; that is frequently used by the Occidentalin describing the Oriental. Also noteworthy in the above paragraph is thetemporal as well as spatial distancing accomplished with the easy fillip&dquo;refused to become modem&dquo; and its adjacent synonym &dquo;Western.&dquo; Thesewords and phrases are the red flags of this discursive strategy.

Becker describes one of her few unaccompanied and illicit forays intothe city: &dquo;I made one more try at finding the Cambodia that I had known&dquo;(410). The implication is that as she knew it, so it was. That the city ap-pears completely different offends. Why? Certainly, as Becker assures thereader throughout the book, she is concerned about possible human rights



19

violations and about Cambodian acquaintances of whom she has losttrack. But the other offense is that she came of age here and that &dquo;here&dquo;has been thoroughly disrupted. Becker had been out of the country for atleast four years; in fact, as she also informs us, Cambodia had been closedoff from the &dquo;outside world&dquo; (406). Yet, within the first twenty-four hours,she seeks out the familiar, expecting somehow or needing it to be in placeto reconfirm her own identity. There is also frequent reference throughoutthat Becker expects to encounter Phnom Penh acquaintances from her pasteven though she is traveling for a week in a country of perhaps seven mil-lion people.

Later, these observations are made about another city, KompongCham:

There were no details to life in this new Cambodia. Before, life was lived on thestreets.... Children played games.... They gnawed on fresh pineapple stuck tosticks like a lollipop. Hawkers sold drinks from gaudy stalls, some on wheels:Coca-Cola, or evaporated milk poured over crushed ice filling half a plastic sackand tied tight with a rubber band. Any crowd or small group of Cambodians hadthe beauty of a procession; the women and men in the countryside wore sarongsand walked with the flatfooted grace of an elephant, swaying with their oftenbare feet solidly but lightly planted to the ground. (419)

The first sentence of this excerpt is highly impressionistic and also clearlyinaccurate; however, the details that are of importance to Becker, the de-tails from &dquo;before,&dquo; are then enumerated. These are the details that areimportant to an adolescent making a first trip abroad, tourist details guar-anteed to delight a Western sensibility. And half-way through this quote,Coca-Cola makes its appearance, amid all the other &dquo;natural&dquo; details: thefresh pineapple, the graceful elephants, the bare feet, and later, inunquoted material, the landscape itself is described in breathlessly beauti-ful terms. But the Coca-Cola and evaporated milk came from somewhere,though their origin is mystified and obscured by the prose. So, too, doplastic bags. This mystification of the link between the Cambodia ofBecker’s &dquo;coming of age&dquo; and the global political-economy serves a par-ticular personal and political purpose, as I shall discuss below.

The conventions of liberal journalism are revealed with ingenuousnessin this chapter. Becker details her own credentials, highlighting the impor-tance of her connection to the Washington Post for the Khmer Rouge if&dquo;they really wanted to get their view across to the American government&dquo;(409). She also mentions that she &dquo;had talked to experts at the Americangovernment’s State Department, Defense Department, and Central Intelli-gence Agency in Washington... and political and military experts of theUnited States, France, Canada, Australia, Sweden, and China&dquo; (409).Becker is herself regarded as an expert by this powerful coterie of otherexperts, but it is interesting that in describing her preparation for this tripno alternative sources of expertise are mentioned, not even one as main-stream as academia. Perhaps Becker did indeed consult other sources; but,



20

to emphasize the depth and status of her preparation, it was governmentsources that were worth textual mention.

Also interesting is the tension between liberal journalistic practice anda form of development journalism which Becker encountered in Cambo-dia. Becker reports several exchanges between herself and her guide,Iliounn Prasith. These quotes convey some of the tension:

He began with a briefing. We... carefully [wrote] down statistics he producedon the country’s economic[s].... At the end, we asked about human rights. Hesmiled. &dquo;You’ll see,&dquo; he said. &dquo;There is no problem about human rights. Youworry so much about the Lon Nol traitors and not about the 90 percent of thepeople who are better off because of the revolution.&dquo; (412)

We were given a short question period. At my turn I asked the men theirorigins....The man without the ear spoke up. Yes, he said, he was a party memberand a veteran from the Eastern Zone. The other two then spoke up, and shortlythe question period was over. Prasith laughed and said my questions were hu-morous. (421)

Obviously any serious attempt to examine human rights questions had to beginwith ... the people of the cities and those who had worked for the defeated gov-ernment and army. Prasith disagreed with my approach and said I waswrongheaded. I should examine the lives of the peasants-90 percent of thepopulation, he said-and stop worrying about the criminals from the old regime.... Prasith shook his head. (420)

I started arguing with Prasith. We had to visit cooperatives in the northwest; oth-erwise our trip would be worthless. His excuses didn’t hold up. Prasith, in turn,told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and added: &dquo;You’ll never under-stand this country.&dquo; (424)

These four selections indicate that there is a serious disagreement betweenBecker and Prasith, the official guide, as to how to report what is beingobserved. The text, apparently objectively, reports these exchanges. But,as the structure of these quotes show, Prasith’s comments or reactions are

reported as if they were somehow gauche and out of place. Never is thetension between approaches to journalism addressed as a real disagree-ment between two equals. Becker reports herself as a heroine; she standsfor progressive values in her persistent pursuit to find the truth of the revo-lution and the &dquo;Cambodia [she] had known&dquo; (410). She was alsoapparently looking for confirmation of her published &dquo;pieces about therevolution ... [including] a review in which I declared that the evidencegiven... was overwhelming and the revolution was awful&dquo; (409). Andyet, Becker, in spite of the fact that she had clearly made up her mindabout the Cambodian revolution, adopts a tone of irony toward Prasith’s sresponses within his own framework of journalistic values and a tone ofcandor about her own.

We were given a full two hours to visit the cooperative and to discuss politicaleducation sessions.... The cooperative was a showcase of the regime, and it did



21

conform to the intellectual underpinnings detailed for us by Prasith. By now itwas obvious to me that most of what we had seen on our trip was window dress-ing.... There was no dispute ... about the use of child labor. The sacrifice of atleast one generation of children was seen as necessary to reach the hallowed goalof self-sufficiency. (429)

It may, in fact, be true that what Becker was shown was &dquo;window dress-ing&dquo; or perhaps a few idiosyncratic successes of an otherwise harsh andrepressive government. But nothing that follows this excerpt, i.e., no evi-dence, supports that contention. Furthermore, the use of irony, or to bemore precise, sarcasm, supports Becker’s own admission that her mindwas made up about the Khmer Rouge revolution. The phrases &dquo;full twohours&dquo; and &dquo;hallowed goal of self-sufficiency&dquo; are but two examples ofthe approach. Further, it seems inappropriate that this non-Khmer-speak-ing foreign guest journalist should adopt a dismissive tone toward a stateofficial. Such sarcasm would be less likely used towards a U. S. official,even if the journalist’s approach were highly critical.

This kind of presumption is reiterated in the description of Becker’s smeeting with Pol Pot, the acknowledged head of state.

He was not what I expected. It took me several minutes to recover.... He wasactually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome but attractive. His featureswere delicate and alert and his smile nearly endearing....

[I]n person there was no question of his appeal. Physically, he had a strong, com-fortable appearance. His gestures and manner were polished, not crude. (430)

This sort of physical description of a head of state is odd. It is more afterthe description of a movie star or a model and again it is unlikely that aserious reporter would write such copy about a European prime minister,for example. Highlighting details of physical appearance, while undoubt-edly an overt strategy to increase narrative interest and involvement,serves to objectify Pol Pot and, at the same time, focus attention onBecker. After all, these are her own visceral responses to a man: &dquo;nothandsome but attractive,&dquo; &dquo;delicate,&dquo; &dquo;strong, comfortable,&dquo; &dquo;elegant,&dquo;&dquo;polished,&dquo; all these are very subjective interpretations which expressmuch more about the interpreter, who becomes the real subject of thestory, than about the character being interpreted, or the object under study.

I am not [not] willing to become a prophet of doom.... Cambodia remains acountry of beauty and resilience. (445)

This is one of the last sentences of the text of When the War was Over.Becker follows this with the denouements of the narratives of various indi-viduals she introduced throughout the book. In effect, we learn the endingsof the four personal stories described above. And this forces the reader toreturn to one of Becker’s first statements from her preface: &dquo;I believe that... I was able to answer the crucial questions about the Khmer Rouge andCambodia&dquo; (15). She says, &dquo;Cambodians remain an unforgettable people,



22

endowed with a culture that at its best is symbolized by the awesome yetsensitive beauty of the famous Angkor temples&dquo; (17). I submit that it is notpossible to answer crucial questions about a foreign country or its revolu-tion when one understands its people as being &dquo;endowed with a culture.&dquo;People make culture, just as people make revolution, which is a type ofculture. Becker’s conclusion, after 445 pages of text and many columninches, is that &dquo;It is impossible to gauge the sentiments of Cambodiansinside the country. I cannot believe they want the Khmer Rouge to return.Nor do I believe that they will be happy with... the Vietnamese. I wouldnot pretend to understand how they feel beyond those two obvious state-ments&dquo; (445).

DISCUSSION

The discursive strategies outlined above shape the terrain of possibilitiesfor citizens who read this text. But I want to be clear from the outset: thisis not a critique of Becker’s reporting per se nor are these strategies pecu-liar to her reporting. As established above, I am using this text as anexemplar of international reporting in elite U. S. newspapers and Beckeras an exemplar reporter on international news. I am also connecting for-eign reporting to other genres of Western representations of Others.

These strategies-and-Communism, anthropomorphism, individualismand an Us and Other construction of individuals, and the concomitant ob-jectification of the subject of study-work together to shape a text that isremoved from its presumed subject and at one with the aims and principlesof the powers that be. At the same time, the &dquo;author,&dquo; in this case Becker,is constructed through her position as a foreign reporter and through herreporting itself as an expert, one who can then be consulted by others.Questions raised by this analysis include the following, which I discussbelow: the creation of an exotic &dquo;Other&dquo; and its embededness in long-standing Western cultural and political-economic practices; the concept ofauthority and the validity of the concept of an &dquo;author&dquo; within the contextof mass media; the notion of the expert, whether in journalism or othercultural practices; the connections between the &dquo;traditional&dquo; mass mediasuch as television, radio and the press and other culture industries such aspublishing houses, film studios, think tanks and academia; and fmally, ofcourse, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model itself.

Herman and Chomsky (1988) cite Walter Lippmann as having recog-nized by the early 1920s that &dquo;propaganda had already become ’a regularorgan of popular government’&dquo; (xi); their own model suggests that thepress is &dquo;guided&dquo; not by conspiracy but by a &dquo;guided market system ...with the guidance provided by the government, the leaders of the corpo-rate community, the top media owners and executives, and the assortedindividuals and groups who are assigned or allowed to take constructiveinitiatives&dquo; (xii). They go on to say that the ’&dquo;naturalness’ of these pro-cesses, with inconvenient facts allowed sparingly and within the proper



23

framework of assumptions... makes for a propaganda system that is farmore credible and effective... than one with official censorship&dquo; (xiv). I

would go further and suggest that the &dquo;naturalness&dquo; arises because not

only do the mass media, as big business, act in concert with their own in-terests, but, in fact, other ideological state apparatuses have performedtheir own tasks in shaping a propaganda system so effective that eitherconsent or cynicism is won from the many to the advantage of the few.Consent or silence, both are acceptable.

And it is texts such as the one examined above that fashion either con-sent or silence. The seamlessness of the writing, the inaccessibility ofalternative views, the overpowering &dquo;objectivity,&dquo; or fairness, which isundermined by a heightened focus on personal experience, the empiricismover theory, all lead to a kind of numbed acceptance of the text as truth.This acceptance is embedded in what we as citizens are taught from earli-est schooling about the function of the press in a democratic society, whatwe observe in our homes, and how our various institutions (churches,amateur sports or drama groups, charity organizations and so forth) usethe media.

As we saw above, Becker invented a Cambodia that then belonged toher. It was the place where she &dquo;came of age&dquo; and her coming of age hap-pened in an exotic space where colors, gracefulness, ancient traditions, aprimordial existence were displayed (for her and for &dquo;Us&dquo;) as a stream ofexperiences. What interfered, what brought time to Cambodia, was theAmerican bombing, the war that Becker was there to report and the re-gional and superpower Communist parties, both of which belonged to thetwentieth century which is by implication a maligned reality. TheUs/Other ratio relationship, the power relationship, equates the primitivewith the pristine, but also with an impossibly retrograde past, while &dquo;We&dquo;are complex, highly developed and perhaps overbearing but, in the end,progressive and real. The power relationship here, of course, is illustratedby Becker’s freedom to come and go, to be disappointed upon her returnto Cambodia that it no longer resembles its primordial &dquo;past,&dquo; while herobject, Cambodia and its people, is fettered to a place and time. The &dquo;We&dquo;are also free; we can choose to read about the Other or not, to think of theOther or not, and to act or remain silent. When those Others break awayfrom either place or time, as Becker’s guide in Cambodia had through hisParis education, his man-of the-world manners, even his articulation ofalternative journalistic practices, they are somehow corrupted and bringcorruption into the pristine place. That the guide is also a Communist, oreven simply claims to be, seals his narrative fate. Edward Said, describingthe production of knowledge, observes:

These are the issues raised initially by methodology and then considerably sharp-ened by questions as to how the production of knowledge best serves communal,as opposed to fictional, ends, how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, theconsiderations, the positions, and the strategies of power. (1978, 8)



24

But these words also apply to journalism. The methodology of objectivityand news values operate within structures of power relations and leadlargely to the production of something that resembles, if not fiction, thencertainly a highly specific narrative version of the object of the reporting.And this reporting is linked to other dominative and coercive factors, aswe saw most dramatically recently in the Persian Gulf War, but as theCambodia example also supports, especially in the aftermath of the KhmerRouge period when Vietnam &dquo;invaded&dquo; Cambodia and the U. S. govern-ment then chose to support the Khmer Rouge, both in its claims for theU. N. seat and in its military offenses against the PRK regime. The pressresponded as the propaganda model predict.

The work of journalism exists within a system of cultural productions.And those cultural productions have their own histories, some of the out-lines of which are discussed in Said’s Orientalism, and in other workssuch as those of Kabbani (1986), Fabian (1983), Clifford and Marcus(1986), and Marcus and Fishcher (1986) to name a very few that deal withthe observation of the East by the West. Said says in the introduction toOrientalism:

My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannotpossibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which Europeanculture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, socio-logically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively... becauseof Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.(3)

This statement applies equally well to foreign reporting, where it is im-perative to understand how manifest journalistic discourse (that ofobjectivity and news values) works with strategies like those outlinedabove which are borrowed from the broader culture to enforce a specificview of the Other, a view which increases &dquo;our&dquo; strength and identity as itdiminishes that of the Other.

In sum, discursive strategies lie on the surface of the text, revealing itsideological nature while still working to conceal any &dquo;truth&dquo; of the matter.As citizens, we can read texts and distinguish their ideological structurebut still remain caught. As this particular choice of text demonstrates, it ispossible to read the elite paper of record, pursue the topic in its presum-ably deeper and more considered book-length treatment (and, byimplication, view television and its presumably shallower, less consideredtreatment) and remain solidly within the parameters outlined by the propa-ganda model. Becker, constituted as an authority simply by the fact thatshe has &dquo;been there&dquo; and reported on this Other, is then later sought afterto produce book reviews and her own book. This media tautology and theprivileging and reification of direct personal experience is a safe way ofreproducing safe material.

Herman and Chomsky’s model suggests that their propaganda modelanalyzes the media as serving a &dquo;societal purpose,&dquo; but not that of en-



25

abling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process byproviding the information needed for the intelligent discharge of politicalaction. Rather, the media inculcate and defend the economic, social, andpolitical agenda of privileged groups. I concur with this assessment andalso with their belief that an independent press, one that is unfettered byties to the state and privileged groups, is necessary for the exercise ofdemocratic processes. At present, we are being cheated of our right to ac-cess to a broad range of information, opinion and analysis, which in turnhas disastrous effects on citizens’ ability to fulfill our part of the demo-cratic postulate.

College of JournalismUniversity of Georgia—Athens

NOTES

Various other works by Elizabeth Becker were also read for this project. Theyinclude any article that appeared in the Washington Post between 1974-1979; herIndochina series that appeared in that publication from February 27-March 1,1983; her review of books by Craig Etcheson and Michael Vickery that appearedin Problems of Communism, May-June, 1985; an article in The New Republic,January 20, 1982, titled "The Quiet Cambodia," and a 1992 article in Current His-tory, April 1989, titled "The Progress of Peace in Cambodia."

1. The term "autogenocide" was used by Jean Lacouture in a review of theFrench book Cambodia Year Zero by Francois Ponchaud (date?). Here I simplywant to question the validity of that term with its attendant implication that auto-genocide differs from genocide as the systematic killing of one’s "own" people.The question of who "one’s own people" are is a cultural one but to distinguishtypes of genocide in this way implies it is natural. "Genocide is a common politicalpattern across the world, not a brutal injustice directed against one group" (Fawcett1986,94).

2. Important work on the DK and early PRK period of Cambodian history is byMichael Vickery (1984) Cambodia, 1975-1982; see also Vickery’s (1986) over-view Kampuchea: Politics, Economics and Society. For a history of communismin Cambodia see Ben Kiernan (1985) How Pol Pot Came to Power. An importantbook edited by Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua (1982) is Peasants and Politics inKampuchea, 1942-1981. A very recent book about Pol Pot is by David Chandler(1992), Brother Number One: a Political Biography of Pol Pot. One of the booksto receive the most attention in U. S. media is both the original French version andthe English translation of Francois Ponchaud’s (1977) Cambodia Year Zero. Inter-est in the film The Killing Fields stimulates interest in Sydney Schanberg’s (1980)The Death and Life of Dith Pran, which is the story that the film re-tells, andHaing Ngor’s (1987) first-person account of life in the DK, A Cambodian Odys-sey ; Ngor is the physician-turned-actor who won an Academy Award for hisportrayal of Dith Pran. An unusual first-person account is written by a Frenchwoman married to a Khmer Rouge cadre: Laurence Picq’s (1989) Beyond the Ho-rizon. William Shawcross has written two books on the subject of Cambodia,Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979) and TheQuality of Mercy (1984).



26

3. In "The East is a Career: Edward Said and the Logics of Professionalism,"by Bruce Robbins ( in Edward Said: a Critical Reader 1992, edited by MichaelSprinker), the issues raised by Said’s use of Disraeli’s quote are addressed further.

REFERENCES

Barron, John and Anthony Paul. 1977. Murder of a gentle land: The untold storyof communist genocide in Cambodia. New York: Reader’s Digest Press.

Becker, Elizabeth. 1986. When the war was over: The voices of Cambodia’srevolution and its people. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Chomsky, Noam. 1989. Necessary illusions: Thought control in democraticsocieties. Boston: South End Press.

Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Hennan. 1979. After the cataclysm: PostwarIndochina and the reconstruction of imperial ideology. Boston: South EndPress.

Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing culture: The poeticsand politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object.New York: Columbia University Press.

Fawcett, Brian. 1986. Cambodia: A book for people who find television too slow.New York: Grove Press.

Gray, Spalding. 1985. Swimming to Cambodia. New York: TheatreCommunications Group.

Haas, Michael. 1991. Genocide by proxy: Cambodian pawn on a superpowerchessboard. New York: Praeger.

Hall, Stuart. 1975. Introduction. In Paper voices: The popular press and socialchange, 1935-1965, A. C. H. Smith, et al. London: Chatto & Windus. (pagenumbers?)

Hall, Stuart, et al. 1978. Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law andorder. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing consent: Thepolitical economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon.

Kabbani, Rana. 1986. Europe’s myths of Orient. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.

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