New Institute Fellow Criticizes T.V. Coverage of Vietnam War

While most foreigners were fleeing Saigon last April in the last days before the National Liberation Front victory, Frank A. Mariano, former Saigon Bureau Chief for ABC News, returned to the capital, to continue ABC's coverage of the war.

In February 1975, after a seven-month interlude in Hong Kong, Mariano returned to Saigon to expand and direct the ABC bureau there which was trimmed to a maintenance staff of 11 after the American withdrawal.

"You don't just leave a story because you consider it over. There were still important stories there," even without American deaths, he said.

So with no telephone and no wire services, Mariano began in-depth coverage of what was to become the NLF's final offensive.

Now a Fellow at the Institute of Politics, Mariano leads a seminar entitled "Television Reporting: Two Critical Perspectives."

Mariano criticizes the "here-they-come, there-they-go" style of most television coverage of the war. "We covered the events in 90-second blasts. No one did very much in the way of what it all meant."

The little analysis that made the air was politically slanted, however, Mariano claims.

"We reported for one side from the start," he says. "We attended NLF news conferences with a jaded view--these guys were the 'baby killers,' the 'rapers.'"

Mariano said that television's reliance on only upper-class, English-speaking Vietnamese as news sources, resulted in the reporting's pro-Thieu bias. He defends the one-sidedness on practical grounds, however.

"The peasant was afraid to say anything since when you left, the village chief might come down hard on him," he said. And the village chief in turn lied so as not to "rock the boat" and "lose the job he had just bought."

Some of the media's bias can be at- tributed to government lying and pressures, Mariano said. A government press handout he will distribute to students in his seminar requests that reporters substitute "Viet Cong extortionists" for "Viet Cong Tax Collectors," for example.

ABC news acquiesced to such suggestions by labeling NLF soldiers as "the enemy" in all accounts, Mariano says.

Mariano left Vietnam for the last time in April, 1975, after a seven-year journalistic career there. He is now settled here with his wife and two Vietnamese children, adopted "before it was stylish to do so," and is working on a book to be entitled, "Oh, The Trouble I've Seen.