Books, Arts & Manners: Dark Horses

James L. Tyson’s Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on U.S. Media (Regnery, $12.95) is a poor book worth reading. The argument is embarrassingly weak when you consider the glittering array of journalistic personalities it takes on, but there is nevertheless a good deal of interesting stuff here, and the chapters on how the media distorted the bombing of Cambodia and how the USSR took the offensive against Washington’s development of the neutron bomb are convincing and infuriating.

“While many observers in the U.S. and abroad,” Tyson writes, “have been alarmed and mystified by America’s loss of will during the past decade, virtually no one has identified Communist propaganda as a principal cause. . . . [There have been] crises in American policy where media treatment of the issues can now be shown to have been based so clearly on falsehoods and at the same time to have followed so closely the Communist line that the treatment must have been executed either by Communist agents or sympathizers or by wellmeaning people being manipulated. ”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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James L. Tyson’s Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on U.S. Media (Regnery, $12.95) is a poor book worth reading. The argument is embarrassingly weak when you consider the glittering array of journalistic personalities it takes on, but there is nevertheless a good deal of interesting stuff here, and the chapters on how the media distorted the bombing of Cambodia and how the USSR took the offensive against Washington’s development of the neutron bomb are convincing and infuriating.

“While many observers in the U.S. and abroad,” Tyson writes, “have been alarmed and mystified by America’s loss of will during the past decade, virtually no one has identified Communist propaganda as a principal cause. . . . [There have been] crises in American policy where media treatment of the issues can now be shown to have been based so clearly on falsehoods and at the same time to have followed so closely the Communist line that the treatment must have been executed either by Communist agents or sympathizers or by wellmeaning people being manipulated. ”