prevalent back then. But I think if you watched the Ken Burns marathon documentary on Vietnam, you can see in retrospect that we were not really getting the unvarnished truth. I don't think much suggests the media was deliberately misleading us. They weren't getting the unvarnished truth, and it was more about protecting political interests than national interests. It is amazing how much energy is expended in avoiding embarrassment. And that's closer to the old Chomsky arguments against the press. He didn't claim that Cronkite was less principled than we thought, but his bosses controlled carefully what he knew, so we wouldn't know too much.

There was some of that. Today, that's harder to do. There is some gray area in all of this. There may be too much inaccurate, unverifiable stuff out there, but it is also harder than its ever been for "power" to hide "truth". Trump would probably prefer we know a lot less about Saudi atrocities and their human rights record in Yemen. Just like in the 70s, we didn't really have the full measure of the brutality of Pinochet in Chile (which helped that Jack Lemmon/Sissy Spacek movie in the '80s become such a success). I think it is now fair to say that our conduct of much of the Cold War, particularly the game of "color the map" we played worldwide against the evil commies, relied pretty heavily on less than unvarnished truth finding its way into our hands.