Critical Studies in Mass Communication

3 (1986), 297-316

KAL 007 and the Evil Empire: Mediated

Disaster and Forms of Rationalization
FARREL CORCORAN

D—News magazine coverage of the conclusion is that cultural analysis should

Soviet attack on KAL 007 is examined as
a text in which a particular view of the
USSR, close to that of the Reagan admin-
istration, is established and legitimized.
The ideological closure imposed on the
disaster is pried open by analyzing the
twin processes of selection and structur-
ing giving coherence to the text. The
look on this dominant discourse about the
USSR, which naturalizes calls for accel-
erating the arms race, as challenging
scholars to explore how the synchroniza-
tion of government and media points of
view takes place in a society free from
overt government censorship.

N THE PRE-DAWN hours of Septem- was widely believed to have triggered

I ber 1, 1983, a Soviet fighter pilot major geopolitical changes whose conse-
shadowed a Korean airliner as it flew quences would be felt for years to come.
through Soviet airspace, then fired a This paper sets out to examine the
heat-seeking missile which plunged the KAL 007 disaster as a rhetorical act of
airliner and all aboard into the icy major proportions.- Taking its cue,
waters of the Sea of Japan. Thus began though not its style, from Wilbur
what Time called "one of the strangest Schramm's (1959) comparative analysis
and least expected confrontations be- of newspaper responses to other interna-
tween the superpowers in the annals of tional crises—the invasion of Hungary
U.S. postwar diplomacy" (9/12/83, p. and the Suez crisis of 1956—it examines
10). Throughout the month of Septem- the performance of the three major
ber, this confrontation took place mainly American newsmagazines in their inter-
through the media in an unprecedented pretation of the last flight of KAL 007.
war of words, with Washington and Its goal is to unravel the reality-defining
Moscow accusing each other in turn of practices of Time, Newsweek and US
propaganda and news manipulation. In News and World Report (USNirWR)
the U.S., a storm of anti-Soviet fury embodied in the structures of their re-
swept the country and the mood of Con- portage, with a view to discerning their
gress swung massively in favor of an distinctive ideological skew.
escalation of the arms race. The event Newsmagazines were chosen for two
reasons. Firstly, it seemed that they
Mr. Corcoran is Associate Professor of Com- reach a leadership that is not only large
munication Studies, Northern Illinois Uni- but also influential in terms of opinion-
versity. leadership. The newsmagazines reach a

Copyright 1986, SCA

298

KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE SEPTEMBER 1986

large number of people, either as sub- This essay assumes that the media
scribers or as "pass-alongs" who get a help define, not merely reproduce, "real-
magazine from a subscriber or purchaser ity," that they actively make things mean
and may read it at home or elsewhere. In through their processes of selecting and
1977, for instance, Time had 4.3 million structuring. It takes the newsmagazines'
subscribers and newsstand buyers, but mass of reportage of the KAL catastro-
according to W.R. Simmons and Asso- phe in September 1983 as a text to be
ciates Research, it had 21.2 million read- read as a structured whole, in which the
ers. Newsweek had a circulation of 3.0 place occupied by certain items in the
million but 17.8 million in readers internal relations of this text is more
(Gans, 1979, p. 221). By comparison, the important than the number of times the
average daily adult audience for the items occur. The text under scrutiny is a
three network television news programs discourse about the U.S.S.R. to be deci-
was 33.5 million in 1977. The combined phered in terms of its own internal orga-
readership for the three newsmagazines nization rather than measured in its
came to 47.3 million adults that year manifest fragmented parts from the out-
(Gans, 1979, pp. xi-xii). Compared to side, in the manner of a more traditional,
television audiences, newsmagazine quantitative type of content analysis.
readers are better educated, more likely This reading suggests how a popular
to be employed in prestigious jobs and consensus in favor of a dominant inter-
more affluent. The magazines also pretation of the KAL catastrophe may be
attract a small but significant audience produced by the "mainstream" news-
from the national elite. A survey of busi-
magazines, but stops short of trying to
ness, political, media and other leaders
prove its impact. As Roland Barthes
found that Time and Newsweek were the
noted of the development of semiological
magazines they read most frequently
enquiry, "we consider objects solely in
(Gans, 1979, p. 224). While this is not a
readership study and makes no assump- relation to their meaning, without bring-
tions about how content is "read" by ing in, at least not prematurely, that is,
different social groups, it is driven by the not before the system be reconstituted as
notion that newsmagazines deserve more far as possible, the other determinants
attention from scholars because of the (psychological, sociological or physical)
unique opinion-leading potential of their of those objects" (1967, p. 95). Also
"upscale" readers. Secondly, the three absent from this essay is any consistent
newsmagazines were chosen for scrutiny reflection on the social-historical context
here in order to extend the kind of in which news media operate, particu-
analysis initiated in Corcoran's (1983) larly the political discourse vis-a-vis
study of newsmagazine coverage of the communism generally available in aca-
U.S.S.R. during those periods of height- demia, in popular culture and in political
ened coverage that followed the deaths of subcultures. Such reflection must be
Soviet leaders from 1953 to 1982. KAL ruled out here for lack of space, but
007 presented an opportunity to look at a interesting approaches to analyzing the
different set of texts in the same news- press in its political context are available.
magazines, spanning a few weeks Halberstam (1979) has analyzed the
instead of a few decades and to examine a orientations of the press to communism
single event that stimulated a massive in an historical way, within the context
outpouring of reportage on the U.S.S.R. of organizational evolution from control
by founding owners to control by

CSMC
appointed executives. Gans (1979,
p. 207) suggests that journalistic anti-
communism may have a basis in working
conditions, at least in part, since commu-
nist journalists lack what American pro-
fessionals define as autonomy. Chomsky
and Herman (1979) explore the system
of press self-censorship which pursues
communist abuses of human rights
avidly while studiously ignoring atroci-
ties committed in terror-ridden U.S.
client states.
LANGUAGE
In examining the vocabulary used by
the newsmagazines to describe the attack
on the Korean airliner, it quickly
becomes obvious that "neutral" language
was eschewed from the start. While the
BBC World Service was observing neu-
trality in language to the point of ban-
ning the verb "strayed" as long as any
question remained over what the Boeing
747 was doing in Soviet airspace
(Guardian, 9/18/83, p. 5), the American
magazines were unleashing perhaps the
most vitriolic language in their history.
Time referred to the "atrocity in the
skies" in which the airline was "cold-
bloodedly blasted out of the skies" (9/12,
p. 10). It was "a brutally provocative
act," a "crime against all humanity . . .
like attacking a school bus." Newsweek
called the attack "wanton slaughter . . . a
ruthless ambush in the sky" (9/12, p.
16). It quotes the President's description
approvingly: "a barbaric act . . . a hei-
nous act," and blandly comments that an
aide persuaded the President to replace
"murder" in his speech with "mas-
sacre," because this was thought "to
conjure up more dramatically a
slaughter of the innocent" (9/19, p. 21).
USNirWR calls the attack "wanton
destruction" (9/12, p. 15), "a murderous
299
CORCORAN
act" (9/26, p. 36), "an atrocity" (10/10,
p. 18).
This radical departure from the usual
professional norms of journalistic prac-
tice is justified in part by coverage of the
populist outcry against the Russian
attack. USNirWR, for instance, epito-
mizes grass-roots outrage in its reference
to popular reactions that varied from
disgusted travel agents and organizers of
basketball exchanges with the U.S.S.R.,
to irate liquor store owners and video
arcade operators. In two successive
issues, liquor store owners are photo-
graphed grimly removing Russian vodka
bottles from shelves (9/19, p. 11) and
pouring vodka into Boston Harbor in a
veritable potlatch of patriotism. A
related story describes the reprogram-
ming of video games in an arcade in
Texas, so that players are urged to score
points by shooting down "aggressive
Soviet ships" commanded by Andropov,
a "Communist mutant from outer
space."
All of the newsmagazines amplified
Reagan's view that the air tragedy was
somehow the fault of the socialist system
of government itself. Newsweek quotes a
Western diplomat: "You have to remem-
ber this is Lenin's foreign policy they are
implementing. It cannot be wrong"
(9/19, p. 36). An "expert" says "Andro-
pov is behaving just like Brezhnev,
Krushchev and Stalin would have
behaved." The Soviet Union is "a society
which wantonly disregards individual
rights and the values of human life"
(USN&WR, 9/19, p. 24).
The process taking place here is the
metonymic transformation of a single
event into a totalizing symbol of the
Soviet Union in all its manifestations. As
with many such processes of metaphoric
transformation in popular culture, me-
tonymy is embedded in a well-estab-
lished and widely adhered to fabric of
300
KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE
images that facilitate it. In the present
case, these images include stereotypes of
Russians as stupid, dreary, politically
anaesthetized followers of an alien doc-
trine imposed upon them by a succession
of strutting tyrants who continue the
barbaric expansionism found in the most
obscure reaches of Russian history. The
reductionist nature of these images, long
established in the newsmagazines before
the KAL incident (Corcoran, 1983), are
now continued. Complex processes of
military decision-making and bureau-
cratic communication are reduced to col-
loquial one-liners. A "Soviet affairs
expert" in Newsweek opined "you may
have an air defense officer who decided it
was not going to be his ass" (9/12, p. 27),
while a former ambassador to Korea
suggested that "they probably just said:
No goddam Koreans are going to get into
my airspace" (p. 27).
New life is breathed into images of an
older vintage, emphasizing the theme of
stupidity. Time digresses from its cover-
age of the Soviet version of the last flight
of KAL 007 to abstract from that version
the actual language used by the Russian
translators as they stumble their way
through modern English. T h e i r
"comically quaint" translations are
"sprinkled with quaint and creaky collo-
quialisms," such as "ignoramus," "fid-
dle-sticks,""hullabaloo" and "crocodile
tears" (9/19, p. 24). USN&WR de-
scribed Aerofiot, now the world's largest
airline, as having installed chandeliers
and cast-iron toilets in its first jets in
1956, even though such extra weight
greatly increased fuel consumption (9/
26, p. 35). Russians are deeply irration-
al, as well as stupid. They are pro-
nounced "trigger-happy" on the cover of
USN&WR and "paranoid about their
airspace" inside (9/12, p. 24). It is sug-
gested many weeks later that the panic of
September may have been confined to
SEPTEMBER 1986
"trigger-happy military commanders,"
whom Andropov must "rein i n "
(USN&WR, 11/14, p. 39). Newsweek
also sees the attack on the airliner as
reflecting "xenophobia mixed with in-
tense national security fears" (9/12, p.
17). Later, we are told that the Soviets
are "highly nervous" about security in
their Far Eastern region (9/12, p. 27). A
week later, the appearance of a Russian
fighter pilot on television in Moscow is
analyzed against "a backdrop of Soviet
obsession with secrecy and a deep-seated
paranoia with borders" (9/19, p. 22).
The air attack becomes what Fiske
and Hartley (1978, p. 89) call a "con-
densational symbol" of the essential dif-
ference between Russians and the rest of
the world. The American government's
attempt to rectify this difference is
widely covered. Time concluded that
"this was the Soviet Union against the
world and the moral precepts which
guide human relations among people
everywhere" (9/19, p. 13). USN&WR
stated it more clearly: "This is not a
US-Soviet issue, this is the Soviets
against the world" (9/12, p. 22) and a
"survey of nations" reveals that all are
indeed "appalled" (p. 11). The main
course of action for the U.S. is "to unite
worldwide outrage against Kremlin bru-
tality" (USN&WR, 9/19, p. 21).
POLICY OPTIONS IN A
MORAL PANIC
That the sentiments of the President
and the newsmagazines are peculiarly
American rather than representative of
global opinion, however, is suggested by
a glance at international news sources.
The Manchester Guardian Weekly, for
instance, in its first issue to report on the
attack, claims that American credibility
"has now been dented" and that the
international community should chal-

CSMC
lenge not what the Soviet pilot really saw
before him in the skies on September 1
but "the allegation that the Korean air-
liner was a stooge of the US spy
machine" (9/11, p. 3). This was an issue
that would never be raised seriously in
any of the mainstream American news-
magazines. A week later, the Guardian
published six letters expressing skepti-
cism of the original U.S. version of the
attack, and the following issue suggested
that the Korean airliner's black box,
when found, "may reveal which of the
two superpowers has been more evasive
in explaining the mystery which pre-
ceded the decision to fire at the plane"
(9/25, p. 6). It concluded that "there is
already enough evidence to show it was
no ordinary passenger flight" (p. 6).
In the American newsmagazines,
however, there is not a hint of skepticism,
except perhaps in Time's brief mention,
near the end of September, of a New
York Times/CBS poll finding that 61%
thought the U.S. government was "hold-
ing back information the public ought to
know" (9/26, p. 22). But even this hint
of skepticism is framed by the notion that
doubts still exist "despite the wealth of
transcripts released by Japan and the
U.S." (p. 21). Before exploring how
doubts raised in other press sources are
excluded from the worldview of the three
newsmagazines under scrutiny here, a
crucial question must be answered: how
can their coverage of the air attack,
judged "hysterical" in some foreign mag-
azines (Link, 9/18, p. 23), be legitimated
as "normal" news coverage that does not
seem to contravene the usual canons of
journalistic distancing? One mechanism
has already been mentioned: the reifica-
tion of popular outrage in ritual actions
such as destroying Russian vodka, and
the positioning of the newsmagazines at
the center of what Cohen (1972) calls a
"moral panic." Another mechanism
301
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focuses on the President's reaction as
"moderate" rather than "right-wing."
This is achieved not only in the depiction
of the President as running ahead, some-
what reluctantly, of the tide of popular
outrage, but also in treatments of those
further right than the President who
thought he was not tough enough on the
Russians. These are referred to by
Newsweek as "the far right" whose criti-
cisms actually make Reagan "look more
moderate and responsible as the 1984
race heats up" (9/19, p. 37). The "far
right" is identified with Kathryn
McDonald, wife of the Congressman
who died in the Korean airliner, and
Richard Viguerie, director of the Con-
servative Caucus. McDonald, we are
1
told by Time, "stoically faced the televi-
sion cameras to declare her husband had
been the victim of an act of deliberate
assassination" (9/12, p. 18). Viguerie
meanwhile complained that Reagan
"sounds like Winston Churchill and acts
like Neville Chamberlain" (9/19, p. 37).
Ronald Reagan "just walked away from
the town bully without drawing his
gun. . . . He's reversing Teddy Roose-
velt—talking big and carrying a big
twig" (USN&WR, 9/19, p. 26).
However, USNirWR perceived
Reagan's chances of reelection to be
improved markedly because "he is no
longer seen as a reckless cowboy who
might be dangerous in a crisis" (9/19, p.
24). A full-page review by Newsweek of
"Reagan versus the New Right" (9/19,
p. 37) contrasts the President's "low-
key" response with a "mad-as-hell" pro-
test rally of Conservatives, concluding
that the White House "relished" the
situation, believing that conservative
criticism only makes Reagan look more
"moderate and responsible" (p. 37) as
the 1984 presidential race heats up.
Thus, not only the President but the
newsmagazines themselves, which iden-
302

KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE SEPTEMBER 1986

a large range of practical superpower

tify closely with his views, are ideologi-
cally rescued from a "right-wing" posi- reactions that could be broadly described
tion and situated in the "mainstream." as either deepening America's immer-
Here, presumably, a national consensus sion in a Cold War or turning it back
may be found that is moderate, rational towards some kind of detente with the
and responsible, and thus the govern- Soviet Union or doing neither. A partic-
ment's response to the U.S.S.R. is legi-ular reaction—intensifying the arms
timized. race—was chosen and promoted by both
In the pages of the newsmagazines, politicians and newsmagazines as if no
the destruction of KAL 007 becomes a other existed. The Russophobic frame,
reassuringly familiar to journalists and
powerful symbol of the evils of the Soviet
form of government, in which is embed- readers alike, helped legitimize this
ded a demand for massive American option in an easily digestible fashion. As
re-commitment to an arms build-up by will be argued in the next section, this
framework was so strong that it allowed
way of response. This note is struck from
the earliest coverage onwards, particu- the newsmagazines to ignore questions
larly in the pronouncements of high- that had been raised elsewhere in the
ranking politicians quoted with approv- press—questions that might have opened
al. Newsweek reports that the anti- up the ideological closure that the frame
detente block in Congress regarded KAL imposed on the question of policy
as "vindication of the President's com- options. What must be pointed out here,
bative stance towards Marxism" (9/12, however, is Goffman's (1974, p. ii)
p. 28). A week later the President's MX assertion that frames, considered as
plans "seemed headed for friendlier active organizers of meaning, govern not
hearings" (9/19, p. 21). USN&WR also only which "strips" are chosen and fea-
tured but also "our subjective involve-
predicts in its initial response that "op-
position to MX will weaken as will the ment in them." Because the call to
cry for a freeze on nuclear weapons" increase investment in a new generation
of weapons, with all its vast political,
(9/12, p. 20). Time agrees that the inci-
dent gives the President a better chancefinancial and global implications, was
for deploying the MX missile and quotes consonant with the major news frame-
Senator Jesse Helms with approval: work (KAL as symbol of Soviet savage-
"This is the best chance we ever had to ry), it appeared obvious, credible and
paint those bastards into a corner" (9/ legitimate. Its unchallenged inevitability
12, p. 18). These predictions came trueacquired a "common sense," a taken-
within a month, with Congress translat- for-grantedness, which enhanced its
ing its outrage into votes for funds to truth value. The result was what Ben-
nett calls an "amplification spiral"
produce nerve gas again for the first time
since 1969, and to produce the first 21 (1982, p. 299) anchored at one end in the
MX missiles (USN&WR, 9/26, p. 19). actual event of the destruction of KAL
One week later, the Senate Foreign 007 and at the other, in actual military
Relations Committee voted 10-7 against appropriations in the U.S. Congress.
a nuclear freeze and also rejected a The initial event is subjected to increased
nuclear "build-down" (Newsweek, 10/ magnification as the reality-defining
3, p. 21). practices of various social agencies
(speech making, reprogramming video
The set of policy options potentially games, destroying vodka, banning Aero-
consequent on the KAL tragedy included
 303

CSMC CORCORAN

flot flights, etc.) sustain and complement tered view which positions them com-
the media's practices and thereby spark fortably inside the narrative, much like
into life a "moral panic" through this classic realist cinema (Andrew, 1984, p.
circuit of amplifying significations. 125), and inhibits critical distancing
The glue giving a coherence and con- from the events being reported.
sistency to the bonding of the dominant
news framework of the newsmagazines
and their editorializing on policy- ALTERNATIVE MEANINGS
oriented matters, is to be found in their The argument thus far has been that
narrative style, sometimes traced to the by blending reportage and editorializing
early influence of the fictional tech- into a seamless web of associations, the
niques of Edgar Allan Poe, particularly major newsmagazines played a role in
the emphasis on scene-setting (Corcoran, defining an arms build-up as the only
1983, p. 307). Newsmagazine reportage "real" answer to the actions of the Soviet
creates a consistent emotional effect and military on the night of September 1,
a sense of "being there" with all the 1983. The discourse of the news maga-
details of fictional realism at its disposal. zines imposes ideological closure on the
Time's report, for example, brings the "meaning" of the attack on KAL 007 by
reader right into the cabin of the doomed emphatically coupling the U.S.S.R. with
airliner, where "many passengers took threat and conflict. In order to discern
off shoes, loosened neckties, reached for the full implications of this operation of
pillows and stretched out to sleep. Some closure, however, it is necessary to exam-
watched the in-flight movie 'Man, ine not only how the news discourse is
Woman, Child' . . ." (9/12, p. 12). As internally structured so as to produce
the plane, now dangerously off-course, privileged meanings but also how alter-
approached the area of Vladivostok, native meanings, generated elsewhere in
"this cold and bleak region," breakfast the press, are downgraded, marginalized
was being prepared: "grapefruit and or excluded.
beef brochette for the high-fare travel-
The most important cluster of alterna-
lers, a croissant and Spanish omelette for
tive meanings focus on the etiological
others" (p. 17). Newsweek opens its
dimension of the KAL crisis: why did the
account with classic Poesque scene-
airliner depart from its assigned route, so
setting style: "Thunderclouds rolled
close to one of the most militarily sensi-
across the North Pacific below. The
tive and dangerous regions in the world,
night sky dropped like a blanket from
and why did the U.S.S.R. respond to the
above—and Flight 007 had lost its way"
intrusion into its airspace with the dras-
(9/12, p. 16). The cover design positions
tic measure of firing heat-seeking mis-
the viewer in the point of view of the
siles at the plane? USNirWR speculates
aggressor, behind a scope aimed at a
for the space of five sentences on the
jetliner, under the heading "Murder in
possibilities of a breakdown in naviga-
the Air." Time's cover offers the voyeur a
tion equipment aboard the jetliner and
more apocalyptic view: a painting of a
the chances of pilot error (9/19, p. 27).
cataclysmic explosion erupting from an
Time's treatment of causes is equally
airliner, while three jet fighters speed
brief and is framed by the insistence that
away from the scene (9/12). These
whatever the cause, the Soviets "clearly
devices, both verbal and pictorial, pro-
violated international law" (9/12, p. 14).
vide newsmagazine readers with a cen-
Speculation about causes is discouraged
304
KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE
by the assertion that it is a major mys-
tery: "The full explanation almost surely
will never be known" (p. 18). News-
week, while agreeing it is a "mystery,"
speculates more broadly: How could a
pilot with the experience of Captain
Chon have gotten so lost? Did he do it to
cut corners and save fuel costs "in the
competitive world of airline discount
fares?" (9/12, p. 18). The conclusion is
that "there is no evidence that KAL 007
was anything but a normal passenger
run that somehow went wrong" (p. 17).
What about the drastic nature of the
Soviet response to the intruder, confirm-
ing and amplifying all previous notions
of Russian "savagery"? USN&WR
wonders why the U.S.S.R. seemed to act
in its own worst interest, by triggering
worldwide revulsion, terminating a ten-
tative warm-up of relations with the
U.S., threatening important grain deals
and access to sophisticated American
technology. The answer lies in the
nature of "Soviet psychology" (9/12, p.
23). Such attacks are "standard operat-
ing procedure"(p. 23) because the Rus-
sians are "paranoid about their air-
space" (p. 24). A later issue (9/26, p. 36)
suggests that the Soviet military may
have engineered this incident in order to
derail arms control negotiations and
reemphasize the need for huge military
budgets. This idea is also suggested by
Newsweek (9/12, p. 28) which adds that
top military commanders in the U.S.S.R.
may have objected particularly to Yuri
Andropov's recent offer to destroy some
of the new SS-20 nuclear missiles.
By far the most important alternative
interpretation of the KAL incident was
that offered by the Soviet Union itself.
To what extent did this penetrate the
discourse of the newsmagazine and how
was it treated? The arrival of the Soviet
point of view onto the agenda of the
SEPTEMBER 1986
newsmagazines was profoundly in-
fluenced by the tardiness of the Soviet
government in acknowledging its role in
the disappearance of KAL 007. The
whole tone of the coverage of the
event—particularly the pitting of the
"uncivilized" Soviet system against the
rest of the world, in an atmosphere of
acute moral outrage—had already been
established by President Reagan and
Jeanne Kirkpatrick by the time the
Soviet government finally admitted, in
piecemeal fashion, that its airforce had
indeed fired on the civilian airliner.
Time reported the Soviet question of
why no steps were taken by the U.S. to
warn the airliner that it was violating
Soviet airspace, since "relevant US ser-
vices" were following the flight through-
out its duration "in the most attentive
manner" (9/12, p. 10). The question is
tightly framed, however, by Secretary of
State George Schultz's "angry" reply
that "no cover-up, however brazen or
elaborate, can . . . absolve the Soviet
Union of its responsibility to explain its
behavior" (p. 11). The Soviet theory that
KAL 007 was on a reconnaissance mis-
sion for the U.S. is referred to only very
bliquely in the brief comment that "com-
mon sense suggests that even the most
expert observer, flying some six miles
high in dim pre-dawn light, is not likely
to see anything that US surveillance
satellites have not repeatedly scrutinized
and photographed in far greater detail"
(Time, 9/12, p. 14). The following issue
of Time refers to the Soviet spy theory as
"a claim just about nobody outside the
Communist world believed" (9/19, p.
12). The press conference given in Mos-
cow by Soviet Chief of Staff Marshal
Nikolai Ogarkov, where the spy theory
was elaborated, is reported as a "confus-
ing" explanation of the Soviet view of the
incident. Time's discussion of the press

CSMC
conference focuses attention not on the
spy theory but on the mystery of who
gave the order to destroy the Korean
plane (9/19, p. 16), whether Andropov •
was consulted at his vacation home in the
Caucasus, whether the Soviet military
are under proper civilian control.
Although many other media around
the world, as will be seen, had by this
time moved away from total reliance on
the initial American interpretation of the
attack and had begun to analyze the
Soviet spy theory, Time's last issue for
September 1983 was still shielding its
readers from any serious consideration of
the Soviet position, which it dismissed as
"volley after volley of recriminations"
(9/26, p. 20). In a vote of censure in the
UN Security Council, for instance, it is
reported that Zimbabwe and Guyana,
both of whom abstained, "argued that
disputes over the facts made it impossible
to single out the Soviets for blame"
(Time, 9/26, p. 20). Yet the substance of
those disputes is never conveyed. As will
be seen, Time here ignored information
already reported in other parts of the
press suggesting that civilian airlines are
indeed used in surveillance missions by
both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Newsweeks's attention to the Soviet
point of view follows a path parallel with
Time. Its initial coverage of the Soviet
spy-plane theory is framed by the notion
that it is part of a "clumsy Soviet scenar-
io" which leaves "all the important ques-
tions dangling" and is still "a telling
demonstration of how the Soviet Union
uses power" (9/12, p. 17). Newsweek's
following issue briefly covered the Ogar-
kov press conference but the tone of the
reporting is ethnocentrically American.
"Tangled in their own skein of excuses,
half-truths and outright lies," we are
told, the Russians "managed to make
themselves look as bad as Ronald Rea-
305
CORCORAN
gan had often painted them—instead of
apologizing, Moscow blandly turned on
the US and said ' y ° u ' r e t 0 blame'"
(9/19, p. 18). Oblique reference to
Ogarkov's accusation is made in the
acknowledgement that both superpowers
regularly "tickle" each other's radar
with airspace intrusions, "a relatively
harmless ritual of international intelli-
gence gathering" (9/19, p. 22). Whether
this ritual could be partly to blame for
the deaths of 269 civilian passengers is
not explored, even though this very con-
nection was already being made in the
press elsewhere (e.g., The Nation, 9/24;
The Guardian, 9/14; The Sunday
Times, 9/11). As late as mid-October,
almost six weeks after the destruction of
KAL 007 and a month after other
sources began investigating Pravda's (9/
20) claim that U.S. surveillance was
involved, Newsweek still maintains that
Andropov "stuck doggedly to the excuse
that Flight 007 had been conducting an
espionage mission" because the Russians
are "still smarting from the gigantic
political setback they suffered" (10/10,
P- 27).
USNirWR downgraded the Russian
point of view even more severely than
Time or Newsweek by omitting any ref-
erence to it in its first relevant issue and
making only one very brief reference in
its second issue to the Soviet feeling that
the airliner was over Soviet territory "to
snoop on secret Russian installations"
(9/19, p. 24). Some seven weeks after the
tragedy, there is a single reference to
"the airliner-spy-plane incident" in the
context of Muscovites beginning to sus-
pect that "their media have tried to
justify the attack through distortion and
misinformation" (10/24, p. 35). Jour-
nalistic canons of thoroughness are given
a little self-righteous compliment in the
observation that a few Russian citizens
306
KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE
"look to the American press to come up Johnson's analysis goes on to explore
someday with the full story" the role of U.S. surveillance aircraft,
(USN&WR, 10/24, p. 35). particularly the RC-135 which shad-
PARADIGMATIC ANALYSIS
By successfully preventing the Soviet
version of the KAL disaster from pene-
trating their reportage, the newsmaga-
zines in effect build an impregnable case
for total Soviet culpability. To judge
their journalistic performance fairly,
however, it is necessary to analyze it in a
paradigmatic way, that is, against the
wider set of information available to all
journalists, from which the three news-
magazines made their selections. More
particularly, attention should focus on
their exclusion of information poten-
tially damaging to the official U.S. ver-
sion. One of the most coherent analyses
of such information is R. W. Johnson's
conspiracy theory (Manchester Guar-
dian Weekly, 12/25, pp. 6-7), built
upon fragments of information publicly
available soon after the disaster, which
throws doubt on the official American
version. The analysis focuses first on
background information about the
highly sensitive Soviet naval complex
around the Sea of Okhotsk where the
new Typhoon submarine is being
deployed, and the intense interest of the
U.S. in this region. Tensions over sur-
veillance were approaching flashpoint
because of the U.S. naval exercises in the
year preceding the KAL tragedy, appar-
ently designed as rehearsals for an inva-
sion of Sakhalin and Kamchatka. The
latest such practice of invasion maneu-
vers was described by its commander as
"the largest fleet exercise conducted by
the Pacific Fleet since World War II"
(Manchester Guardian Weekly, 12/25,
pp. 6-7). This backdrop of tension
escaped wholly without mention in the
major newsmagazines.
SEPTEMBER 1986
owed KAL 007 for much of its flight. No
mention of the RC-135 was made in
early American accounts of the tragedy.
When its presence was revealed acciden-
tally in a presidential briefing, the gov-
ernment claimed that the RC-135 had
left KAL 007 early on and was, in any
case, a fairly innocuous aircraft. This
was sharply contradicted in the Denver
Post by two former U.S. Airforce com-
munications intelligence specialists who
regularly flew on RC-135 reconnais-
sance missions out of Okinawa. They
said the President's assertion that the
RC-135 had abandoned the Sakhalin-
Kamchatka area was "unbelievable and
contrary to National Security Agency
[NSA] policy" (9/16, p. 7). The aircraft
in fact is so important to U.S. intelligence
collection in sensitive areas that it is
always relieved on its orbit by another
RC-135 just before the end of its mis-
sion, this procedure allowing for 24-
hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year coverage.
The plane has "a super-advanced,
ultra-secure communications system
which is linked to the most sophisticated
communications network in the world"
(Denver Post, 9/16, p. 7), allowing a
message to be in the President's hands 10
minutes after its transmission from the
aircraft. Its mission continually brings it
to at least the brink of potentially hostile
airspace, and on occasion "intentionally
penetrates the airspace of a target
nation" (p. 7) to bring its air defense
system into a state of alert "so that the
NSA can analyze the activated systems
for potential flaws" (p. 7). The former
intelligence specialists furthermore be-
lieved that the entire chain of events
surrounding the KAL tragedy—from
the initial tracking by Soviet radar oper-
 307

CSMC CORCORAN

ators to their "confusion" of KAL 007 hata (cited in Link, 9/18, p. 24), asserted
and RC-135, to the alerting of Soviet that KAL was used for espionage and
fighters, to the shootdown—was "metic- quoted the former Chair of the Japanese
ulously monitored and instantaneously Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying it was
analyzed by U.S. intelligence" (p. 7). possible that the Korean pilot, a former
They conclude that "the official U.S. Air Force officer, got his instructions
version of events is incomplete and mis- from the U.S. The Guardian asserted
leading" (p. 7). Their disclosure drew no that circumstantial evidence indicated
public response from the government, KAL 007 was on a spy mission for the
although both men were warned that U.S. (9/28, p. 15). The Sunday Times
they "technically" violated espionage reported "a growing conviction in the
laws when they publicly challenged the West that the South Korean airliner flew
Reagan administration's version of the deliberately into Soviet airspace" (9/11,
Korean airliner incident (Progressive, p. 1). After reviewing the various theo-
4/84, p. 1). ries concerning why the Korean pilot
Other published information began to had deviated from the correct course, the
unravel the official American version. Sunday Times concluded that "there is
An editor of Defense Science admitted to now a growing conviction in military,
the San Francisco Examiner that KAL political and aviation circles that Cap-
airliners "regularly overfly Russian Air- tain Byong-in was not in Soviet airspace
space to gather military intelligence" by accident" (p. 18). A Lufthansa pilot
(9/4, p. 1). The Examiner also quoted expressed disbelief in the official U.S.
"a U.S. official with close ties to military explanation of the role of the RC-135 by
intelligence" as admitting that "carriers pointing out to Deutsches Allgemeines
owned by governments deemed friendly Sonntagsblatt that U.S. military planes
to the U.S. are fitted in this country with have often been observed behaving like
cameras and other devices for intelli- civilian planes. The mixing up of mili-
gence collection" (p. 1). This work was tary and civilian planes, he said, "was
done, he said, by a number of private purposely provoked by the military"
electronics firms and also at several U.S. (cited in R. W. Johnson).
bases, such as Andrews Airforce Base.
The Philadelphia Enquirer thought it
was not impossible that airliners were LOOSE ENDS
useful for surveillance because there is If the weeks following the attack on
more clarity in low-flying, slower air- KAL 007 are characterized by pro-
craft observation. ABC-TV quoted a gressive revelations in the press else-
Pentagon source as admitting that the where of information which seriously
U.S. has relied on passenger planes "in questioned the official U.S. position,
the past" to monitor the U.S.S.R. The they also reveal an attempt in the major
Hearst News Service also reported that American newsmagazines to freeze the
airliners are regularly used for surveil-
earliest information available and down-
lance (see Manchester GuardianWeekly, grade Soviet explanations. However, a
9/28, p. 15). few new pieces of information had to be
Non-American press outlets also dealt with by the newsmagazines in the
turned up discordant information. Japa- weeks following the disaster because
nese military sources, reported in Aka- they came from the U.S. government
308
KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE
itself. The most important of these reve-
lations concerned the role of the RC-135
reconnaissance plane and the Soviet mis-
sile test planned for, and then cancelled,
the night the Korean airliner entered
Soviet airspace. These had the potential
to damage the veracity of the official U.S.
government interpretation of events,
wholeheartedly endorsed by all three
major newsmagazines. How were these
two news items handled so that they did
not destroy the impression of total Soviet
culpability already created?
When the presence of an RC-135 was
revealed "through a largely accidental
American disclosure" (Manchester
Guardian Weekly, 9/11, p. 1) the White
House confirmed three days after the
disaster that the U.S.S.R. may have mis-
taken the passenger plane because "US
reconnaissance routinely takes place off
the Soviet coast in international waters"
(p. 1). Several hours later it was con-
firmed in Washington that the Soviet
military had in fact mistaken KAL 007
for an RC-135. According to the Sunday
Times (9/11, p. 18) the U.S.S.R. was
quite used to RC-135 "milk-runs" at
least 20 nights each month. The Guard-
ian suggested that KAL 007 may have
been a "ferret" for the RC-135, a decoy
in a joint intelligence maneuver whose
function was to "tickle" the Soviet
defense system to see the number and
kinds of aircraft that are alerted (9/14,
p. 15). The Far East Economic Review
linked the "ferret" function to the Soviet
claim that the departure of KAL 007
from Anchorage on the last leg of its
voyage was delayed 40 minutes so that its
flight over Soviet bases would concide
with a U.S. intelligence-gathering satel-
lite passing overhead (10/13, p. 34).
By contrast with this wealth of specu-
lation about the role of the RC-135,
Time referred to "a US reconnaissance
plane" only once in all of September, and
SEPTEMBER 1986
that in the context of Marshall Ogar-
kov's press conference which gave a
"confusing" explanation of the whole
event (9/19, p. 16). It was not until seven
weeks after the disaster that Time men-
tioned the RC-135 by name and said it
had been in the area of KAL 007 "earlier
that night" (10/17, p. 25). Newsweek
referred to the RC-135 only once in
September, repeating the U.S. govern-
ment claim that it had already landed
"back in Alaska" before the Soviets fired
on the Korean airliner (9/19, p. 18).
This claim is also reported by
USN6-WR, which refers to the RC-135
only once more, in the context of the
superiority of U.S. pilots compared to
their Soviet counterparts (9/26, p. 19).
Was there any special reason for a
heightened American surveillance pres-
ence in the Sakhalin/Kamchatka area on
the night of September 1 ? In the weeks
following the disaster, there were many
suggestions in the press that the U.S.S.R.
was planning to test a missile in the
Soviet Far East the same night the Ko-
rean Airliner flew 300 miles off-course
into Soviet territory (MacLeans, 9/19,
p. 34). The Guardian noted that Soviet
weapons are usually test-fired from the
Plesetck and other launch sites and
directed at Kamchatka. On the night of
the disaster, there was planned "the
apparent trial of a rapid reload method
for the Russian SH-08 anti-ballistic mis-
sile system" (9/11, p. 7). A later
Guardian issue quoted U.S. officials as
admitting that there was heightened
Soviet air defense activity one hour
before the shooting of the airliner (9/25,
p. 6). A Soviet SA-2 ground-to-air mis-
sile was ordered to track a target identi-
fied by the U.S.S.R. as an RC-135. The
Guardian then goes on to speculate on
whether the U.S. ordered KAL 007 to
take evasive action and if the airliner and
the RC-135 were in direct contact (p. 6).

CSMC
The initial U.S. government reaction
was that it knew of no important Soviet
military exercises that day, but later,
knowledge of the planned missile test
was acknowledged. However, a search of
the three major newsmagazines reveals
that none of them referred, even
obliquely, to this missile test, even
though information on it would have
been available in Washington.
Could the U.S. have averted the dis-
aster by appealing directly to the
U.S.S.R.—as suggested in the press else-
where (Manchester Guardian Weekly,
9/18, p. 2)? USN&WR, for instance,
reports on the American Cobra Dane
phased array radar system in the Aleu-
tian Islands, which is "so powerful it can
spot a baseball at a range of 2,300 miles"
and is linked to satellites "so sensitive
they can pick up the faint signals that
leak out as telephone calls flash from one
microwave point to another" (9/12,
p. 24). Yet the obvious question is never
raised: why didn't the U.S. intervene to
save the airliner? Newsweek, in an
article on the sophistication of the U.S.
Air Force's 6920th Electronic Security
Group on Hokkaido, does wonder why
the U.S. did not warn the Korean pilot
that he had wandered into Soviet air-
space, but the legitimacy of the query is
undermined by the observation that
TASS also picked up this issue "appar-
ently trying to shift some blame" (9/12,
p. 25). Newsweek answers its own ques-
tion by saying that there is "a good
chance no human ears were actually
listening for much of the time" (p. 25).
This assertion is questioned elsewhere,
for instance by a report from a former
worker at a military tracking station in
South Korea that Washington would be
informed immediately if the airliner
entered Soviet airspace (Manchester
Guardian Weekly, 9/14, p. 15).
Also omitted from newsmagazine
309
CORCORAN
reportage was any attempt to get beyond
the idea of "Russian paranoia" and
understand the Russian reaction to the
intrusion, an attempt that was made in
the liberal press. The Guardian, for
instance, pointed out in reference to the
rhetoric about "an evil Russian empire,"
that Americans are generally unaware
"that many Russians have a 'devil
image' of the U.S. and that each country
tends to nourish the other's worst suspi-
cions" (9/11, p. 15). A later issue pre-
sents to Americans the analogy of a
North Korean plane entering the U.S.,
ignoring instructions to leave or land for
two and a half hours and then heading
straight for Cheyenne Mountain,
Colorado, headquarters of NORAD and
the Space Command (9/25, p. 6).
Perhaps the most important area
where the closure imposed on the dis-
course of the newsmagazines could have
been pried ajar is the manner in which
references are made by all three maga-
zines to how communist governments
utilize civilian airliners for surveillance
purposes. Newsweek reports that be-
tween 1981 and 1982, Aeroflot planes
went off course 16 times to fly over U.S.
military installations, including Groton,
Connecticut, "at the precise moment
when General Dynamic Corporation's
Electronic Boat Division was launching
the first Trident nuclear submarine"
(9/12, p. 22). The civilian airliners of
Soviet allies have flown similar spy mis-
sions. Instead of concluding, as the press
elsewhere did, that the use of airliners
for espionage is not uncommon in both
communist and capitalist countries,
Newsweek concludes that "given the
Soviet bloc's apparent use of civilian
aircraft for intelligence gathering, it is
perhaps not surprising that the Kremlin
could suspect South Korea and the
United States of the same thing" (p. 22).
Time also refers to the incursions of
310

KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE SEPTEMBER 1986

Aeroflot, LOT (Polish) and CSA tioned as political tracts supporting the
(Czech) into restricted zones in Ameri- Reagan administration. All three display
can territory and claims U.S. planes do a very similar interpretation of the disas-
the same thing in Soviet territory (9/12, ter, so similar that one is tempted to
p. 14). But there is no suggestion that the wonder if this is yet another example of
U.S. planes are civilian airliners. "pack journalism." Why the high degree
Instead, the idea that airliners can in any of uniformity? Some of it can be traced to
way improve on the visual detail avail- a common magazine style in which "fact,
able to spy satellites is downgraded by opinion and colorful adjectives are
"common sense." The illegal incursions blended together into a slick, highly
of Soviet bloc airliners is framed by the readable puree" (Corcoran, 1983, p.
conclusion that "we never blasted any of 309), in which the detached tone of
them out of the sky" (p. 14). traditional journalism gives way to a
From the time of the actual KAL 007 narrative point of view which allows
disaster to when it disappeared from the subjective attitudes and values to domi-
agenda of the newsmagazines, its mean- nate a story. Some of it can be traced to
ing had acquired a closure that solidly the dyadic competition that Time and
resisted the queries and loose ends being Newsweek in particular are locked into.
explored by the press elsewhere. Since The implications of this competition are
there was no reason to suspect any U.S. explored by Gans (1979, pp. 176-181),
particularly the notion that it prevents
involvement in the tragedy, the U.S.S.R.
journalists from judging their work by
was wholly to blame and it appeared that
general considerations of substance and
"global outrage" validated this view.
quality shared in the profession as a
New information unfolding elsewhere
whole.
was rigidly excluded and all Soviet
attempts to change the dominant Ameri- A more interesting line of inquiry into
can interpretation were branded as self- the remarkable degree of similarity
between the newsmagazines in this
serving lies. The erosion of credibility in
the official U.S. position in the second instance may be their tendency to rely on
half of September was carefully con- a narrow set of sources: those which
cealed from the readers of Time, News- reflect the U.S. government position.
week and USN&WR. A reasonable crit- There is ample evidence that govern-
icism at this point would be that the ment, in its bureaucracy and in its indi-
three newsmagazines in this instance vidual officers, has favored access to the
acted not as an independent Fourth news media. Much recent scholarship on
Estate but as the mouthpiece of the U.S. the marketing of news stresses the sym-
government in a manner more usually biotic relationship between "official"
attributed to the relationship between sources and journalists: the "official"
TASS or Pravda and the Soviet govern- version gets easy and widespread access
ment. to the media, while journalists protect
their dependency on the messages of a
small spectrum of "official" news
GOVERNMENT-NEWS sources. Bennett (1983) shows how this
COMPLEX is true even of prestigious papers like the
The analysis of KAL 007 coverage New York Times and the Washington
presented here forces the conclusion that Post, paragons of professional perfor-
the three major newsmagazines func- mance in American Journalism. Sigal

CSMC
(cited in Gans, 1979, p. 145) analyzed
the origin of 2,850 domestic and foreign
stories that appeared in the New York
Times and the Washington Post and
found that public officials were the
source of 78% of the stories. Halberstam
(1979, pp. 667-668) describes Times'
reliance on sources at the top levels of
government, rather than at middle and
lower levels, as leading to a reflection of
"policy not reality." Gandy (1982) has
shown how the value of such access to
media by "official" sources is increased
to the extent that a source "can disguise
the promotional, partisan, self-interested
quality of information. . . . Information
that would be accepted with caution if its
source were identified as a partisan in a
debate is much more powerful if it is
received as objective fact, reported by an
uninterested journalist" (p. 14). The
Glasgow Media Group (1976, 1980,
1982) has shown how the "official" line
in a controversy is given a preferred or
privileged position in the internal struc-
ture of news stories, even in media orga-
nizations like the BBC where impartial-
ity is mandated by law.
Why such overwhelming reliance of
official sources? Gans (1979) suggests
many advantages of such an arrange-
ment to news workers and organizations,
including the crucial ability of official
sources to provide suitable information
quickly and in quantity (pp. 121-124).
The proliferation of large amounts of
information by a source means that some
of it cannot help but turn into news,
concurrently placing less well organized
sources, with perhaps more accurate
information, at a disadvantage. There
are many incentives built into the news-
gathering process which inhibit the
questioning of official sources. Beat
reporters must frequently censor them-
selves by calculating the costs and bene-
fits of displeasing their sources with a
311
CORCORAN
story, deciding whether to report it or
pass it up so as to maintain an important
source relationship for another day
"when a much bigger story may come
their way that will justify disruption of
the rapport" (Gans, 1979, p. 134).
White House correspondents are suscep-
tible not only to the "quasi-monarchical
mystique" of the President but also to the
taboo against asking searching questions
that may anger him and show the corre-
spondent to be disrespectful. Reporters
are also susceptible to the more direct
pressures of the Pentagon which "has
long been known to withhold informa-
tion from or banish reporters who do not
adhere to the Pentagon 'line' " (p. 135).
In the case of foreign news, journalists
often follow the government's foreign
policy because no equally efficient news
model is available and because this
solution discourages State Department
criticism. Journalists gain nothing by
unnecessarily provoking official criticism
because they know that "their audience
is not particularly interested in foreign
news and would be unlikely to support
them if the government chose to attack
news media for harming the national
interest" (p. 149).
Among the pressures public officials
can exert on news organizations Gans
lists complaints to corporate executives
in the news organization, threats to hurt
the firm economically (e.g., RCA's con-
cern during the Vietnam War that the
government might cancel the conglomer-
ate's defense contracts in retaliation for
NBC News reports on the war), mobili-
zing pressure from advertisers, launch-
ing investigations into news practices,
instigating legal threats against individ-
ual journalists and direct appeals to the
audience in an attempt to impress it with
journalists' failings. More far-reaching
measures would include encouraging
new, more compliant news firms that
312
KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE
would compete with non-cooperative
ones, proposing government regulation
of news media and establishing govern-
ment-run news media that would favor-
ably publicize a President's activities
(Gans,1979,p. 282).
Since the departure of founding own-
ers from direct roles in news companies,
connections between government and
media have become less directly person-
al. Among the most important of these
connections are systemic mechanisms
that keep out some news by shaping
journalists' perspectives, thus deter-
mining what they look for and what they
see. Through various forms of what
Gans (1979, p. 276) calls "anticipatory
avoidance," journalists are restrained
from straying into subjects and ideas that
could generate pressure in the news
organization. Of immediate relevance to
an examination of the KAL 007 story is
the taboo on "unbelievable news" which
determines that even a normally convinc-
ing amount of evidence is not sufficient to
persuade journalists that certain stories
are true. The phenomenon under scru-
tiny may be unique, information on it
may come from an untrustworthy
source, or a story may transcend a jour-
nalist's expectations of what people are
capable of doing. During the last 15
years, this taboo can be seen in operation
in such cases where the national media
found certain stories too unbelievable
despite the evidence: exposes of illegal
CIA and FBI activities, published for
years in the radical press but not consid-
ered believable by the mainstream press
until 1975; American atrocities in Viet-
nam, including My Lai; some of the
early exposes of Ralph Nader and, at the
very start, the Watergate scandals. The
whole framing of the Vietnam War as an
American struggle against a communist
enemy rather than as a long-standing
civil war, fostered the tendency not only
SEPTEMBER 1986
to favor official sources heavily but to
avoid North Vietnamese and National
Liberation Front sources, since the
media had framed them as the enemy,
thus denying their viewpoint any credi-
bility.
The intriguing question that remains
to be answered is how does it happen
that decisions made in the newsrooms (or
perhaps the boardrooms) of the major
newsmagazines contain strong elements
of a particular ideology, previously con-
sidered "right wing" but now pulled
back into the normality and credibility of
"the center," the presumed national con-
sensus? Not only do media perform an
ideological function by constructing cer-
tain ways of looking at the world, but
this function may be traced to their inter-
nal modes of organization (e.g., the edi-
torial hierarchies peculiar to corporate
journalism), their linkages to other insti-
tutions (e.g., the movement towards
conglomeration in media institutions,
especially connections with companies
operating in politically contentious areas
such as oil and military technology) and
their commercial imperatives (e.g., the
belief that opinions that seem to be closer
to a "national consensus" get wider
acceptance in society and maintain
healthy ratings or circulation figures).
Thus, links can be forged between a
dominant style of writing, the messages
embedded in it and the economic ration-
ale that sustains it. Murdock and Gold-
ing, for instance, point out that the pres-
sure to maximize revenues for media
institutions produces a consistent ten-
dency to avoid "the unpopular and ten-
dentious and draw instead on the values
and assumptions which are most famil-
iar and most widely legitimated" (Mur-
dock & Golding, 1979, p. 37). Similar
analyses of other media offer useful mod-
els (e.g., Gitlin, 1983; Golding & Elliott,
1979). Tirman (1981), Gans (1979) and

CSMC
Halberstam (1979) offer useful back-
ground information for further inquiry
into the organizational behavior of the
newsmagazines in times of crisis.
Besides the economic dimension of
media operations, there is also the histor-
ical dimension to be considered. For reg-
ular readers of newsmagazines, it must
be remembered that the magazines have
been performing an ideological function
for several decades by cultivating a Rus-
sophobic worldview. As Corcoran (1983)
points out, the magazines have remained
trapped in crude stereotypes and melo-
dramatic, superficial images which
operate largely to pre-empt debate with
caricature. His examination of news-
magazine coverage of Soviet funerals for
the last three decades reveals the opera-
tion of a process of mythic reductionism,
which has consistently generated images
of Russians as coercive, irrational, bru-
tal, visceral, cunning, savage. Gans
(1979, p. 34) points out that while the
official decline in the Cold War and
Nixon's visit to China brought about a
considerable change in the news from
most communist countries, reportage
from the Soviet Union was much less
affected by the official American shift to
detente. The so-called liberalizing of
Time in the 1960s, coinciding with the
passage of editorial power from Henry
Luce to appointed executives, involved a
shift in that magazine's attitude to China
and Vietnam rather than in its attitude to
the U.S.S.R. (Halberstam, 1979, pp.
467-485, 549-552).
THE PALL OF SILENCE
In the case of KAL 007, with the close
relationship between government and
media points of view and the exclusion of
alternatives, it is not unreasonable to
conclude that media and government
together are in possession of a powerful
313
CORCORAN
mechanism of political control over a
confused public looking for simple and
emotionally satisfying solutions to geo-
political problems. The synchronization
of media and government viewpoints,
with all the credibility, resources and
information control that this allows,
enables official sources to dominate the
news long enough to influence the out-
come of such political issues as accelerat-
ing the arms race. As Bennett (1983,
p. I l l ) suggests,
the repeated exposure to completely familiar
stimuli results in the formation of subcon-
scious mental "scripts" that make it possible
to respond to situations without really think-
ing about them. Curiosity and attention are
minimized in such "scripted" situations. On
the other hand, stimuli that are completely
foreign may be so dissonant and hard to
assimilate that people tend to ignore, avoid or
misinterpret them.
If readers are led to think only in slo-
gans, spaces between slogans are left
empty and unexplained. The more a
dominant version of the prevailing "cli-
mate of opinion" is defined and dissemi-
nated by journalists, the more will con-
trary individual voices remain silent,
thus accelerating the media effect in
what Noelle-Neuman (1974) calls a
"spiral of silence."
The mechanisms of this spiral of
silence are far from clearly understood,
however, particularly in a society where
the mainstream and the alternative press
exist side by side in an atmosphere free
from overt government censorship. In
particular, it is not at all clear what
constraints inhibit the mainstream press
from utilizing its far greater resources to
explore ideas introduced by its small-
circulation counterpart and elevating
them to a more salient position on the
national agenda. Coverage of KAL 007
in The Nation is a case in point. Proba-
314

KAL 007 AND THE EVIL EMPIRE SEPTEMBER 1986

bly the strongest call in the media for a spiracy theories" and the fact that many
full and impartial investigation of the questions remained unanswered. One of
U.S. role in the shooting down of KAL the most interesting summaries of such
007 has been David Pearson's probing of questions was an article in the British
the available evidence, published in an • defense journal Defense Attache, re-
entire issue of The Nation, August 18, printed in World Press Review (WPR)
1984. Pearson stresses the timing of both (9/84), suggesting that in response to
the KAL 902 (1978) and the KAL 007 Ronald Reagan publicly hanging "the
catastrophes in relation to potentially albatross" of KAL 007 around the neck
constructive moments in the process of of the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders
arms control negotiations. Cyrus Vance extracted a secret diplomatic accord from
and Andrei Gromyko were discussing the Reagan administration to end this
arms control issues in Moscow when type of intelligence gathering operation
KAL 902 was shot down. Gromyko and and to demilitarize the Shuttle program.
George Schultz were scheduled to meet This, it suggests, may explain "the
in Madrid and Geneva a week after astounding pall of U.S. and Soviet
KAL 007 was shot down, to sign an silence that rapidly fell over the event
agreement on the sale of high-tech and has been maintained steadfastly"
equipment to the U.S.S.R. and to discuss (WPR, 9/84, p. 28). In spite of this
the American deployment of Cruise and support from across the Atlantic, how-
Pershing missiles in Europe. Without ever, The Nation did not succeed in
trying to prove whether or not KAL 007 rousing national attention to the failure
was a spy-plane, Pearson's analysis leads of American media to initiate a sus-
him to the conclusion that the White tained, responsible inquiry into the cir-
House and the Secretary of Defense cumstances surrounding the deaths of
must have known in advance that the hundreds of innocent passengers. In the
plane was in grave danger and could worldview of the mainstream news-
have communicated with it but did not magazines, there was no room for any
do so: such call for further inquiry. The ideo-
logical closure achieved by this world-
At a minimum, it appears that the President view was so tight that such calls would
and his Administration misled the press and probably have run the risk of being
the world concerning what they knew about framed "anti-American."
the KAL 007 incident and when they knew
it. Beyond that, it appears probable that they With the recent burgeoning of analy-
risked 269 lives in the hope of gathering ses of the KAL tragedy (e.g., Clubb,
information about the Soviet defense system. 1985; Dallin, 1985), spurring further
(The Nation, 8/18/84, p. 124) controversy in reviewers' columns (e.g.,
New York Review of Books, 4/25/85,
A summary of The Nation's findings 7/18/85), it is obvious that the last word
was published as a full-page advertise- on this sad event has not been written. In
ment in the New York Times (10/25/ the absence of a full accounting of the
84) and Pearson's thesis was briefly "facts" then, how should the media critic
picked up by NBC's The Today Show proceed? How is it possible to talk about
and in the New York Times itself. On "bias" or "slant" when reality "as it
September 1, 1984, the anniversary of really is" may never be seen in all its
the tragedy, many news outlets carried detail, until perhaps the release of classi-
stories referring to the existence of "con- fied documents relating to KAL 007 well
 315

CSMC CORCORAN

into the 21st century if ever? This is a
problem that overshadows all cultural
criticism "in the dream of forms of repre-
sentation that are neutral and through
which reality might be revealed as if
without mediation" (Bennett, 1982, p.
306). The epistemological implications
of the problem are beyond the scope of
this paper, but a solution may be
glimpsed in the realization that the broad
spectrum of media includes systems of
signification which are dominant as well
as systems which are not. Within this
spectrum there is a constant ideological
battle being waged. The social and polit-.
ical impact of "the KAL crisis" should
be understood, then, not in terms of how
it codifies a reality presumed to be exter-
nal to it, but in terms of the position this
discourse occupies in relation to other
discourses, all of which constitute a
dimension of reality itself, not merely the
transformation of a "more real" reality
which they are all reflecting in a more or
less accurate way. In the case being
explored here, we are witnessing a revi-
val of passions and perceptions in and
through media, that all too often have
frozen the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. into
Cold War immobility. It is the task of the
critic to survey the ideological battle-
ground to discern the structured rela-
tionships between the ideas and world-
views fighting for supremacy. •

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