ABSTRACT
In February 1981, the Reagan administration, as its first major foreign policy action, released the State Department ‘White Paper’ entitled ‘Communist interference in El Salvador.’ I was struck by the similarity between the reporting of the 1981 White Paper and the reporting of the White Paper released by the Johnson administration in February of 1965 in preparation for escalation in Vietnam, and decided to write an essay on the remarkable persistence of the old practice of reporting official statements on foreign policy at face value, without consulting alternative sources or historical parallels, and without commenting on their accuracy, significance, or motivation. I was quickly ‘scooped’ by numerous critiques of White Paper coverage. 1 But in the meantime a much more complicated and theoretically more significant story was developing.
