NBC's Tom Brokaw exclaimed, on day one (12/20/89): "We haven't got [Manuel Noriega] yet." CNN anchor Mary Anne Loughlin asked a former CIA official (12/21/89): "Noriega has stayed one step ahead of us. Do you think we'll be able to find him?" After eagerly quizzing a panel of U.S. military experts on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (12/21/89) about whether "we" had wiped out the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF), Judy Woodruff concluded, "So not only have we done away with the PDF, we've also done away with the police force." So much for separation of press and state.
Nightline's Ted Koppel and other TV journalists had a field day mocking Noriega's Orwellianly titled "Dignity Battalions," but none were heard ridiculing the invasion's code name: "Operation Just Cause." The day after the invasion began (12/21/89), NBC Nightly News offered its own case study in Orwellian newspeak: While one correspondent referred to the U.S. military occupiers as engaged in "peacekeeping chores," another correspondent on the same show referred to Latin American diplomats condemning the U.S. at the Organization of American States as a "lynch mob." After the Soviet Union criticized the invasion as "gunboat diplomacy" (as had many other countries), Dan Rather ( CBS Evening News, 12/20/89) dismissed it as "old-line, hard-line talk from Moscow."
Journalism gave way to state propaganda when a CNN correspondent dutifully reported on the first day of the invasion (12/20/89), "U.S. troops have taken detainees, but we are not calling them 'prisoners of war' because the U.S. has not declared war." (That kind of obedient reporter probably still refers to the Vietnam "conflict.") Similarly, on day one, many network correspondents couldn't bring themselves to call the invasion an invasion until they got the green light from Washington; instead, it was referred to variously as a military action, intervention, operation, expedition, affair or insertion.