The military understood well the fault lines on which its power rested. It understood, too, that to ensure the continuance of that power, to convince the citizenry the nation needed it in power, the military needed to control the messages that formed public opinion — in this case that the rioters were instigated by outside influences, read radicals and communists, and that the military was protecting the nation from those outliers. And as crude as they were, the military’s efforts to do so worked. For example, incoming foreign-language news magazines bound for subscribers or for sale at kiosks all over the country were individually clipped of offending stories before they were distributed. Television and radio news broadcast were strictly controlled as to the information they were allowed to air. And the nation’s newspapers were censored heavily (Seoul papers, 1980; Stokes, 1980, August 29; Stokes, 1980, September 4).