Essay on War and the Media

During the Vietnam War, Americans were greatly influenced by the extensive media coverage of the war. Before the 1960’s and the intensification of the war, public news coverage of military action was constrained heavily by the government and was directed by Government policy. The Vietnam War uniquely altered the perception of war in the eyes of American citizens by bringing the war into their homes. The Vietnam War was the first U.S uncensored war resulting in the release of graphic images and unaltered accounts of horrific events that helped to change public opinion of the war like nothing it had ever been. This depiction by the media led to a separation between the United States government and the press; much of what was reported flouted

By 1968, more than half of the American people relied on television as their principal source of news. What they saw informed, engrossed, and unsettled them. CBS Evening News anchor Harry Reasoner referred to it as “horrors and failures.” The Vietnam War dominated the network newscast as it never had before. Suddenly the war was everywhere. The impact on the American public would indeed be great. It set off a critical reaction to the war within the American media and gave greater credence to arguments against the war that a vocal protest movement had been voicing for some time. The media coverage of the Tet Offensive had a great influence on the eventual outcome of the fighting and its aftermath. Clarence Wyatt, author of Paper

During the period 1960 and 1964 television in America had become extremely familiar to the public. Not only were they able to now be involved in the Vietnam War, but see it on their TV screens at home for the first time ever. In the 1950’s, only 9% of American homes owned a television, however, this figure rose dramatically to 93% during the time of the war in 1966. With inadequate government controls, The American journalists in Vietnam were now able to record video footage and expose the American government of their lies. The government’s failure in maintaining censorship to the public just like they had managed to do in World War 1 had failed. The media was now able to publish uncensored pictures and videos

Radio was a very important transmission mode. The radio’s main function was to deliver citizens the necessary information in a way that was easy to understand, while at the same time making sure the news agencies earned sufficient ratings and to profit. The radio companies had to make the radio programming easy to understand to the average citizen, because “[t]he education of many Americans had ended after freshman year in high school. (Horten, p.

People believe that the media played a large role in the U.S. defeat. They claim that the media’s inclination toward negative reporting helped to eliminate support for the war in the United States. However, many experts who have studied the role of the media have concluded that prior to 1968 most reporting was actually supportive of the U.S. effort in Vietnam. An assessment made by Walter Cronkite, an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years, in 1968 said that the Vietnam conflict was mired in stalemate. He basically said that the U.S. had lost the war; the negative tone of reporting may have reflected rather than created similar feelings among the American public.

Up until the 1950s and 60s, investigative journalism did not exist, or at least not pertaining to issues in which the government was involved; what the government said was untouchable. After the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times, in March of 1971, the American people suddenly had access to information that confirmed that the United States had taken an active role in building up the conflict in Vietnam. Simply put, “the people who were aware of how we had stumbled into Vietnam were the ones who wanted to get us out” (Heller, “Interview with” 1975), so this shocking revelation paired with the continued involvement of the United States in Vietnam added insult to injury for citizens whose support for the war was already dwindling. Yossarian’s bold statement that “the enemy...is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on” (Heller, Catch-22 124), resonated with an angered and betrayed American public. Yossarian represents “a rallying cry for a generation traumatized by the Vietnam War” (Muhlestein 2009) because he does not walk through life blindly. He asks the questions that everyone ignores, and he expects a proper answer, a characteristic which was consistent with the “spirit of revolt” (Heller, “Checking In” 1981) Heller felt in the political

Finally, I will also show how their various works impacted public opinion and whether or not it largely affected the American government’s decision to pull troops out of Vietnam. The paper will include several sources from mainly historical monographs, journal articles, biographies, and autobiographies.

The investigation assesses the media coverage of the Tet Offensive and its impact on American policy concerning the Vietnam War from 1968 until 1969. The investigation evaluates the contrast between media broadcasts and government reports of the war, the effect of the media on the American public, and the effect of American public opinion on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s course of action. Two of the sources, Vietnam and America: A Documented History by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, and The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam by Daniel C. Hallin are examined.

“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room.” Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of communication theory, told the Montreal Gazette in 1975. Vietnam is often referred to as the television war and it’s been widely said that the outcome of the war was decided not on the battle field but on the television screen. Today I will be exploring the extent to which media reporting on the Tet Offensive influenced US crucial decision making in 1968. The aspects that I will be investigating are; the media coverage of the war and it’s influence on public opinion as well as how the result of these two aspects impacted on how the government formed their decisions.

Before the invention of Television, most people could not possibly be completely cognizant of events going on overseas or even on the other side of the country and therefore had to rely on the Presidents’ word. In 1968, the Vietnam War was at its peak. President Johnson held fast to his belief that we would be able to win so the American people continued to support him. However CBS’s Walter Cronkite decided to make a trip to the war-torn country of Vietnam to see the current situation with his own eyes. When he returned he announced to the American public that the war was hopeless and there was no way that military victory was possible. Johnson knew that the American people greatly respected Cronkite and that they would all believe the war was hopeless. So the only thing for him to do was to pull troops out of Vietnam and call the war “an honorable attempt to defend democracy.” I believe that Cronkite’s coverage of the war was a good thing because it allowed the American public to see exactly what was going on and make their own decisions about the situation. People no longer had to rely only on the President. Cronkite’s documentary was also an important deciding

It is known media coverage over the decades starting in WWII is dramatically different than how it was during Vietnam

     Edward R. Murrow, former reporter for CBS once said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we…remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment unpopular.” Times are changing when it comes to the media covering wars. There was once a time in our country when journalists were not afraid to report the realities and atrocities, to a reasonable extent, that occurred during wartime. During the Vietnam conflict America saw what actually was happening in the jungle on the other side of the world and it enabled citizens to form their

During the first Gulf War in 1990, the government created the Department of Defense and News Media Pool (DoDNMP) (Edkins, and Zehfuss 151). The job of the DoDNMP was to censor the media’s reports on the war. This was accomplished by restricting reporters’ access to the battlefield, by holding press conferences, and by subjecting all media to “formal security review” (Edkins, and Zehfuss 153). As one could imagine, the DoDNMP was not very popular with the media. After the first Gulf War, the press responded to the censorship, “On July 2, 1991, the chiefs of seventeen major U.S. news organizations sent a report to the Secretary of Defense bemoaning the restrictions imposed on press coverage during the Persian Gulf War.” (Kennedy 11) The media made it clear that they were not happy with the amount of access

The role public media played in the Vietnam war was unprecedented: television brought live images even video clips to Americans’ sitting room, photographs and reports from the war front brought the latest news of the battles, documentaries and films depicted the sensational stories from the war and war heroes. Bearing so many social influences, medias were somewhat blamed for being responsible for the loss of war by many historians. Most of them attributed the responsibility to the television which undermined the political and military efforts, and to the journalists and broadcasters who opposed the war---finally led to the burst of domestic anti-war sentiments. But that is not true. (New American Nation) With eloquent supporting evidence, U.S. domestic medias during the Vietnam war was not the major contributor to the cease-fire and the loss of the Vietnam because they pertain supportive biases within reports in general. Also for their effort of postponing yet hampering the transfer of sensitive reports to the public under government censorship. Lastly for the ineffectiveness of reports in changing public opinion shown in the poll.

Although the press had quite a bit of freedom in Vitnam, they still had agreements with the government having to do with battle coverage and positions. Such as not reporting battle information until after it had began, and most reporters repespected this practice. However, it was not mandatory; there were no contracts just an unspoken agreement. It was after the Tet Offensive, the operation that revealed that the United States was not winning the war, that the military began to severally limit the press in Vietnem. Increasing during Vietnam, the commreadery between repoers and the soldiers that were a hallmark during World War II and Korea was chipped away. Commanding officiers thought that reportser were trying to make them look like the bad guys and reporters assumed everything they were td was a lie.