The Role and Importance of the Media in Vietnam

supportive of an American intervention in Vietnam. Secondly, it shows the Administration’s tactics of “news management”: everything that appeared in the press was based on official press releases; no journalist was allowed to talk to any of the members of the Maddox or to read any of the messages sent to or from the Maddox. Despite this gross lack of transparency from the Government of the most democratic country of the world, however, no one doubted that was the truth, no journalist stepped back to get an overall view of the conflict and to question what rights the United States actually had to be in Vietnam.

The media’s initial support for the Administration was mostly based on two factors, The first was pure ideology, the idea that as a bastion of freedom, the United States had the right and even duty to intervene when one of its ships was attacked by Communist forces and that the “responsible journalist” should by no means quibble when the President announced such an intervention. The second reason for the media support in the Tonkin crisis was, ironically, “objective journalism”, the idea that the sole goal of the journalist is to present the facts. Fact is there were no facts, there only was an official version of what had happened. It follows that the entire support the Administration had for waging that war was gained through deceit.

Despite this obscure beginning however, the media enjoyed in Vietnam a freedom it had never enjoyed before (or since, for that matter). This was because Vietnam was a contained war, both geographically and in terms of the military forces deployed, because, as a contained war it presented no threat to national security (therefore a censorship on the media would appear anti-democratic), and because, officially, the US were not directly involved in the war, but were there only to assist the South Vietnamese government in its struggle against Communism. This fact only made censorship of the media officially impossible.

The success of the first national deception regarding the Tonkin incident, Young and Jesser argue, set the trend for a continued deception over American goals and policies that was used by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, to one extent or the other. It was a nation-scale deceit and an attempt to manipulate the media and always put across an “official” version of the truth, which in the later years of the war came to contradict again and again what journalists could see for themselves on the battlefield. It is not my argument that the media was well-informed however. That was impossible because, despite the lack of censorship and the relative ease with which one could get to Vietnam, the media seldom had access to classified information. Most of the times, it had to content itself with what it saw on the battlefield (which was wounded and dying American soldiers) and the official Military press releases (which said no American till had been injured or killed). The access the media had to sensitive information usually came from disillusioned superior officers, who many a time preferred to remain anonymous (such was the case of Lt. Col. John Paul Vain, who found a trusted ally in 28-year old Saigon correspondent for the Mew York Times David Halberstam). However, the flagrant differences between what the press had to say, well informed or not and the official version (ever-optimistic, even in the wake of the Tet offensive) eventually created that “credibility gap” with the public. That is not to say, however that the media turned the  public  against  the war.  It  simply  made  it  more  aware of what was going on in Vietnam, and even at that point, many Americans still wanted an escalation, rather than a de-escalation of the war.

What probably made the relations between the media and the military so difficult was the outrageous optimism of many superior officers. Gen. Harkins, the commander of the MCAV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) between 1962-1964, was characterized by an unrealistic optimism and Halberstam writes — the high command of the MCAV became a place “isolated and eventually insulated from reality”. It is worthwhile noting that many of the superior officers now were junior officers in World War II, which was eventually catastrophic for two reasons: firstly it was inconceivable for them that America, the world’s super-power could lose a war, and secondly they were by no means able to make feasible decisions in a war they had never seen before, such as the guerilla and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The ever-optimistic Harkins was replaced in 1964 by Gen. W. Westmoreland. Although more realistic, it was difficult even for him to asses the situation without any front lines. Westmoreland was also a believer in “the big war” and an attrition warfare that would eventually exhaust “Communist” resources. In his relations to the media, however, he was by no means friendly and he took every chance he got to criticize the press, specially David Halberstam and Maleom Brown especially:

Finding fault was one way to achieve the sensational

and finding fault with an oriental regime with little background

in or respect for Western style democracy was easy …when

their peers back home rewarded them with a shared Pulitzer price, the

pattern for those who followed was set.

I consider I have established with sufficient evidence that the relationship between the media and the military was everything but friendly and that because of that both sides had to lose: the press was denied access to vital information that would give it a more accurate and probably more supportive overview of the situation and the Military (and the Administration) lost their credibility and witnessed the slow erosion of support by the American public because of the media’s impossibility to convey any sense of purpose to sporadic fighting in an unconventional warfare

3-The Media and Public Opinion

“For the first time in modem history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the television screen” said Robert Elegant, Los Angeles Times, alumnus. The defeat in Vietnam left the United States deeply divided and almost no issue was more controversial and bitterly disputed than the role the media had, i.e. to what extent the media was to blame for losing the war at home.

Several opinion poles in the 60s revealed that more than 50% of the American public, in case of conflicting information, would rely on television rather than the press. However, as I mentioned before, neither the television nor the written press were able to offer the American public battles they could identify with, a sense of purpose to the struggle. In the protracted war the VC were fighting, all television could present was a series of “continuous and seemingly inconclusive actions that typified Vietnam until the major battles of Tet.” It was this, combined- with official versions of an ever-improving military situation that created the “credibility gap”. The nightly briefings by JUSPAO (dubbed “the five o’clock follies”) could easily be contradicted by what the reporters had seen on the field for themselves just hours early. And since this happened every night, the public caught a taste, and came to trust, thc TV news, specially when it came in contradiction with the official press releases.

This by no means implies that the media is the one to blame for the shift in public opinion. The peak of public support for the Vietnam war was in January 1966 and it steadily declined thereafter. With the casualties rising from 1000 to 10000 “homeboys”, statistics show that the overall support of the Military dropped by 15%. Such a response was regardless of how the war was going and the same pattern has been observed in Korea. The media was merely an intermediary.

It is again Gem Westmoreland’s opinion that of the media that:

[the coverage was] almost exclusively violent, miserable or

controversial; guns firing, men falling, helicopters crashing, buildings toppling, huts burning, refugees fleeing, women

wailing. A shot of a single building in ruins could give the

impression of an entire town destroyed. The propensity of the cameramen at Khe Sanh to pose their commentators before a

wrecked C-130 and deliver reports in a tone of voice suggesting

doomsday was all too common.

That was not at all the case: statistics show that before the Tet offensive of January 1968 only 3% of all TV coverage of Vietnam (by ABC, CBS and NBC) showed “heavy battle”. Only 22% showed actual combat and only 24% of the television footage contained images of dead or wounded Americans. This only comes to prove the footage was not “almost exclusively violent” and that there was some form or another of self imposed censorship from the part of the media. There was a form of censorship related to the hours at which the footage was to be shown (usually at hours of maximum audience, there was not much gore in the footage) and there was an ideological pseudo-censorship It was, after all, a war fought by the Americans and reported by American reporters (who spent most of the time side by side with the soldiers on the battlefield), so no matter how scornful the media was of the high officials in Washington, as long as the soldiers were supportive of the war, the television was also supportive. Another fact that has to be taken into account when refuting the statement that “the media is to blame” is that, even thought Vietnam was the “living room war”, in the mid 60s less than 20% of the American public watched the evening news -- and hence footage from Vietnam --  more than three times a week. Last but not least, the television’s role in romanticizing or satanizing the war must be taken into account. Unlike photography, television footage of war had an anti-war character to start with, just because it didn’t show one man heroically dying with a clear shot through the heart, but it showed wounded and dying Americans, it showed all the suffering, misery and disillusionment associated with war.

A thing television can be blamed for was not that it reported all the violence inherent to a war, because as said before, the television was always sympathetic towards the soldiers. A thing television was guilty of was only placing emphasis on the US troops. The stories that made the news were always about US troops in combat, US troops doing civil action, sometimes US troops in trouble (desertion, drugs, fragging). The allies, whose losses (280,000 South Vietnamese dead) far exceeded those of American troops were invisible to the American crews. This gave the American public the feeling that the war was being waged mostly by the Americans and it was probably this, more than the almost exclusively violent coverage which gave the public a sense of disillusionment and war weariness.

When blaming the media for demoralizing the American public, critics have tended to single out images which they say show the war in a much uglier Light than necessary. Two of such images is the shooting of a VC suspect in the head by police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan or the image of a group of children fleeing a Napalm bombing. The things that critics tend to ignore is that none of those pictures were taken between January 1966 and 1967 (that is from the point when American support was the highest and during a period of steady decline). Also what people tend to ignore today is that the photograph of the VC suspect being shot was contextualized so as to aid the US effort, and it was presented as the execution of a member of the VC suspected for several American deaths. When it comes to photographs, it was not the images themselves, but their subsequent incorporation in the anti-war effort that created the illusion that the written press was against the war. Pictures as these, argues Caroline Brothers, have been taken as early as 1962, but were widely rejected by the editors exactly because of their contents, which was not compatible with what the public wanted to see at that time. It appears, therefore, that the images that changed history can only surface when the mood of the public is ripe, hence they exist to reflect and not influence public opinion towards war.

4-Conclusion

It is easy to accuse the media for the loss of public support in Vietnam. After thc media’s massive blunder of reporting the Tet offensive as a major psychological defeat, and not having “the sophistication, integrity or courage to admit their error” (which is actually justifiable by the distrust the media had for official reports) opposition to war rose sharply. Still, the media cannot be singled out as the main cause. Nicholas Hopkinson’s statement is the one that probably best reflects the situation of the media in Vietnam:

As public enthusiasm faded, reporting became more and more critical[…] but to single the media out as the decisive element in declining public opinion is incorrect.

US opinion turned against the war because it was long

                       unsuccessful, costly in terms o/human life and expenditure.’5

Word Count: 2825

Bibliography

1-Brothers, Caroline, War and Photography, London, Routledge, 1997

2-de Burgh, Hugo ed., Investigative Journalism, Context and Practice, London, Routledge, 2000

3-Hallin, C. Daniel, The Uncensored War - The Media and Vietnam, University of California Press, 1989

4-Loengrad, John, Life Photographers - What They Saw, Little, Brown & Co., 1998

5-Tucker, C. Spencer, Vietnam, London, UCL Press 1999

6-Young F. & Jesser P., The Media and the Military, From the Crimea to Desert Strike, London, Macmillan Press Ltd. 1997

7-www.vwam.com/vets/media.html [consulted 28 July 2001]

8-http:/fhome.no.netlkkahrs/vietnam.html [consulted 29 July 2001]

9-www.hometown.aol.com/ecperry/myth. html [consulted 31 July 2001]

10- www hometown.aol.com/ecperrylmythl . html [consulted 31 July 2001]

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