Source G may not be very reliable because it doesn’t say how many people they had asked, for all we know it could of only been ten, twenty people asked instead of the millions tuning in to watch the television. If it’s only ten, twenty people being asked then it’s not reliable at all because it’s not giving the bigger picture. It could also be unreliable because the mass media were strongly in favour of the war at the time and so they could quite easily alter and sway facts and figures to how they wanted them to be published. Those figures could be utter rubbish, for all we know the figures could be the other way round. The mass media had the power to sway public opinion quite easily, just by showing what they wanted to show and what they wanted the public to read.
Source H shows us the results of opinion polls in the USA in the 1960’s. It shows us the Public’s view of the important problem facing the country according to Gallup Poll results 1961-68. It says that by 1965 onwards Vietnam was the main concern, over issues such as Race, Inflation, Segregation which are all big issues. You could say this is extremly reliable because this was produced by Gallup, a very well respected and trusted poll organisation, so many people wouldn’t have thought that they would produce any false facts or figures, also because the war was going so bad, much of the public did go against it and so that makes the facts and figures look correct in this source.
On the other hand you could say it’s quite unreliable because it doesn’t give you the bigger picture. There were about 230 million people in the Country at the time and only a couple of thousand were asked, so only a tiny percentage was asked, this means that the information hasn’t come from the whole Country and so could be displaying false results, this is mass media again manipulating the public now trying to turn them against the war by trying to say that the whole Country is against it.
Source I is not directly about public reaction but it is an example of the sort of news that would effect and change public opinion. In Source I it shows us a letter written by a soldier fighting in Vietnam in 1969 explaining the horrors of the war. This is very reliable because it has been written first hand by an actual soldier fighting in Vietnam. He is telling it bluntly how it is and so the American public are going to be disturbed and scarred by this, especially when he tells of how the average age of a soldier is nineteen. This is a soldier that has seen the My Lai Massacre and the Tet Offensive and so he knows what’s happening. This was a letter sent to a family and then sent on to the newspaper, so it wasn’t deliberately written to shock, he was intending just to send it to his family not knowing that it would be passed on to the national newspaper and its impact. Once the American public would have read and seen this they would have been shocked and made to think what was the point in the war.
Then again it may not be very reliable because it had been sent on to the newspaper, which was a form of mass media, and so they could have changed and edited it to sound worse than what it was to manipulate there audience. It could have easily of been sent to the newspaper as a normal letter and then the newspaper could have altered it.
Source J shows us an article from Time magazine in January 1970. It described the My Lai Massacre in 1968, it was written by a US army reporter who was present at the time. This is a very reliable source because again it has come first hand from a witness who was present at the event. This report would have almost certainly have swayed the public against the War, it was so horrific that the Government had tried to keep the My Lai Massacre a secret by not releasing their reports for two years as they also knew it would be bad for public opinion., this shows they were worried about public reaction. Once this had been released then public opinion would have changed quite dramatically.
Then again this may not have been very reliable as again time magazine was apart of the mass media, so it could of very easily have been changed to manipulate public opinion. It had become a very different story, from the beginning when the media were strongly in favour of the war to now where they were completely against it. Again Source J is not directly about public opinion but the delay shows the government was aware reactions were becoming negative and reports about atrocities like this would upset people and worry them about their loved ones.
Altogether the sources are useful because they show public reactions were becoming negative for example in Source H and Source J which shows the government were aware of this; Source I and J help to explain why people would turn against the war because you can work out the reactions to bad news of the war would be negative.
By Sean Mckinnon
