Beginning during the Vietnam War (1955-1975), and continuing into the present there has been a continuing debate on the influence of the news media on the course and outcome of the conflict.
This debate has centered upon a set of basic assumptions shared across the American political spectrum. On the one side are those who charged that the media misrepresented the U.S. military effort, causing a collapse of American will to prevail in a war that could and should have been won.
Post-1968, the charge that the press had "lost Vietnam" had become an article of faith to many political conservatives, military officers, veterans, and members of the public.
Ranged against them are those who saw the media as having revealed to the public the truth about failed policy, which in turn forced decision-makers to face reality and alter the course of the war. Both sides staunchly believed that the media was a "decisive actor" on the stage of the Vietnam conflict and that changes in the coverage of that war produced a shift in public opinion and, by extension, American policy.
A third supposition, one that was held by both groups, was that the communist Tet Offensive of 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War as far as the American public was concerned and that all opinions created and decisions made after its conclusion were a direct result of it. Unfortunately, all three of these suppositions were incorrect.
In January 1963, South Vietnamese forces engaged the communists at the Battle of Ap Bac.
The reporting of what became a debacle for the South Vietnamese military and the condemnation heaped upon it by the Western press became a cause celebre at the time.
The U.S. Mission and Washington both condemned the reports and questioned the motives of the correspondents. The Kennedy administration then went on the offensive, bombarding news editors in the U.S. with complaints concerning the accuracy of the reporting of the Saigon press corps.
This chain of events led to the interesting conundrum of American periodicals attacking the accuracy of their own on-the-spot reporters.
The reporters, however, were not questioning the black and white assumptions of the time that the war was a struggle between the free world and totalitarianism or whether the war was beyond America's ability to win.
They saw it as a conflict over tactics, not principles - the government and military of Diem were hindering a positive solution to the problem. According to the reporters, the U.S. had only to get rid of Diem or take over control of the war itself.
Although the U.S. Mission was irate over the reporting of the battle, even the U.S. Public Information Office (PIO) in Saigon had to admit that working from partial information on an emotional subject, the reporting was "two-thirds accurate" and that the correspondents had done quite respectably.
Ap Bac and the controversy surrounding it marked a permanent divide in the relations between the official U.S. position and the news media in Vietnam. Before the battle, the media criticized Diem and argued for a more U.S. control of the war, but they were still agreeable to the position of the diplomats and military assistance command.
After it, correspondents became convinced that they (and, by extension, the American people) were being lied to and withdrew, embittered, into their own community.
To emphasize that the United States (U.S.) was only assisting the Saigon government in fighting communist aggression, the U.S. diplomatic mission sought to emphasize the South Vietnamese role in releasing news to the press.
Although official U.S. spokesmen might brief correspondents on the activities of Americans in Vietnam, they followed South Vietnamese press guidance in all matters involving the country itself.
The position of the U.S. Mission was that although President Ngo Dinh Diem had a right to dictate and impose press restrictions during what was viewed as a war of aggression waged by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), the American press should be allowed to report on the conflict unhindered, due to the fact that the support of the American public and Congress were absolutely necessary for the continuation of U.S. aid to Saigon.
The American government had no independent information-gathering system in Vietnam and was forced to rely on a regime that the Pentagon Papers described as "discouraging realism".
Reporting was also initially controlled by the bipartisan Cold War consensus that identified foreign policy decisions with national security and there was little editorializing about Vietnam in the pages of American newspapers.
In the tradition of objective American journalism, reporters "just gave the facts". But they were not just any facts. They were official facts that doomed objectivity and opened wide the channel through which official influence flowed.
This would not have mattered except for the fact that the policies of the Kennedy period in South Vietnam did not succeed.
Soon two different pictures of the conflict began to appear in the news media. One increasingly critical of the way the war was being conducted by the South Vietnamese, critical of the Saigon government, and pessimistic about the prospects of both.
The other was supportive of those Americans who led the effort and optimistic about the wars future course.
As the conflict increased in scope and length, the number of lower echelon American sources in the field available to reporters increased and comparisons of official statements of success and progress with those of the personnel "on the ground" who were more skeptical, were the seeds of a "credibility gap" that would only continue to widen.
South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem believed that the U.S. government controlled its media (as he did), and blamed the U.S. Mission for it's increasingly critical stories.
The Mission blamed the reporters for their insensitivity to the need to win Diem's confidence. The reporters, in turn, accused the Mission of misleading them in order to protect Diem.
The U.S. Mission's own ambivalence and the tensions that grew between the Diem regime and the foreign press undermined official U.S. relations with reporters from early 1962 onward.
Although the number of full-time reporters covering the conflict was small (in 1960, they numbered only around eight individuals), that number belied the impression that they made on Diem.
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This situation was only exacerbated during the Buddhist Crisis of May 1963, when the Diem government considered the press as its enemy and was unwilling to communicate its side of the story effectively.
While the top levels of the U.S. Mission in Saigon were inordinately closemouthed around reporters during the period, others, especially those who disagreed with the policy of supporting Diem, were not. They leaked information from discussions with Diem to the press, embarrassing the President and thwarting the Embassy's vigorous efforts to win an end to the anti-Buddhist repressions.
Once again, however, despite occasional factual errors and conflict between the press and the Embassy, most of the commentaries were reasonably accurate. The U.S. Army's official history of military-media relations reported that "Although marred at times by rhetoric and mistaken facts, they often probed to the heart of the crisis."
During the Buddhist Crisis the number of correspondents in South Vietnam swelled from an original nucleus of eight to a contingent of over 60.
By 1964 the leadership of both the U.S. and South Vietnam had changed hands. President John F. Kennedy had been felled by an assassin's bullets and Diem had been murdered during a U.S.-backed military coup. Instead of paving the way for political stability, however, Diem's demise only unleashed a maelstrom of political unrest.
Coup followed coup as South Vietnamese generals vied for power. There were seven governments in Saigon during 1964 - three between 16 August and 3 September alone. The war in South Vietnam ground on and the communists made serious headway. Following the recommendations of an internal report, the new U.S. headquarters, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), made the decision that since news correspondents were "thoroughly knowledgeable" about the war, its Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) would attempt to woo reporters by providing them with "up to date, factual information on current operations and policies.
Although Operation Candor was a welcome relief for correspondents, it did not halt the media's dubiousness concerning the efficacy of the Saigon government or further American involvement with it.
Reporters had also become quite aware that that all sides (the South Vietnamese and American governments, the U.S. Mission, MACV, the Buddhists, etc...) were trying to manipulate them.
It did not help matters that JUSPAO was also MACV's propaganda arm, a fact well that was well known to news correspondents.
The American public was also dissatisfied with the course of events in Vietnam.
At this early stage of the conflict (and continuing to its end) the South Vietnamese people themselves were viewed by the media with the condescension, contempt, and disdain that characterized the American attitude toward them.
American journalists arrived in Vietnam with almost no knowledge of its culture, history, society, or language, nor did they attempt to learn.
Although the U.S. U.S. Department of Defense offered a brief introductory course for journalists on the history and culture of Vietnam, few ever bothered to attend it.
Although the "pacification" of the villages was continuously touted by the U.S. Mission, MACV, and the media as the supreme goal of the Saigon government, there was little real discussion in the media as to why it was so difficult to convince the Vietnamese people to join the side of the Saigon government.
As for the armed forces of the North Vietnamese and National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), American readers rarely encountered the argument that the communists were waging a war of reunification rather than "a campaign to further the interests of a communist conspiracy masterminded by the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union."
The domino theory was utilized to justify the American intervention in order to prevent regional domination by China, overlooking centuries of hostility between the Vietnamese and the Chinese.
Throughout the war communist troops were always portrayed as "brutal, cruel, fanatic, sinister, untrustworthy, and warlike. Most depictions of the enemy employed hateful imagery or reinforced racial stereotypes of the era associated with Asians."
The media went so far as to follow the lead of the American military by refusing to refer to communist forces by their correct titles. NLF forces were referred to by the derogatory term Viet Cong and northern troops of the People's Army of Vietnam as the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA.
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During 1964-1965 period in which the new administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson made the key decisions to escalate American involvement in the war, there was little debate or discussion in the American media.
The initiation of Operation Rolling Thunder against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and Operation Barrel Roll in the Kingdom of Laos raised immediate concerns at MACV and in Washington over the possible imposition of press censorship in order to protect operational security.
Many in the U.S. Mission were convinced, however, that since South Vietnam was a sovereign nation; neither censorship nor involuntary restraints on the press would do any good.
Reporters were free to travel by other than U.S. military means and to file dispatches through cables and telephones operated by the South Vietnamese.
The U.S. could influence the Saigon government to impose censorship, but considering the authoritarian nature of the Saigon government, "there was no guarantee that it would confine its supervision to military matters" and that censorship would lead to more political problems than it would solve.
An Information Conference was held in Honolulu in March 1965 to consider press censorship. The new commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, believed that censorship might indeed be the only solution to the problem but that "practical considerations" made it impossible.
The media, political, and public uproar that was certain to follow the imposition of such a measure was problematic. Censorship
would require the legal underpinnings of a declaration of war as well as an enormous logistical and administrative effort.
The censors would need jurisdiction over all communications and transportation facilities connecting South Vietnam with the rest of the world and parallel authority over civilian mail. That would necessitate a large number of multilingual military personnel to do the censoring and expanded, U.S. controlled teletype and radio circuits in South Vietnam to move the censored material...In any case, many of the Saigon correspondents were foreigners beyond the reach of American military regulations and likely to resist any attempt to bring them under control."
The answer seemed to lie in a system of voluntary cooperation between the military and the media. In return for accreditation, military transportation around South Vietnam, and access to briefings and interviews, correspondents would have to abide by certain rules designed to protect military security.
MACV and the diplomats believed that they had created a system that was both capable of giving the American people a reasonably accurate accounting of the war without at the same time helping their enemy.
Under the new arrangement, correspondents agreed to withhold certain categories of information.
These included:
never to reveal future plans, operations, or air strikes; information on rules of engagement; or the amounts of ordnance or fuel on hand to support combat units. During an operation, unit designations, troop movements, and tactical deployments were to remain secret.
So were the methods, activities, and specific locations of intelligence units; the exact number and type of casualties suffered by friendly forces; the number of sorties and amount of ordnance delivered outside of South Vietnam; and information on aircraft taking off for, en route to, or returning from target areas. The press was also to avoid publishing details on the number of aircraft damaged by enemy antiaircraft defenses; tactical specifics such as altitudes, courses, speeds, or angles of attack; anything that would tend to confirm planned strikes which failed to occur for any reason, including bad weather; the types of enemy weapons that had shot down friendly aircraft; and anything having to do with efforts to find and rescue downed airmen while a search was in progress.
The system seemed to work.
Between 1962 and 1968 only three news correspondents were disaccredited for infractions against these guidelines.
There was no evidence that the military ever considered the press a source of significant damage to military operations or security. Officials sometime complained of diplomatic damage done by press coverage, but again there was little evidence that this was extensive.
The most significant example was the revelation in the New York Times of Operation Menu, the secret bombing campaign that began in Cambodia in 1969, which caused no political fallout whatsoever until it was confirmed in 1972.
Restrictions also covered still photography and television news coverage. Newsmen were tasked with abiding by a U.S. Department of Defense ruling that pictures of recognizable American dead or wounded servicemen would not be released until their next of kin had been notified. Pictures of disfigured wounded, of amputees, or of men in severe shock were also to be withheld unless the permission of the individual had been obtained first.
Television coverage of combat was more problematic.
Television coverage was shot on motion picture film and, since there were no facilities incountry for developing it, there was no opportunity to review it before it left South Vietnam.
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From 40 in 1964, the press corps in South Vietnam had grown to 282 by January 1966.
By August that number had jumped to 419. Of the 282 at the beginning of the year, only 110 were Americans. 67 were South Vietnamese, 26 Japanese, 24 British, 13 Korean, 11 French, and seven German.
Of the Americans present, 72 were more than thirty-one years old, and 60 of them were over the age of thirty-six.
The same was true of the 143 non-Americans.
Correspondents with valid accreditations had to show their credentials in order to receive a card that gave them access to military transportation and facilities.
All other correspondents had to present a letter from their editors stating that they represented a bona-fide newsgathering organization which would take responsibility for their conduct. Freelance correspondents were required to produce a letter from one of their clients affirming that agency's willingness to purchase their work.
The U.S. Mission and MACV also installed an "information czar", the U.S. Mission's Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs, Barry Zorthian, to advise Westmoreland on public affairs matters and had theoretical responsibility under the ambassador for the development of all information policy.
He maintained liaison between the embassy, MACV, and the press; publicized information to refute erroneous and misleading news stories; and sought to assist the Saigon correspondents in covering the side of the war most favorable to the policies of the U.S. government.
Zorthian possessed both experience with the media, and a great deal of patience and tact and maintained reasonably good relations with the press corps.
Media correspondents were invited to attend nightly MACV briefings covering the day's events that became known as the "Five O'Clock Follies". The Saigon bureau chiefs were also often invited to closed sessions at which presentations would be made by a briefing officer, the CIA station chief, or an official from the embassy. They would present background or off-the-record information on upcoming military operations or Vietnamese political events.
One of the chief charges laid against the news media (both then and later) was that it had misinterpreted both the Tet Offensive of January 1968 and its outcome, blaming the media for altering American public's perceptions of the war and shifting it into an antiwar stance. When the first large-scale deployment of U.S. troops had taken place in 1965, a majority of the American public had supported it.
Yet, even at that early stage, public opinion polls revealed that 25 percent opposed the U.S. commitment. Over the following three years majority support for the war declined steadily, finally being surpassed during the third quarter of 1967 - well before the Tet Offensive.
When viewed over a four year period, Tet had only reinforced a growing public perception that U.S. involvement in Vietnam had been a mistake.
Many contemporary commentators (and later historians) had already criticized the media for the negative light in which it portrayed the war in general.
During and after Tet, media coverage of the offensive became the quintessential example for those that held the view that it had misrepresented the facts. They believed that possibly the greatest allied victory of the Vietnam War had been turned into political defeat by the negative reporting of the media.
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Television reporting was especially decried by media critics for bringing the horrors of war into the living rooms of American citizens and that its graphic content turned viewers against the military effort.
By 1965 television news coverage had increased dramatically.
CBS and NBC had gone to half-hour evening news broadcasts in September 1963.
ABC followed suit in early 1965.
The three television networks did not systematically preserve tapes of evening news broadcasts and no complete record of network evening news existed until 1968, when the Vanderbilt Television News Archive was established.
In 1963, CBS had begun saving some transcripts and rundown sheets listing the day's stories, but this collection too was incomplete. Due an incident in 1965, however, the U.S. Defense Department began copying evening news coverage.
A combination of these three sources allowed a study of all three networks from mid-1965 until 1973.
What a review of this record revealed was that television coverage of the Vietnam War by the three television networks was most often banal and heavily stylized.
Until Tet, television (and the press media) had generally followed the conventions of reporting established during the Second World War, and was neither critical in tone nor graphic in its depiction of combat.
American television executives showed little courage in their approach to Vietnam. They generally followed the path that the American military alid out for them.
They saw the war as "an American war in Asia - and that's the only story the American audience is interested in," and they let other, equally important aspects of Vietnam go uncovered.
There was an actual scarcity of combat footage depicted on television, since such footage only ranged from three to six percent of all war segments broadcast, depending on how the scenes were categorized.
One factor that limited the graphic depiction of combat was the manner in which the war was fought: most of the operations that were covered (by three-man television crews, carrying 80-100 pounds of equipment each) took place in extremely remote areas of Vietnam and involved little or no contact with the communists.
The chief limiting factor, however, was that the television networks had no desire to broadcast gruesome battle scenes during the dinner hour in America, which might have prompted viewers to switch channels.
The result was that from August 1965 to August 1970, only 76 out of more than 2,300 television news reports originating in Vietnam depicted heavy fighting.
Critics of the media also claimed that statements by news commentators or reporters on television were overly critical of the war effort.
The view that held that journalists had served their function as a "watchdog" and had reported "the truth," of the war to the American public, thereby altering public opinion was also a false one. From 1965-1967, far back in the journalistic mythology of the press as adversary of the state, it had been rather docile.
Even an issue as provocative as Vietnam (an undeclared war, without censorship or restrictions on access) failed to alter the basic premise that the media were, after all, "an establishment institution, both prior to and after Tet. What had changed was that the establishment itself, and the nation, was divided over the war."
Post-Tet, the news media simply followed the influence of disenchantment with the progress in the war emanating from the administration, the Pentagon, the public, and American troops.
Conscientious reporters themselves were the first to admit that objectivity sometimes went out the window for some of their colleagues.
During the fast-breaking (and extremely dangerous) Tet period, correspondents made mistakes in their coverage.
During the first phase of the communist Tet Offensive of January/February 1968 a record 636 correspondents were incountry.
Journalists who had covered the conflict (some for as many as five years) became increasingly skeptical that American policy was succeeding.
New restrictions were imposed by MACV on reporting the number of enemy rounds and the number of U.S. casualties at Khe Sanh.
There were also limitations on the number of reporters in the Khe Sanh area.
In fact, it had been General Westmoreland's inflated predictions of military success to the press and his inability to predict the Tet Offensive that undercut public support.
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On 3 November 1969 President Richard M. Nixon made a televised speech laying out his policy toward Vietnam.
He promised to continue to support the South Vietnamese government (through Vietnamization) and held out a plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops.
This "silent majority" speech, not the Tet Offensive, marked the real watershed of the American involvement. In it, Nixon permanently altered the nature of the issue.
Nixon's policy toward the media was to reduce as far as possible the American public's interest in and knowledge of the war in Vietnam. He began by sharply limiting the press's access to information in Vietnam.
The peace talks in Paris, the viability of South Vietnam, of its military and its government, and its effect on American disengagement, became the prime stories during this period for the news media.
The reportage of the Tet/Khe Sanh period was unique, and after it was over the news settled back into its normal routines.
The gradual dissipation of support for the war was apparent in changes in the source of news stories.
The traditional sources - press conferences, official news releases, and reports of official proceedings were less utilized than ever before.
Reporters were doing more research, conducting more interviews, and publishing more analytical essays.
The media never became "acutely critical...but more sober, and more skeptical.
The media, however, never examined or reexamined the assumptions about the nature of the war it had helped to propagate.
Television's image of the war, however, had been permanently altered: the "guts and glory" image of the pre-Tet period was gone forever.
For the most part television remained a follower rather than a leader.
As the American commitment waned there was an increasing media emphasis on Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese government, casualties, both American and Vietnamese.
There was also increasing coverage of the collapse of morale among American troops, interracial tensions, drug abuse, and disciplinary problems.
These stories increased in number as U.S. soldiers "began to worry about being the last casualty in the lame-duck war."
The U.S. military resented the attention and at first refused to believe that the problems were as bad as correspondents portrayed them.
The media demonstrated, however, "that the best reporters, by virtue of their many contacts, had a better grasp of the war's unmanageable human element than the policy makers supposedly in control."
The high number of American casualties (70 dead and 372 wounded) produced an unusual burst of explicit questioning of military tactics from correspondents in the field and from Congressmen in Washington.
After the battle's conclusion, major battles of attrition involving American forces became rare - as did commentaries from correspondents like those surrounding Hamburger Hill.
Tensions between the news media and the Nixon administration only increased as the war dragged on.
In September and October of 1969, members of the administration openly discussed methods by which the media could be coerced into docility.
The key stories of the Nixon period - the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the release of the Pentagon Papers - were not broken by Vietnam correspondents but by insiders.
As for media coverage of the antiwar movement, negative statements about it outweighed positive ones by about two to one. Indeed, 49 percent of all domestic criticism of administration policies reported on television came from public officials and former public officials, 16 percent came from reporters in commentaries, and 35 percent came from all other sources, including antiwar protesters, soldiers in Vietnam, and "the man on the street".
By the time of the Cambodian Campaign of April 1970, there were at least 450 accredited print and television journalists resident in Saigon. During the operation, that number would swell to 497. Besides a large contingent of American and South Vietnamese correspondents, 21 other nationalities were represented, including 32 from Japan and Korea, 21 from Great Britain, 17 from France, and seven from Australia.
MACV and the South Vietnamese imposed more stringent press restrictions and initially forbade American correspondents from accompanying troops during the incursion.
During 1970 and 1971 official American sources began to shut their doors to reporters.
In the end, the controversy that developed between the U.S. military and the media over the goals, success, and the expansion of the war during the Cambodian and Laotian incursions was probably inevitable.
On the American side, the military and the news media had become fatigued, both with the war and with each other.
As the war lengthened and the withdrawals continued, the two sides became more and more antagonistic toward one another and they battled constantly over the issues of combat refusals and the drug and morale problems of American troops.
Although MACV officially remained dedicated to providing evenly balanced public affairs information, the situation was exacerbated by the manpower drawdowns at the Public Affairs Office itself.
The Easter Offensive of 1972, a conventional North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam was generally depicted by MACV and Washington as a "true test" of the policy of Vietnamization.
It was also readily apparent to the media that American airpower had saved the day. The press reported heavily on the "mixed" capabilities of the South Vietnamese defense and on the retaliatory U.S. bombing effort in North Vietnam, Operation Linebacker.
By the end of 1971 the number of accredited American correspondents had declined to fewer than 200.
By September 1973 that number had dwindled to only 59.
As the war became more and more a South Vietnamese affair, the Saigon government tried to silence unofficial news sources, tightening its information guidelines and stringently punishing any who violated them.
Even as the Easter Offensive waned, President Nguyen Van Thieu passed a martial law decree that made circulating news or images "detrimental to the national security" a criminal offense.
Critics of the media within the military paid great attention to the mistakes made or violations of the rules by a few correspondents, but little to the majority of reporters, who conscientiously attempted to tell all sides of the story in tens of thousands of news reports.
The chief problem with the relations between the U.S. government and military and the media during the war was that both Presidents Johnson and Nixon enlisted the military as spokesmen for their views.
MACV had to justify both presidents' efforts and endorse their claims of progress, especially the Vietnamization program. Johnson found this effort easier, at least until his "success offensive" and the Tet Offensive. Nixon, embittered by what he considered biased press coverage of his administration and increasingly suspicious of his political opponents, attempted to intimidate the media into silence.
In the end neither succeeded in their attempts to manage news coverage.
The interdisciplinary nature of the Vietnam War required a new kind of war correspondent, one that was able to deal with complex political issues that often intruded on the military aspects, where military success was necessary, but where it alone was insufficient, a war where unwarranted optimism, propaganda, and news management could often deeply obscure the issues.
Vietnam does stand out in the history of journalism as the first war in which journalist began to seriously question the ethics of their business.
Photographers in particular were troubled by the voyeuristic nature of their profession.
45 correspondents were killed in Vietnam, and 18 were listed as missing.
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