| Excerpt from Jele News
Jele News, based in Pebble Beach, CA, operated briefly in 2006 as an Internet-based alternative news and information resource. It contracted with select writers to provide material on selected subjects, with a goal of maintaining an independent perspective on major issues and events.
Below is a piece Richard was commissioned to research and write about news media coverage of the Vietnam War:
- "Media Coverage of the Vietnam War," published on line by Jele News, Spring 2006:
Regarded in retrospect as a controversial and ill-fated enterprise, United States military involvement in Vietnam began in 1957 and ended in 1975, with most activity occurring from 1962 through 1972. The war followed Vietnamese fighting from 1946 to 1954 led by Ho Chi Minh against France. The French had made the Southeast Asian country part of its colonial empire in the mid-19th century and resistance to its presence increased after World War II, when French control resumed following brief Japanese occupation.
As the French withdrew, Vietnam was split into communist northern and non-communist southern countries. Rebels in both sectors subsequently sought to overthrow the republic of South Vietnam and to reunite the two nations under a communist political system. The U.S., the South Vietnamese army, and several U.S. allies tried to stop the rebels militarily, but ultimately failed. In April 1975—two years after the departure of U.S. ground troops—communist forces triumphed and reunited north and south as a single communist country. This political system and unification remains in place.
The involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam was inspired and maintained to a large degree by a stated “Cold War” commitment by both Democratic and Republican presidents to aid nations threatened by communist takeover. U.S. leaders feared that if South Vietnam became communist the region’s other Western allies would topple, as President Dwight Eisenhower put it, like “a row of dominoes.” Vietnamese communists, however, described their campaign as a war of liberation from foreign control and an attempt to reunite their people under a single ideology they believed would benefit the populace overall. While communist China and the U.S.S.R. provided the rebels with material support, they did not send troops to Vietnam. [SOURCE: World Book Encyclopedia, 2004 on-line edition, Vietnam conflict entries]
Media coverage of the low-level U.S. involvement in Vietnam was understated during the Eisenhower and early Kennedy years (1957-61). Scrutiny became more intense after the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and the U.S.S.R.-Cuba missile crisis of October 1962. These events, coupled with a substantial 1962 increase in the number of U.S. personnel in South Vietnam, fueled media interest in overseas military activities related to the Cold War stand-off between communist and non-communist nations. If Cuba could pull the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviets, it was reasoned, perhaps the same might occur in Vietnam, with “Red” China allied with Moscow against the U.S. [SOURCE: World Book Encyclopedia, ibid]
Reports from Vietnam were initially constrained by tight controls. “Although there are an estimated 10,000 American military men in Vietnam,” a correspondent wrote in 1962, “an official news blackout has been imposed by U.S. and Vietnamese officials.” [SOURCE: New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 23, 1962] After the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam’s President Diem by insurgent officers of his army, sanctioned sources became more accessible to the press, although many reporters remained disbelieving of the information disbursed.
In a 1984 report on U.S. media coverage of the Vietnam conflict [SOURCE: www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1984/HCD.htm] for the Command and Staff College, U.S. Marine Corps Major Cass D. Howell argues that U.S. reporters were skeptical about the war from the time it began creeping into news reports during the Kennedy years.
From the early 1960s, Howell writes, “American military and State Department representatives in South Vietnam clashed with journalists on a frequent basis. Reporters charged that U.S. agencies were lying about the extent of American involvement in the developing war, the performance of the South Vietnamese army, and especially about the progress that was being made in winning the war. They accused American officials of trying to distort, evade, and manage the news process and ridiculed the daily military briefings for the press as the ‘Five O'Clock Follies.’”[Howell cites Lt. Col. Chandler Goodnow, et al, News Coverage of the Tet Offensive; Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1969; p. 16-20.]
A commentary by James Reston of the New York Times gives credence to such an analysis. “The day-to-day communiques [by the U.S. military],” Reston wrote in 1965, “give the impression that we win almost every encounter, but we somehow merely advance deeper into the bog.” [SOURCE: New York Times, Nov. 14, 1965]
Such interpretations reflect the frequently expressed view among senior U.S. military personnel that overly negative and biased media coverage of the Vietnam conflict contributed to the war’s ultimate failure. “According to the conservative version [of what happened in Vietnam], the media were the villains,” concludes Daniel Hallin, a University of California media historian. “They covered [the conflict] in a contentious and negative way, turning the public against it and leading the U.S. to withdraw from a war it could and should have one.” [SOURCE: Daniel Hallin, undated talk at a Duke University conference on Vietnam War www.dube.edu/web/tiss/archives/conferencerecords/media/hallin.htm]
Yet other analysts—particularly those positioned on the political left, within academia, or among journalists who covered the war—have faulted the new media for allegedly uncritical reporting during the early years of Vietnam engagement and heaped praise for what they feel was more realistic coverage later on. [SOURCE: and Daniel C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War,’ New York: Oxford, 1986]
There was some vindication for the former view in 2001 following the release of tape recordings made secretly by Lyndon Johnson. Transcripts confirmed his private uneasiness about the war at a time when the president projected confidence in victory to the American people. “I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing [in Vietnam],” Johnson told his defense secretary on Feb. 26, 1965, “and I don’t see any way of winning.” [SOURCE: Beschloss, Michael, Reaching for Glory, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, as excerpted in Newsweek magazine, Nov. 12, 2001, p. 59].
Scholar Hallin maintains that “coverage of the Vietnam War was actually highly supportive in the early years.” [SOURCE: Hallin at Duke, ibid] He believes the media generally followed a pattern of conduct similar to other U.S. wars--initially skeptical, then supportive, and finally skeptical again--and basically reflective of overall public opinion. One difference in Vietnam, he allows, was a comparatively high degree of freedom afforded correspondents to report what and from where they pleased.
Observers of all persuasions tend to agree that a significant shift toward more trenchant and less supportive media coverage of the war began in late winter of 1968, during January and February’s fierce and unanticipated Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese. This was reinforced by February’s near defeat of President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary by anti-war activist Gene McCarthy and March’s prime-time TV concession by Johnson that the public was divided on the war and his surprise revelation that he would not run for re-election. [SOURCE: Hallin book, ibid, p. 168-173; Stanley Karnow, see below]
There is general agreement that U.S. public opinion about the Vietnam conflict was heavily influenced by TV news reports, although it remains unclear as to what degree the content of that reporting also was influenced by dissension among political leaders, competing news events, low morale within the military, and the anti-war movement at home. [SOURCE: Hallin book and Duke, ibid]
After the events of early 1968, however, it is widely felt that media coverage presenting the inconclusive fighting in Southeast Asia, open dissension among opinion makers, and escalating protests at home may have had the greatest single impact in turning majority U.S. sentiment against the war during the late 1960s and early 1970s. By 1965, journalists operated in Vietnam with few restrictions and advances in technology allowed for extensive and almost instant visual reporting from the field, particularly in the war’s later years. This provided a means whereby dramatic battlefield pictures and dissenting voices from soldiers could be--and were--transmitted directly to viewers back home. [SOURCE: Hallin book, ibid, 173-174]
At first, anti-war protesters were not given extensive or sympathetic coverage by the media and they seemed to be regarded by much of the public as unpatriotic. Opinions polls in the early and mid-1960s reflected strong support for U.S. involvement in the war, although this trended downward, with the majority of Americans opposed to the war from spring 1967 onward. [SOURCE: Hallin at Duke, ibid; Karnow, p. 594]
During January and February 1968, the media’s intensive and often graphic coverage of the Tet offensive is believed to have turned many disenchanted Americans firmly against the war. Television reports included bloody footage of hand-to-hand combat with knives, rifles, grenades, and bombs. From this point on, previously marginalized anti-war demonstrators and politicians began receiving more attention, culminating in August 1968 with live network coverage of brutal tactics used by the Chicago police against demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention. [SOURCE: Daily Life Online Teacher Resources, Greenwood Publishing; http://dailylife.greenwood.com/teacher/activity.asp?id=DLO_AH_SE_L45x]
At the time, CBS TV anchorman Walter Cronkite was regarded nationally as the one person whom most of the U.S. public could "trust wholeheartedly" (rated 73%, compared to Nixon and Humphrey at 57% each). [SOURCE: George Arthur Bailey, The Vietnam War According to Chet, David, Walter, Harry, Peter, Bob, Howard and Frank; Ann Arbor, MI; University Microfilms International, published on demand; p. 77.] Cronkite thus had an enormous impact on popular attitudes when, after returning from an in-person assessment of Tet, reached this conclusion: “I think that it is time for us to face the facts in Vietnam; that we are in a no-win situation and it is time for us to get out ... We came here with the best of intentions, and we failed.” The war was, Cronkite, summed up in his February 27 broadcast, “a bloody stalemate.” At that point, President Johnson reportedly told his aides: “It’s all over.” [SOURCES: Cleveland Amory, "What Walter Cronkite Misses Most;" Parade magazine; March 11, 1984, p. 4; Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War, New York: Oxford University, 1986, p.6, 108, 170; and Arthur Bailey, ibid, p. 307-308.]
From then on there was less discussion among opinion makers, political elites, and media pundits of "winning" in Vietnam and more about how and when to get out. This frustrated military leaders. U.S. Army General William Westmoreland, the commander of forces for much of the war, is quoted as reflecting: "Press and television created an aura not of victory but of defeat [after Tet], which, coupled with vocal anti-war elements, profoundly influenced timid officials in Washington." [SOURCE: Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976; p. 166.]
On Mar. 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a deliberate de-escalation of war and said he would not seek another term as president. The unexpected news stunned the nation. Johnson’s withdrawal came on the heels of an announcement two weeks earlier by Robert F. Kennedy of his own anti-war candidacy. Kennedy’s candidacy would gain momentum rapidly, but he was assassinated in June and Vice President Hubert Humphrey won his party’s nomination that summer. Humphrey was defeated by Republican Richard Nixon, who was both hawkish on the war and committed to ending it. Nixon stepped up bombing while starting peace talks with the North Vietnamese and directing his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to initiate a bold speechmaking campaign that denounced members of the news media as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” [SOURCE: The Press In Times of Crisis, edited by Lloyd Chiasson Jr., Political Science Books, 1995, pg. 183; and Hallin, ibid, 109, 184]
Although Humphrey would never be president, he once made a compelling observation about media coverage of Vietnam: “This is the first war in this nation's history that has been fought on television where the actors are real. Where, in the quiet of your living room of your home, or your dormitory, or wherever you may be, these cruel, ugly dirty facts of life and death in war and pain and suffering come right to you; and it isn't Hollywood acting. I've had letters from mothers that have seen their boys shot down in battle.” [SOURCE: Lt. Col. Chandler Goodnow, et al, News Coverage of the Tet Offensive; Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1969; p. 141.]
Another significant piece of reporting during this period concerned the so-called My Lai massacre. The incident occurred in a South Vietnam village of that name on March 16, 1968, and was carried out by infantry troops commanded by U.S. Army Second Lt. William L. Calley Jr. An estimated 300 to 400 unarmed people, mostly women, children, and old men, were killed in cold blood. News about this event—including incriminating photos—did not surface for 18 months. When it did, the searing images and subsequent investigations helped galvanize further opposition to the war. Morale among soldiers and faith in the military among civilians reportedly suffered under the presumption that other atrocities were taking place and being covered up by those in charge. Calley was later indicted on criminal charges and put on trial. [SOURCE: Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History; New York: Viking, 1983, p. 24]
In 1969, one of the most widely circulated publications of the time stunned its readers by displaying the names and pictures of all 250 of the U.S. military personnel killed in Vietnam during a one week period. The stark spread, with brief and neutral commentary, took up 11 pages in the June 27 issue of Life and drew a wide range of feedback, from scorn to praise. More significantly, perhaps, it entered homes of millions of “middle Americans” from whom Nixon was striving to maintain support for the war. [SOURCE: Karnow, ibid, p. 489]
The anti-war movement gained considerable traction in early May of 1970 after President Nixon disclosed on Apr. 30 that U.S. ground and air forces had invaded Cambodia in pursuit of communist Vietnamese soldiers. Student protests left several students dead on U.S. campuses, notably at Ohio’s Kent State University. National Guard troops opened fire there on protesters, killing four. Extensive media coverage included a now-famous photo of a distraught female student, arms outstretched, crouched over the dead body of a young man lying face-down on a sidewalk in his own blood. In reaction to such events, some 400 of colleges and universities across the U.S. were paralyzed by widely publicized demonstrations and teach-ins, then shut down for the remainder of the term. {SOURCE: Karnow, ibid, p. 611-612
In June and July, 1971, the New York Times published the so-called Pentagon Papers, a collection of sensitive government documents purloined and leaked to the newspaper by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst. Publication of reports based on the papers was halted for 15 days while the U.S. Supreme Court considered Nixon Administration arguments that the Times should be forced to stop sharing the documents with its readers. Among other things, the reports described how presidents Kennedy and Johnson had expanded the Vietnam War without full disclosure of pertinent facts relating to the situation. Overall, the memoranda suggested a U.S. victory in Vietnam was unlikely. For many Americans, the Pentagon Papers confirmed their suspicion that the war had been a misguided, expensive, and possibly immoral mistake. The revelation that Nixon later ordered the burglarizing of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office, presumably to obtain damaging information about the leaker, compounded their discomfort. [SOURCE: New York Times Magazine; Mar. 31, 1985; p. 47; Karnow, ibid, p. 633]
Arguably the two disturbing filmed sequences of the war that became most well known were the point-blank execution by a pistol shot to the head of a Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese officer in 1968 and the sequence of a little Vietnamese girl running naked down a rural road, her clothes burned off by napalm dropped from a South Vietnamese plane during a ferocious 1972 communist offensive. Earlier disturbing images included the self-immolation of several Buddhist priests, which began in 1963, as suicidal war protests. Hundreds of newspapers printed pictures of these men, sitting cross-legged on sidewalks while engulfed in flames. [SOURCE: Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, New York: Viking, 1983; p. 271]
Though these incidents did not involve direct U.S. participation, their impact on the home front was far-reaching and overwhelmingly negative. The images were seared into the brains of millions of Americans and came to represent troubling ethical questions about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. [SOURCE: Howell, ibid; and Karnow, ibid]
By the time U.S. ground forces left Vietnam in early 1973, opinion polls suggested that more than two-thirds of the American people did not approve of continued U.S. military involvement. For those who shared this view, there appears to have been a common feeling that reporters had helped expose important truths that political and military leaders had tried to hide. “They played a role in the snowballing process by which the support [for the conflict] ended,” concludes Hallin, adding: “Divisions [within the Nixon Administration also] led to a lot of leaks to the press that affected the character of news coverage.” [SOURCE: Daniel C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War,’ Oxford: 1986, p. 210]
Defenders of U.S. intervention seemed to blame the same coverage for influencing the war’s negative outcome. “The key role played by the media is one of the most important lessons of the Vietnam experience,” wrote Reed Irvine, editor of Accuracy in Media Report, in 1984. “This was the first war fought by the U.S. in which propaganda, disinformation, and incompetent and irresponsible journalism proved to be more decisive than guns.” [SOURCE: Reed Irvine, Accuracy in Media Report; Jan. 13, 1984, p. 2]
While the debate about the media’s role and performance in the Vietnam conflict is likely to continue, a survey of the available literature suggests that a set of conventional wisdoms on such matters has coalesced and is largely reflective of the political ideologies and values held by whomever espouses them.
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