United States news media and the Vietnam War

Intense levels of graphic news coverage correlated with dramatic shifts of public opinion regarding the conflict, and there is controversy over what effect journalism had on support or opposition to the war, as well as the decisions that policymakers made in response.

They returned in 1945 and fought against a Vietnamese nationalist movement under Communist leadership, commonly called the Viet Minh, in the First Indochina War, which began in 1945 and 1946.

In 1949 they sponsored the creation of the State of Vietnam under Bao Dai so they could claim to be fighting not as a colonial power but as allies of a legitimate Vietnamese government.

The French colonial government set up a system of censorship, but correspondents traveled to Singapore or Hong Kong to file their reports without constraint.

In asking how the United States got into Vietnam, attention must be paid to the enormous strength of the Cold War consensus in the early 1960s shared by journalists and policymakers alike and due to the great power of the administration to control the agenda and the framing of foreign affairs reporting.

The basic policy governing how the US mission in Saigon handled the reporters reflected the way the administration of President John F. Kennedy conceived of the American role in the war.

The reporting of what became a debacle for the South Vietnamese military, and the condemnation heaped upon it by the Western press became a controversial issue that then attracted a great deal of public attention.

[12] Ap Bac and the controversy surrounding it, however, marked a permanent divide in the relations between the official US position and the news media in South Vietnam.

Before the battle, the media had criticized Diem and argued for more US control of the war, but they were still agreeable to the position of the diplomats and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV).

[13][14] The situation was only exacerbated during the Buddhist Crisis of May 1963, when the Diem government considered the foreign press as its enemy and was unwilling to communicate its side of the story effectively.

They leaked information from discussions with Diem to the press, embarrassing him and thwarting the embassy's vigorous efforts to win an end to the anti-Buddhist repressions.

The US Army's official history of military-media relations reported, "Although marred at times by rhetoric and mistaken facts, they often probed to the heart of the crisis.

As for the PAVN and VC, American readers rarely encountered the argument that they 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.

"[24] 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.

[32] An early divide between the personalities of the US government and the Saigon press corps can be seen in the aftermath of Operation Starlite, a large-scale search-and-destroy mission conducted during the escalation phase of 1965.

He maintained liaison between the US 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.

[34] Zorthian possessed both experiences with the media and a great deal of patience and tact while maintaining reasonably good relations with the press corps.

"[37] During late 1967, MACV had also begun to disregard the decision that it had made at the Honolulu Conference of 1966 that the military should leave the justification of the war to elected officials in Washington.

[41] Other correspondents who later made the journey to North Vietnam included Mary McCarthy, Anthony Lewis, Michael McLear from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and R. K. Karanjia from India.

"[42] Because he reported from the communist side, Burchett was regarded by many in Australia as a traitor and was persona non grata with the Australian government, but he also possessed extraordinary information.

After visiting South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, Cronkite said in an editorial on 27 February 1968, "To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

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 later years of Vietnam were "a remarkable testimony to the restraining power of the routines and ideology of objective journalism… 'advocacy journalism' made no real inroads into network television.

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.

[66] 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.

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.

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.

[70] With the breakdown of peace negotiations with Hanoi, President Nixon launched Operation Linebacker II, an extensive aerial campaign that began on 16 December 1972.

"[72] Following the campaign, Hanoi returned to the negotiating table and (after some wrangling with the Saigon government) the Paris Peace Accords were signed on 27 January 1973.