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Television Reporting of the Vietnam War; or Did Walter Cronkite Really Lose the War?
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11787 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
5,336 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence W. Lichty and Edward Fouhy
Lawrence W. Lichty is professor and chairman of the Department
of Radio/Television/Film and a Fellow of the Institute for
Modern Communications, Northwestern University. He was
director of media research forthe thirteen-hour documentary
series Vietnam: A Television History (1983). He began his
research on the television coverage of the war in 1967 and
traveled to Vietnam and Asia in 1968 and 1975 as part of this
study. Edward Fouhy was CBS
News bureau chief in Saigon in 1967. He is currently an
executive producer of NBC News in Washington, D.C. |
We are only now, as more memoirs of wartime leaders and grunts alike appear, finally able to begin to understand the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, one of the main barriers to fully understanding it is the pernicious, and in our opinion, simplistic and wrongheaded view of television's impact on public opinion during the war. The thesis is frequently framed in the simplest of terms: it was the first TV war; it was the first war America lost; therefore, TV caused America to lose the war.
Early in his memoirs, A Soldier Reports, Gen. William Westmoreland writes:
A few graphic newspaper photographs and a TV shot of American marines setting fire to thatched-roof huts were enough to convince many that "search and destroy" was tantamount to scorched earth.
Yet in reality the operations were aimed at finding the enemy and eliminating his military installations - bunkers, tunnels, rice and ammunition caches.
And near the end of his long book he returns to this theme, saying:
Television brought war into the American home, but in the process television's unique requirements contributed to a distorted view of the war. The news had to be compressed and visually dramatic. Thus the war that Americans saw was almost exclusively violent, miserable, or controversial: guns firing, men falling, helicopters crashing, buildings toppling, huts burning, refuges fleeing, women wailing. A shot of a single building in ruins could give an impression of an entire town destroyed.
In his autobiography, Maxwell Taylor makes the same point, with specific reference to the Tet offensive of 1968, stating that the enemy attacks
created scenes of death, fire, and destruction which, as recorded on American TV screens and reported in glory headlines in the American press, scared much of the American public and some of our officials into a funk from which recovery was slow and, in come cases, never complete.
Taylor argues that from 1965 on there was a "constant flood of information and misinformation on Vietnam from officials, press, radio, and television." He states that the media did not wait to verify or interpret the facts and that, in the process of reworking and summarizing, official
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