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Television News Coverage: A Power Misused
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12812 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1987 |
7,314 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bocklet
Richard Bocklet is a correspondent for New Guard magazine. |
The mid-1960s saw war come of age. No longer was it something far off on another continent, or halfway around the world. War had come to America's shores, to hometowns, into living rooms, and in living color through the wonder of television. Vietnam was the first television war with real combat scenes, casualties, and the inevitable body bags sent home for all to view.
The North Vietnam communists were our first battlefield opponents to realize that the medium could be used as effectively as bullets and antiaircraft rounds to push a war-weary nation to settlement on the communists' terms at the conference table. What could not be won militarily was now possible to win by swaying American opinion through the electronic media.
While newspaper reporters informed the public in cold, but exact prose of battles in World War I, radio during World War II radio brought us the sounds of London being blitzkrieged and the horror of heroic soldiers dying on Normandy and Omaha beaches. The Korean War was brought to us by a fledgling television industry, but many caught only glimpses of the action in weekly movie house newsreels. With refined cameras and satellite transmissions during the Vietnam era, television brought us pictures of conflicts within hours, delivering immediacy and realism. Electronic news gathering added a new dimension to reporting, but few predicted television's profound impact on the viewing audience. Now, few observers would deny the role television played in the outcome of the Vietnam conflict. No future wars - except a nuclear one - will be waged without assessing the element of television coverage in the overall equation.
Aided by television cameras, a Vietnamese defeat could be turned into victory; one-side coverage of bloodied American soldiers leave the impression of a war being lost. Views of tired, besieged Marines at Khe Sahn seemed to epitomize a great military machine in decline. Footage of coordinated Vietcong attacks on provincial and district capitals and a nineteen-man sapper squad pinning down soldiers for six hours at the American Embassy in Saigon shocked a nation unaccustomed to front-row seats on the battlefield. That the Tet offensive of 1968 was a serious tactical and military defeat for the Vietcong and their superiors in North Vietnam never came through as dramatically as pictures of the first few hours and days of the offensive. The enormous losses of Tet shattered, nearly destroyed, the indigenous guerrillas and forced North Vietnam to continue the war with its own regular army troops.
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