How did the media shape public perception of the vietnam war?

Vietnam: war and the media

In the early years of the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) everything was, according to historian John Lewis Gaddis, "hidden and denied". Correspondents in Washington had access to data that concealed the truth. The newspapers, without being able to reconcile the information provided by Washington with those coming from Saigon, preferred to publish the official version. The United States has not tried to impose censorship on Vietnam to solve its problems. Quite the contrary: a real "Public Relations" campaign was launched to publicize his version of the war. During the conflict, journalists from the most diverse backgrounds were invited to visit the country and write about what they had seen. So many perks were granted, that they saw themselves with a "moral" obligation of gratitude, ending up publishing exactly what the propaganda of the American government wanted.

There was, however, a famous exception to the farce of war coverage by the American government. On August 5, 1965, a report by Morley Safer for CBS showed US Marines burning Vietnamese village huts with lighters, triggering a (semi-official) campaign by the Pentagon to discredit the television report and qualify the correspondent as "impatriotic".

Until then, most of the fighting in Vietnam was reported after it occurred or, at best, if the confrontation was too long and reporters got access, reporting precariously what was happening inside the battlefield, with huge delay and very little precision.

After the offensive by the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, American action was seen by a large part of society as "disorderly, frustrated and costly action". The press started to show the "live war", unleashing a spirit of national dissatisfaction in practically all levels of society.

Television is a medium that greatly influenced the American civilian population during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The display of fighting and the cruelty of the American military itself towards the Vietnamese radically changed the relationship that public opinion had with that conflict. Internal protests were responsible for the withdrawal of the military from the Vietnam war.

At the end of the 1960s, the failure of American action was already evident, which was controversial in successive pacification campaigns in the USA and in different parts of the world. With more than one million dead and two million wounded, the "cease fire" did not take place until January 23, 1973 and the withdrawal of American troops was completed two years later, on March 25, 1975.