Question for DUers around during Vietnam War coverage

Is my old brain playing tricks on me or am I remembering correctly that Vietnam War reporters regularly challenged the administration?

I remember controversy over General Westmorland`s body bag counts because reporters weren`t afraid to challenge his bogus numbers nor were they afraid to highlight the vast sacrifice chasm between draftees and those fortunate enough to get deferments.

Do any of you remember "embed" reporters? I honestly do not. What a difference today in this age of spin and image making. I can`t help but wonder what may have happened had today`s reporters done their jobs and asked probing, pre war questions.

there were certainly reporters there but I don't remember that they were referred to as embedded or that they traveled with any particular unit. I assume they were free to go where they chose.

I know that the anti-war folks (I was in college and my roommate was very active in SDS) still complained about the media's lies.

That doesn't help much..sorry.

I wasn't wide awake back then, as I like to think I may be now.

The main thing I remember was that you saw just a whole shitload of Vietnam, and heard the nightly death toll, while you ate your dinner in front of the TV. The images were key. The images that also were in LIFE magazine and other publications - like the Nick Ut photo of the naked, screaming girl running down the road after having been napalmed - that really got to people. I guess that shows how much of America is visually-oriented in the way we process information. It was the nightly images we got on our TVs that helped to sink public opinion. And the bushies knew this. That's why they've done their damnedest to keep all those returning coffins and body bags from being photographed. Heaven forbid, can't have that! Can't have the people seeing the true cost of war. YIKES! Might make 'em turn against it!!!

It was actually his honest reporting that made Americans question what was happening there.

This is from memory and I could be wrong. I have to admit part of the 60s are still a little fuzzy. ;)

I think that had a huge effect on people.

The follies was what reporters called their daily briefing by the military, as I recall. I also recall hearing pointed questions aimed at the brass flacks. I remember daily war coverage on network TV (which was all we had at that time).

Prior to the war, all of the State Dept. experts on Indochina had been purged. That left no one in the government to expose the lies about the Domino Theory. So who started telling the truth? The academics, with their teach=ins. These were people who devoted their lives to research in their fields and were intellectually equipped and skillful in revealing truth.

For a good backgrounding on this, read "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam.

But reporters were not barred from photographing the flag-draped coffins as they came back into the country back then as they are now, thanks to a 1991 law implimented by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

that Vietnam was front and center in the news. There was no hiding it , no softening it up. Nothing. You read about it, saw it and heard about it all the time.

I think reporters were just sent by their papers. We also believed what was going on at first. By the 60's the hospitals were filled with men and that is not what they were saying. Scuttlebutt was that things were not as the news was saying. Once word came down if you go to anti-war meeting do no wear uniforms. Uniforms were sort of put on the back burner. If you had any thing to do with military hospitals you were just sick with it all.Air force around us had to go to make rank but they did not like it and the FBI checked them out. I am not sure if that was a regular thing but I can recall them stopping at my home and asking about air force men who lived in homes around my home. It was a joke with many FBI as I would never say a thing and they would ask if I was from NE.

reporting from Nam.

when I was a kid. And it was in black and white!

Yes, they challenged Westmoreland. Remember a young Dan Rather standing in Vietnam while F-4s(I think flew over him.) He said something like, "see those f-4s, they are not here.)

In-Bed reporters were not the norm. They asked questions.

Today's reporters make too much money from the Corporations to catapult the propaganda. News is a dying art form.

The coverage wasn't "anti-war" but it was real.

It was much rawer because it was on film, and often several days old. But reporters did go out and see the actual war and its results and report on what they saw from a more objective perspective -- rather than today where you don;t usually see any real war.

Because it was brought into our LR's every evening by 68 or so,it was pretty gritty.

Like others of my generation, I was young and didn't follow that closely. I was more concerned that my male friends would be sent to death in Vietnam. (If they had a draft today, the present war would end a lot quicker!)

However, like Walter Cronkite's sign-off of the Vietnam era, today's Newshour with Jim Lehrer signs off in silence with photos of the recent Americans killed in Iraq. It's effective and respectful, and I wish more news stations would follow suit.

Like Watergate, the Vietnam War news dribbled out until major revelations like the Mei Lei (sorry for misspelling) massacre.

Johnson couldn't run again because of the war, and if memory serves, Nixon won on a promise to end the war.

BTW, did anyone else watch FRONTLINE's report on torture? Can't believe the country isn't roaring about this.

And yes you are right. There is something very wrong with reporters nowadays. Maybe it is just the "younger" generation in general. J/K
What I wouldn't give for our bloggers to be in the mainstream?

It was right after the relief of Khe Sahn and we were roaming the surounding hills counting bodies and searching enemy bunker systems. I never saw or read any of the reporters work and can not remember his name but there was at least one that was along for the ride.

Photographs and film brought the Vietnam war into our living rooms. Villages and villagers burning, running, screaming. Firefights on film. The true horror of war beamed into our living rooms every day.

Like this:

I'm fuzzy on a lot of details, but I remember seeing those images on television day after day.

Michael Herr went to Viet Nam as a correspondent for Esquire magazine in 1967. Herr authored a famous article in Esquire titled "Hell Sucks."

As a CBS reporter in Viet Nam, Morley Safer was a frequent contributor to Cronkite's CBS Evening News. Safer's August 1965 coverage of the burning of Cam Ne village by U.S. Marines (calling themselves the "Zippo Brigade") shocked the nation and outraged the LBJ White House.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/reporters/safer/camne.html

Vietnam War reporters (or the anchors back at home) were too concerned that their reporting might upset someone in the White House. In general, I remember nightly news broadcasts being raw and honest with reporters and anchors honoring their independence. That`s what`s missing with today`s media.

Instead, in hopes of acceptance by those in power, today's media compliantly carries water for the cabal.

The bigger they are, the worse they are.

Ya hear that Fat Timmy?

Tweety?

Leslie?

Reporters were not 'inbed' with the government and they told the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. That along with courageous protesters at home is what stopped the Vietnam War.

Before Iraq, the Bush administration had taken care of 'reporters' and news out of Iraq by offering (pressuring networks?) to put reporters under the protection of the military. AND, obviously, control the news they reported.


Where are our hero newspeople today? There are a few, and they take flack from the government, and their sheeples, on the right every time they dare to tell the truth about what they see.
A courageous newsperson will not be intimidated. They cannot be hired by an administration to frame the press conferences by being a plant and asking the questions approved. They can not be hired to 'sell' a war or a plan in print or on TV that is bad for America.

Freedom of the press carries responsibility to tell the truth. Either freedom of the press is dead, or a decision has been made by reporters to skew the truth. (Lie)

read nancy greggs' article "in memoriam" published on DU 5/25/05. i'm sorry i don't know how to do the links.

and yes, i was around then. we watched the death and destruction every night. it was even a topic that my 7 year old son brought up. i guess it was talked about in school. i'm a little fuzzy too.

Cronkite and some others making scathing reports of what was happening over there and I do remember Gen.Westmoreland, coming under fire on a constant basis...There had to have been embeds, for all the information that was made available, and for all the story pictures that came out in Life Magazine..but perhaps they weren't called that...and it seems to me, that I remember stories about reporters that got in the way, and the hassle trying to keep them safe, caused for the troops...

My husband spent two years in Vietnam..we lived and I worked right between an Army base, and an AF Base, and I can remember wondering what our papers were talking about, when they stated no more men were being sent to VN, at the same time I was watching the buses transport men by bus, from the Army base to the AF base, who were LEAVING for VN...I cancelled my subscription right then...and every lie we are fed, is being done, deliberately..

an interesting quote...I am posting here, to make a point..if you take the "almost" 40 years away from 1991...it takes you back to the early 50's..but the lying and secrecy has been going on for a long, long, time..as has manipulation of the press and journalism as a whole...

"We are grateful to the Wash. Post, the NY Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 YEARS.. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries" From a speech made by David Rockefeller/Baden-Baden, Germany/June 1991..at a Trilateral Commission meeting..

Everyone should do some research on what the word Liberal really means..and also on the state of reporting in this country..I stumbled across the following site..I know nothing about the author..but suggest you read the article/blog, or whatever it would be called..

http://www.tacklingthetoughtopics.net/Eberhart/eberhart_controlled_media.html

windbreeze

I was around then and for the early years of the war, questions about its conduct were only occasionally raised (such as Morley Safer's account of troops burning a village sometime around 1965 or 1966). The "turning point" probably didn't occur until around 1968, with the Tet Offensive. Cronkite did a memorable special report in which he stated, at the conclusion, "To say that we are closer to a victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say
that we are mired in a stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion." Even after that, however, the reporting was not always thorough. Or more accurately, the networks were reluctant to allow their reporters to report. I have read articles suggesting that stories regarding the My Lai massacre were offered to the networks, but that at first they wouldn't touch them. It wasn't until the networks understood where public sentiment was heading that they really unleashed their reporters, IMHO. Remember, even in 1969, CBS cancelled the Smothers Brothers show principally because of their anti-war attitude and replaced it with Hee-Haw.

onenote

I was a teenager, and I remember every day on the evening news would be actual combat scenes, and a body count. I remember it got to a point where it became mind-numbing after a while. I don't remember any embedded reporters, though.

The best example of his cheer-leading was the segment he did from Danang when he flew a combat mission in a B-57 Canberra bomber (ca. 1965). It was not until February, 1968 (after the Tet Offensive) that Cronkite admitted, on the CBS Evening News, that it did not look like we were winning in Viet Nam. Of that admission, LBJ said,"If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."


B-57 Canberra