‘Television news is a medium capable of transmitting small slices of truth.  It is not capable, even if the people running it had the will, of changing the course of history’. (Edward Fouhy, former CBS bureau manger in Saigon and senior producer of CBS Evening News)

No issue is more bitterly divisive in the debate regarding America’s defeat in Vietnam than that of the role of television as the principal cause of national failure.  On the basis of content coverage of the war in Vietnam, I will examine the extent to which, as a medium, television succeeded in dominating domestic opinion and its impact on anti-war sentiment amongst the American viewing public as an agent of defeat.  This thread of investigation will focus not only on the televised war coverage in Indochina, and its change in tone following the escalation of combat during the Tet offensive, but also the coverage of the war at home of the New Left spilling into mainstream America. 

The first 'living room war'

As the first ‘living room war’, Vietnam became a news spectacle without precedent.[1]  It was the first war to be systematically televised during a period when television was becoming a more compelling presence in a country dominated by visual culture.  A survey conducted in 1964 revealed that the Americans depended equally on television and newspapers for information. However, by 1972, the percentage of Americans who relied primarily on television for their news had jumped significantly. ‘But more important, when faced with conflicting or contradictory accounts, 48% of those surveyed said they would trust television, while only 21% responded that they would trust newspapers.’[2]  This is significant when we consider these statistics document the increase of growing power of television as a preferred medium by Americans to deliver news coverage during the Vietnam War.  Within a period of dominant visual culture, the living room became the theatre of war, and modern technology provided a means of indirectly providing the American public with an intimate acquaintance with Vietnam on an hourly news show basis.  As media scholar Marshall McLuhan put it in 1968, ‘the public is now participant in every phase of the war, and the main actions of the war are now being fought in the American home itself’.[3]  It is for this reason, coupled with the absence of censorship in reporting, that television is singled out as the decisive influence on the ‘first domino’[4] of anti-war American public opinion.

Vietnam was America’s first true televised war; nevertheless it was also the country’s most divisive and least successful war.  The connection between these two facts I believe begins foremost and is central to the issue surrounding the restrictions in reporting and media censorship in wartime Vietnam. 

The uncensored war

In World War I there was considerable controversy over lack of press access to the front, and in World War II the press coverage was considered central to the mobilization of public opinion and increasingly seen as something that needed to be organized systematically.[5]  This meant that censorship and other controls would be used to prevent damage to morale on the home front and also military operations and capabilities.  Censorship in Vietnam however was not instituted, and thus it became the first war in which journalists were routinely accredited to accompany military forces, but not subject to formal censorship.[6]  The American military considered initially that censorship was not necessary and was neither feasible nor practical as it would be of limited use in an undeclared war and as guests fighting for a foreign government, this would only lead to legal problems.  Dean Rusk claimed on the issue of censorship that ‘unless we are in a formal state of war….with censorship here [in Washington], there is no point in having censorship [in Vietnam]…..Here is where most of the leaks come.’[7] It seems plausible now, with the Vietnam War over, and the advantage of hindsight, that implementation of a measure such as censorship would have eradicated or most certainly severely reduced the political and public uproar that arose around the conduct and coverage of the medium of television in reporting the war, and the increased questioning of the legitimacy and intention of government involvement in Indochina.  

As there was no official military censorship in Vietnam, it produced an unintended consequence of heightening caution amongst journalists.  Daniel Hallin argues in The Uncensored War: the Media and Vietnam that the perceived power of television triggered excessive discretion on the part of television journalists,[8] which led them to conduct their reports through self-censorship.  Hallin argues that ‘television’s very power….has the ironic consequence of making the medium particularly sensitive about the boundaries of legitimate controversy.’ It may be argued that the fact that reporters were aware of this power caused them to be ‘sensitive’ in upholding the dominant political perspective and passing on what the authorities assumed to represent the nation as a whole. Even on issues as explosive as Vietnam, an undeclared war in a distant and hostile land, without censorship or extensive restrictions on access; the media at first proved remarkably docile.  The idea that war appeared nightly in the nation’s living rooms, and that the experience and reality of war they witnessed could only have soured public opinion on continued involvement in South Vietnam, is debatable. 

Contrary to popular belief, actual fact combat footage constituted a relatively small proportion of television coverage.  According to Edward Fouhy, senior producer of CBS evening news, of the 4,000 filmed reports on the network news programmes during the war only about ten percent were ‘bang bang’ stories, that is, stories featuring images of combat.[9]  The New Yorker’s Michael Arlen described what usually appeared in terms of Vietnam combat in American living rooms as ‘a nightly stylized generally distanced overview of a disjointed conflict which was composed mainly of scenes of helicopters landing, tall grasses blowing in the helicopter wind, American soldiers fanning out across a hillside on foot, rifles at the ready, with now and then [on the soundtrack] a far-off ping or two, and now and then [as the grand visual finale] a column of dark billowing smoke a half mile away invariably described as a burning Viet Cong ammo dump.’[10]  This contradicts the common notion that television brought the American public graphic scenes of death and destruction on a daily basis.  Rather it provides an insight into the actual content of televised war footage and undermines the argument of those who are critical that television coverage showed too much violence by U.S and South Vietnamese troops.  ‘Television very rarely showed us anything of a horrific or bloody…nature on the nightly news.  In fact, television dutifully passed on the body counts - a distant alienating kind of announcement - but almost never showed us death, which might have been more meaningful’[11].  This suggests that, if television had in fact brought home the reality and horror of war home each night to the American viewing public from the outset, then it might not have taken ten years, from escalation in 1965, to the ceasefire in 1975.  However, this view fails to account for the fact that, although throughout the early years of the Vietnam War TV tended to report from a perspective largely consistent with, and in favour of American foreign policy, following 1968 the obvious contradictions in those American policies became apparent, and dissent became more widespread as television began to show the war in a more critical light. 

Moreover, in the case of the Vietnam War, there was no military censorship and the media had extraordinary freedom to report the war without direct government control; reporters were more or less free to go where they pleased and report what they wished.  Vietnam was in this sense genuinely an ‘uncensored’[12] war.  With so much freedom, some reporters clearly did not just consider themselves as part of a mission to serve the war effort, and this was manifest in dramatic ways such as Morley Safer’s report of Cam Ne, which aired on CBS, showing American marines setting fire to thatched huts, destroying a village and killing its civilians. 

The Tet Offensive and the decline of public support for the war

However, the Tet offensive of 1968 brought Vietnam home into living rooms in a way it had never been seen before.  Television coverage of the Tet was graphically violent and coincided with a shift of public opinion, so much so post 1968 that the charge that television had ‘lost Vietnam’ had become an article of faith for many political conservatives. 

General Loan’s execution of a Viet Cong officer on the streets of Saigon was probably the most memorable, dramatic and repulsive television footage to come out of the whole entire sixteen year war.  The footage showed ‘on the left…a typically corrupt officer who has neither concern for human life nor respect for public opinion.  On the right of the frame…a man dressed in civilian clothes, who stands defenceless before a representative of government authority.’[13]  NBC’s cameraman caught most of the scene, which concluded with high angle, close-up zooms of the Viet Cong’s head spurting blood over a foot in the air.[14]  The footage provided a startling, barbaric portrait of an unprovoked, casual execution on the streets of Saigon, horrifying the American viewing public with an insight (and an obvious one) into just how the war in Indochina was being conducted, fought and supposedly won by the U.S and South Vietnamese military.  In commenting on the footage, Professor Bruce Southard, a graduate student in 1968, explains his initial he never forgot.  ‘It was unlike anything I had seen before…I saw the blood coming out of the guy’s head….It really turned my stomach.  I didn’t throw up but I came close to it.  After that I decided what we were doing in Vietnam was wrong, I could not conceive of the callousness with which one person executed another with no pretence, with no trial, with no evidence….After that I became active in the anti-war movement’[15]  This individual reaction to footage ascertains televisions role as an agent of defeat in the war, as in showing brutal attacks and airing such shocking material, television served to demolish any war effort or sentiment associated with Vietnam, and may explain the magnitude of denial and defence that followed the incident from officials against the footage.  Alan Brinkley comments, ‘No one single event did more to undermine support in the United States for the war,’[16] as this barbaric execution became a compelling icon, imprinted on the public mind as a microcosm of the Tet offensive and the Vietnam War as a whole.

Furthermore, President Johnson was convinced that television was somehow responsible for the collapse of popular support for his administration’s war policies.[17] Indeed, the coverage of the Tet offensive did seem to coincide with the dramatic decline of public confidence in the government.  Even though Johnson administrators had attempted to woo public opinion into support for the war with recent campaigns of good news, footage of Tet attacks seemed to expose the official stories as pure propaganda.  This was especially the case with those chaotic images of carnage at the attack on the U.S Embassy in Saigon, which presented the viewing public with images of a weak American counter-offensive that appeared to be failing.  In particular, a piece of footage that showed General Westmoreland standing outside the Embassy in an interview with reporters addressing the situation with claims of control, were ironically challenged as a bomb close behind exploded.  Such dramatic scenes, which exposed the General in charge of the offensive as powerless and under threat, were certainly disconcerting, if not harrowing, for the viewing public.  After all, the public were being fed with conflicting information from what officials reported and what was being witnessed on their television screens; television footage showed that the American Embassy had been penetrated, yet U.S officials in Saigon staunchly denied the obvious.  The images spoke for themselves.  Yet, how could such televised dramatic images be contradicted by officials who had been selling invincibility?[18] How could officials claim that Tet was a victory when nightly new reports showed instead that American control was crumbling? The relations between the media and government during Vietnam was one of persistent conflict and ill feeling: the media contradicted the more positive view war officials sought to project[19] and exposed gaps in political versions of progress and legitimacy and therefore aroused suspicion in widening Johnson’s credibility gap[20] and amplified public unease and doubts about the war.

Furthermore, many critics and political conservatives alike blame television’s representation of the war for the decline in public support, pointing to the fact that, although Tet was primarily a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, it was not presented as such.  A number of critics have argued that there was a conspiracy among broadcasters to represent the Tet offensive as a defeat; this has been countered by the claims that it was simply a case that Embassy footage rolled on not because cameramen wished to give the impression of a quagmire, but because news film arrived too late to be edited.[21]  ‘Network producers in control rooms in New York had neither the time nor the opportunity to shield American viewers from the grisly close-ups of wounded Americans, body bags, and death.’[22]  Saigon was where reporters and camera crews were stationed, and the offensive being unexpected, and no censorship enforced, the American military was unable to control press movements. 

Similarly, Peter Braestrup’s Big Story is an exhaustive critical examination of television’s role in coverage of the offensive, and condemns coverage of a misreported defeat for the U.S during Tet.  He believes there was ‘quite a lot of incentives journalistically to make it a bigger story than it needed to be’[23] and argues events such as those in Khe Sanh were made into a ‘melodrama’ and ‘that is why Khe Sanh came to have such enormous visibility in journalistic terms, quite aside from what was happening there.’[24]  He further concludes in his work that there is a direct causal relationship between the coverage of the war and the negative impact on the public’s perception and loss of will on behalf of both the public and American political leaders towards the war effort.  However Braestrup seems to miss, or certainly obscure, the fact that, given the war’s high visibility at any time, ‘the setting of a siege was in itself a contrived drama - well staged but lacking plot or climax.’[25]

This notion that, because of the camera, television shows war in a particularly dramatic and unmediated way, and that any war covered by television, regardless of the political context would lose public support, essentially ignores the effect of selection, editing and broadcasting of televised footage.  Even if we do accept the premise that too much combat and violence was shown on television, we must take into account that television broadcasting must report all of its news within a strict time frame, and so reports were necessarily brief, which resulted in a small presentation of dynamic images and ‘small slices of truth’[26] rather than coherent analysis.  We must question whether these television images broadcast to the public, that are accompanied by continuous voice-over narration which leaves the viewer very little time to reflect over their meaning, can act significantly upon the viewing public to change their views and thus be an agent of defeat.  The view that ‘perhaps many of those in politics have had such a low regard for common sense that they could have believed that millions could be easily manipulated by 75 to 90 second news ‘headlines’ on something so monumental as the rightness of their government’s policy on war and peace’[27] takes into account that, regardless of television coverage, most people have a moralistic, pre-formulated opinion on whether they think war is right or wrong, or else people make their own mind up about war irrespective of what television presents.   It is worth considering that, rather than changing the opinions of the viewing audience, television coverage of war may actually have just reinforced those that already existed.  John Mueller, a professor of political science, argues that ‘the assumption that people will know how they feel about [war] only if they see it regularly pictured on their television screens is essentially naïve and patronizing’[28] 

Changing the tone of coverage

Nevertheless, it certainly appears, notably during and indeed after Tet, that there was a change in the tone of television coverage that coincided with a change of public opinion.  Although television had previously reported objectively and sustained the perception that the American effort was succeeding, coverage of Tet on television news now magnified the problems of leadership and policy direction as the war progressed and reporters developed a more critical viewpoint of analysis.  Indeed, as a key turning-point in the war and on public opinion, Tet effectively collapsed the argument that progress was ongoing and led to a situation where even news anchors, whose position had previously been favourable towards the war effort, now began to dispute official explanations of the conflict with reports infused with personal opinion.   

If we accept the notion that television was an agent of defeat and did end the war, it could be argued that it began with CBS commentator Walter Cronkite’s historic broadcast of the Tet offensive.  Abandoning the traditions of ‘objective’ journalism, Cronkite concluded his report on the Tet offensive with a personal commentary in which he voiced his strong belief that the war would end in a ‘bloody stalemate’, and made this final comment; ‘The only rational way out…would be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and to do the best they could.’[29]  Following this broadcast of Cronkite’s evidently highly critical report, President Johnson is believed to have turned to his aides and said, ‘It’s all over.’[30]  This single remark not only demonstrates the significance and magnitude of Cronkite’s enormous credibility amongst the American viewing public, but also provides an insight into the influence and power of television and its representatives within a visual culture.  Indeed, it may be argued that Cronkite’s stance on and opinion of the war was crucial to support at home, for, if Johnson had lost the support of Walter Cronkite, he had pretty much lost the support of Mr Average Citizen.[31] Hailed the ‘most trusted man in America’, the public both identified with and respected Cronkite. Therefore, unsurprisingly, his editorial has been widely regarded as a critical influence on public opinion of the Vietnam War and his views affected public opinion against American intention towards, and involvement and conduct in, Indochina.  In this light, television is indeed capable of ‘changing the course of history’ through the ‘people running it’, as it has been claimed that Cronkite’s negative editorial destroyed support for the war and was a factor in Johnson’s decision against participating in the next presidential election.  Was this television’s fault? Can this single broadcast be blamed for public opposition and political change? Hallin insists that there is no way to measure the impact of television.  Television cannot be blamed as an agent of defeat on the premise that its coverage influenced and instigated oppositional reaction to the war, as far as we cannot be certain it was the impact or coverage of television reports upon the public that provoked political elites to devise a shift in U.S policy following the Tet offensive.  Hallin points out that ‘perhaps it doesn’t matter whether television really has the immense impact on public opinion’ and that perhaps ‘reputation is enough’.  He argues instead, ‘If politicians believe television shapes public opinion, and respond to the news as an indicator of public sentiment, then the news might shape the course of politics regardless of its actual impact on the public.’[32]  In this light then, television as an institution may provide government officials with a scapegoat; an excuse that its influence and false representation is to blame for America’s defeat in Vietnam, when in fact it is the contradictions and malfunction of their own policies which shape the opinions of reporters and public alike, and provide the agent for their own defeat. 

Bringing the war home

Furthermore, on commenting upon the assertion that opposition to the war was partly attributed to extensive television coverage, Richard Nixon stated, ‘More than ever before, television showed the terrible suffering and sacrifice of war.  Whatever the intention behind such relentless and literal reporting of the war, the result was a serious demoralisation at the home front.’[33] Indeed coverage of the war, particularly Tet, inaugurated a televised movement in America.  The phrase, coined as a statement that encapsulated the core motive behind the anti-war movements rife in America, was ‘Bring the war home’.  Foremost, the phrase is a pledge from anti-war protesters for the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.  However, we must also recognize the literal meaning implicit in the phrase; anti-war protesters recognized it was a ‘war’ that was needed and necessary at home to fight against the war in Vietnam and in this sense very much brought the war ‘home’ onto streets of America and into domestic consciousness.  This consciousness was brought about by the increasing, dramatic, mass political events such as the civil rights movement and anti-war demonstrations that were televised in the theatre of the home. 

After the assassination of Martin Luther King, a critic of American’s involvement in Vietnam and an advocate of the racial and civil rights movement, television coverage showed American ghettos on fire and the increasing social anarchy, racial hostility and violence throughout black communities.  These televised images of domestic unrest were juxtaposed with, and also reminiscent of, the footage from the war itself.  In a sense, the war truly had ‘come home’.

Moreover, television reports were unfavourable to the anti-war movement through focusing on the confrontations between police and protesters.  CBS broadcast a three-part feature about police ‘getting tough’ on demonstrators and blacks across the country in mid-August 1968.  It treated with sympathy the rising police fury against demonstrators, and showed police carrying illegal but officially tolerated weapons.  Ten days after this broadcast came the famous live coverage of the Chicago ‘police riot’.[34]  At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968, anti-war protesters peacefully marched and demonstrated throughout the city, until tensions between protesters and police escalated into violence.  Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war politician, noted that he witnessed ‘five or six policemen beating up one or two protesters.  They were waiting to charge, and, when there was no provocation, they charged anyway.’[35]  However, although anti-war sympathizers were horrified by ‘unmerciful’[36] police violence, television footage seemed biased, and tended to rally to the side of the police.  Reports on anti-war demonstrations mostly resembled crime stories.  ‘The emphasis was on the disruption of public order…and listings of any scuffles, damage and arrests.  Little or no attention was given to the analyses presented in the [anti-war] speeches themselves.’[37]  Indeed there did appear to be a notable absence of interest in the substance of the arguments which the movement articulated well and aimed to promote; rather the possibilities of change the anti-war movement embodied were presented as threats, not as the movement participating in political debate as it was.

Todd Gitlin notes that these negative representations were used by the government to criticize and undermine the anti-war movement, since they portrayed the movement as unco-ordinated, extremist and part of the New Left conspiracy that presented a threat to the social order.  Thus it may be argued, the role and impact of television was as an agent of defeat, not towards the war in Vietnam, but towards the war at ‘home’ and anti-war demonstrations.  The negative construction of anti-war demonstrations increasingly concentrated on left-wing resistance and rebellious youth, ignoring the less dramatic representations of peace (and notably the reasoning behind the protests) and thus contributed to the viewing public’s distrust of, rather than sympathy and support for, the anti-war case.  ‘Such images also tended to support government assertions that the movement was concerned not really with peace, but with the merits of communism’[38].  Therefore, televised reports surrounding protests significantly made many Americans who were distressed by the Vietnam War more distressed by the domestic anti-war movement and what they perceived to be rowdy and unpatriotic upheaval.[39]  The unpopularity of the movement then provided the American administration with opportunity to further marginalize and erode the movement’s chances of acquiring public support, and, it could be argued, shifted the focus from the negative feeling and pressure from anti-war feeling to those people causing a war within the U.S. 

However, regardless of the fact that the television was sending out a negative portrayal of the anti-war movement, as long as it captured what Fred Friendly (then President of CBS news) called ‘”fire in the belly”, an emotional event with emotional people’, it was televised[40].  The anti-war demonstrations certainly conformed to entertainment demands through their dramatic obstruction of political and social norms; they were exactly what television wanted; they had news appeal.  It wasn’t just television chiefs who recognised what exactly this appeal was.  Jerry Rubin, the left-wing social activist and cofounder of the Youth International Parties (Yippies), explains ‘as an ex reporter understood [he knew] “how to make news and I knew we had to make dramatic news in the streets to counter the news in Vietnam”’[41]  The Yippies conducted mass media events which succeeded in their aims to capture the media’s attention with wacky political spectacle.  However, instead of engaging in responsible discourse, television marginalized these groups further by trivializing their protests and attacking their dress and mannerisms.  In this respect, television was an agent of defeat towards the war at home as in ‘acting as representatives of power institutions, [television] denied the anti-war protesters a voice, labelling them in such a way as to render their views beyond the pale of legitimate discourse.’[42]

In conclusion, the claim that television as an agent of defeat provided the most powerful and single influence over the American public against the war effort fails to recognise that television simply acts as a ‘transparent window to reality’, and that despite its visual impact and popular access, serves as just another communication medium.  Although it played a crucial role allowing the public to see the true reality of war, its powers to mould and change public opinion and indeed, the course of history, via the living room are vastly overrated and there is no evidence to provide a fully comprehensive relationship between the impact of television and the decline of public support.  As an agent of defeat, television was not singularly responsible for changing the course of history in terms of the war in Vietnam; there were a multitude of factors; the Vietnam War was not lost solely in the living room, but in the jungle, in the minds of elites and in anti-war demonstrations in the streets of America. However televised coverage was responsible for changing the course of its own history, in that it served as a test case to future governments to censor and control televised coverage during a period of conflict. 

Bibliography

Buzzanco, Robert Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999)

Cumings, Bruce War and Television (London: Verso, 1992)

Gitlin, Todd The Whole World is Watching: mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left (London: University of California Press, 1980)

Hallin, Daniel The Uncensored War: The media and Vietnam (London: University of California Press, 1989)

McLear, Michael The Ten Thousand Day War

ed. Rollins, Peter C Televisions Vietnam: The Visual Language of Television News from Journal of American Culture (Ohio: Bowling Green Sate University, 1981)

Spencer, Graham The Media and Peace (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)

ed. Starr Jerald M Lessons of the Vietnam War (Centre for Social Studies Education, 1991)

JSTOR: Gulbert, David Television's Visual Impact on Decision-Making in the USA, 1968: The Tet Offensive and Chicago's Democratic National Convention, (Journal of Contemporary History, 1998)

JSTOR: Schreiber, E Anti-War Demonstrations and American Public Opinion on the War in Vietnam (The British Journal of Sociology, 1976)

JSTOR: Hallin, D The Media, the War in Vietnam, and Political Support: A Critique of the Thesis of an Oppositional Media (The Journal of Politics, 1984)

JSTOR: Hammond, W The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat: A Critical Examination (Reviews in American History, 1989)

Web sources:

The 6:00 Follies: Hegemony, Television news, and the War of Attrition, Elizabeth J Burnette

<http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA05/burnette/thesis/conclusion.html>

Reporting America at War:

<http://www.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/reporters/cronkite/censorship.html>

Visual texts:

Tet Offensive documentary: Channel Four

Hearts and Mind Documentary directed by Peter Davis 1975

References