But then again, that’s never stopped you before. The Vietnam War was also the first one in which the United States suffered a clear defeat. Particularly history. Wiley, 2009 - History - 218 pages. FORUMS. 0 Reviews. Not exactly an impressive lot. — former PhD candidate in international relations. That anecdote from a presidential aide is, like so many things involving this war, the subject of dispute. Had we been allowed to truly go to war and fight like warriors - Vietnam … The U.S. intervention ceased to be framed by TV news reporters as “our” fight against the Viet Cong. The Vietnam War was the first major war to be televised and documented through the media. Your email address will not be published. Cronkite, who retired from his anchor position in 1981, worked on a 1987 documentary series on the Vietnam War. Only when the elites began to question American strategy did news reports take on an antiestablishment slant (Hallin 513). By early 1968, “stalemate” was a decidedly unoriginal — and fairly orthodox — way of characterizing the war effort. When he’d visited Vietnam on a reporting trip early in the war, he’d been annoyed by the attitude of the young reporters who seemed to be “engaged in a contest among themselves to determine who was the most cynical,” he wrote in his autobiography. Cronkite’s nightly newscasts helped shape public opinion about Vietnam, which became known as “the living-room war,” in the words of Michael Arlen of the New Yorker. The complete conversion of The Voice of America, the United State’s Government’s broadcasting agency, (and the largest broadcaster in the world), from short wave radio to television broadcasting and webcasting using the ‘VJ†paradigm (1998-present). United States Involvement. Public approval of the war effort gradually eroded. I didn’t know Cronkite, but I knew a lot of other television reporters. For all of the self-satisfied voyeurism surrounding the Vietnam War, it’s hard to find a concrete idea about why the U.S. lost. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Stalemate was the correct assessment, but Cronkite just mirrored that theory which was first said in 1967, 5-6 months prior to Tet. Then he stunned the nation: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”. Vietnam had actually approached the U.S. for assistance in building a nation in the wake of the Second world war and particularly from French … I can count,” the president said. media lost the war in Vietnam. MESSAGES. But there is revisionism to the revisionism. He’d never taken a public position on the war. With these changes in media, the worst thing the U.S government could have done was hide the reality of the Vietnam War from the American public and the rest of the world. Now that doesn’t look like a communist victory. The media didn’t lose the war in Vietnam because the U.S. didn’t lose the war. Before Vietnam journalists were viewed as propaganda weapons for military powers to feed through selective updates of a conflict; however, by the time it was over the use of the media in war had changed almost completely. I thought we were winning the war!” he said. Adams, whose photograph won the Pulitzer Prize, later said he felt his photo unfairly tarnished the police chief. Vietnam. But papers were small, circulation limited. . It was part of a larger regional conflict as well as a manifestation of the Cold War. I am not sure anyone really thrived under the Pathet Lao, the KR or the People’s Republic. For Higher History, study the reasons the USA lost the war in Vietnam. The guilty media thesis is one that blames the media as to why America lost the war; it was mainly government and military officials who took this view and they were adamant that the war was “lost in the living rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam.’ It was the first ever televised war with the advancing technologies making it easier to transmit news instantaneously. At the time of the Vietnam War there were significant changes taking place that affected not only the stories that were available to journalists, but also crucially the way in which the news was reported by the media. We had killed close to a million enemy soldiers. Read Johnson’s “The Vantage Point,” chapter 18, he thought about leaving office since he became president. What’s certain is that political dominoes fell rapidly after Tet. Adams-Westmoreland Controversy Sam Adams became the center of a growing Vietnam War controversy. Much of the U.S. effort was aimed at rooting out communist guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam — the “pacification” effort. Robert F. Kennedy, the heir to Camelot, for the first time delivered a speech attacking the administration’s dissembling about Vietnam. --Marshall McLuhan, 1975. There’s Cronkite in Saigon. And Mark Bowden, author of a new book on the Battle of Hue, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times, “Cronkite was right. Many Americans would be hard-pressed to name the current anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”, Cronkite’s great persuasive power emerged from his long history of not attempting to be persuasive at all. During one of my assignments, I was on the Commander, Patrol Wings Atlantic staff. The Vietnam War: How America Lost the War Against Communism Essay. +++ 11:32 Mehr als 57.700 neue Fälle in den USA +++ (1993-1996). The disputed narrative of the Vietnam War, and what it meant, and why it unfolded the way it did, highlights the genius of the wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall. Did the news media, led by Walter Cronkite, lose the war in Vietnam? The antiwar Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, had sudden momentum heading into the March 12 New Hampshire primary. (They were afraid of the Chinese and Soviets, which is in itself arguable). Estimates of casualties of the Vietnam War vary widely. America’s war grief. The referees of history may make it a draw.”. First we were not allowed to pursue the NVA into Laos or fire into Laos, so the NVA had a safe haven. He says to the viewer, “First and simplest, the Viet Cong suffered a military defeat.” And then he goes on to explain multiple ways the Viet Cong failed to achieve their objectives. To this day it is my passion. The men killed on a single, bloody day in Vietnam, and the haunting wall that memorializes them, To fight the status quo, the activists of 1968 harnessed the power of fashion. The Vietnam War in 40 Quotes by James M. Lindsay Last month, I did a series of posts commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. The Vietnam War, with the exception of the Civil War, was the most divisive conflict in American history. Looking at the world balance of power now and conditions in Russia and China it’s hard to say that goal was not obtained — even though the tactical goal of maintaining the South Vietnamese government was lost (something I am not convinced anyone in the U.S. ever really cared about all that much). 85% of the population still says that television news is their primary source of information. Jon Mixon, who has studied military actions during war times, feels that the Vietnamese War was lost by the Americans because South Vietnam was a product of France’s loss during the Indo-china War. The world seems so simple to understand. To think that he did, well, that’s just part of the illusion of knowledge. Many declared it the turning point in the War in Vietnam. It was not the media that lost the war it was the untruthfulness of the U.S government and military. Estimates include both civilian and military deaths in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Media coverage during the Vietnam War was a very important reason why the US lost the war as sources D to L show and do so very well. Let’s begin with the My Lai massacre of March 1968, … I have been to Vietnam several times as a journalist (as well as Cambodia and Laos). They argue that the media’s tendency toward negative reporting helped to undermine support for the war in the United States while its uncensored coverage provided valuable information to the enemy in Vietnam. The Vietnam War; Media and the War. Download file to see previous pages Vietnam War is an example from history where American media could not handle the war to protect the gains of the forces. After all, he was there; and for more than two weeks. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam, in the field. .”. Henry Kissinger signs the Paris Peace Accords on Jan. 27, 1973 in Paris. Journalists look for direct causality, while historians see complexity. and they were the smarter ones. In essence, we got into the war to prevent the toppling of dominos in Southeast Asia, and we effectively succeeded, which was, in reality, a strategic victory. The east and west ends of the memorial feature the names from the very midpoint of the war, as measured by Americans killed. Had the Americans invaded the North physically and taken Hanoi and Haiphong (which they could have done in an afternoon), the war would have been over soon, and probably the people of Vietnam would have, in the long run, fared better than they did under a communist regime (see South Korea v. North Korea). I was the bad-news messenger. Army & Navy Vietnam Veterans. At the end of the war, it began to be manufactured in large-scale. The responses were remarkably static in the first half of 1968, despite Tet, the Cronkite Moment and heavy U.S. casualties. I am sure they could have. The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. This essay will discuss to what degree the media can be blamed for the United States' loss in the Vietnam conflict ending 1975. CBS News correspondent Morley Safer and his colleagues had followed Marines into a hamlet named Cam Ne, which was allegedly infested with the communist guerrilla fighters known as the Viet Cong. (See China). My Uncle is clearly a conservative. The communists failed to topple the government in Saigon or persuade the rice farmers in the countryside to join their cause. As elite consensus eroded, public opposition moved from the “political fringes of society into its mainstream” (Hallin 514). Johnson didn’t call the “Cronkite Moment” a turning point like Halberstam falsely stated and the media didn’t push him out of office. I am sure Walter was a great ‘journalist’, whatever that means.. but an intellectual? Until then, journalists based in Saigon had to go find the war. Vietnam War (1954–75), conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Voraussetzung seien Maske und Abstand - die Läden hätten aber die Wirksamkeit ihrer Hygienekonzepte bereits nachgewiesen. Until 1968, network news operations tended to edit out the blood and gore and avoid direct criticism of military operations while American lives were on the line. Login; Join; HOME. Only when the elites began to question American strategy did news reports take on an antiestablishment slant (Hallin 513). This didn’t look like a war the Americans were winning. Now the war came to them. Hallin argues that the media methodically reported the Vietnam War (69). The Vietnam War in 40 Quotes by James M. Lindsay Last month, I did a series of posts commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. What was astonishing, upon examination, was that Cronkite made that pronouncement after a 2-week tour of Vietnam. > News Media and Politics lost the war ! When the first bulletins arrived at CBS headquarters, Cronkite was aghast. During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of antiwar Americans entered academia and the media, while few Vietnam veterans and other supporters of the war obtained jobs in those professions, in many cases because veteran status or pro-war sentiments were considered unacceptable. In a survey conducted in 1964, 58% US respondents said that they “got most of their news” from television2. This is not a liberal vs. conservative argument. “[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate . Sorry, I can’t seem to find it. Our Public Affairs Officer showed the staff a video about the media misinformation (CBS News) concerning the battle for Khe Sanh. which the US never really did. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. The Marines found no Viet Cong or firearms. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam”[1] The impact of the media on society had never been seen to the extent of its impact on the Vietnam conflict. The combination of so much unchecked power married to too often shallow and superficial information is recipe for disaster. . Did the media coverage of Tet change the way Americans viewed the war? Army & Navy Vietnam Veterans. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, ... Media and the Vietnam War, Truthful or Deceptive?, 2012) Hallin (1989) gives an alternative point of view and says that there are people, such as David Brinkley6, who does not agree with the notion that media played any part in decision making about Vietnam. Following orders, they burned down the hamlet. A power that has no countervailing force to make sure that it also stays in balance. Fifty years later, he bears witness again. The US held back on running a full scale war and maintained a limited kind of ‘police action’ which resulted simply in dragging on a slow bleed for years. Why?The absence of a clear explanation is not an accident. It made me start to thing about the juxtaposition of the power of the media, particularly when it is populated by people who generally know next to nothing about what they are talking about. The milestone comes at a … Timeline of the Vietnam War (Second Indochina War). The media. Right before we decided to pull out of the war we had the North close to surrendering. Cronkite was absolutely incorrect about his assessment of the war. However, that being said, I remember the media coverage about Tet. We & the South Vietnamese had been beaten & they showed the VC & N. Vietnamese in Saigon by the US Embassy & the S. Vietnamese Headquarters. The facts, in my view are as follows. The enemy had organized a well coordinated attack throughout S. Vietnam. They surprised us, however they lost thousands of soldiers & did not take any cities or towns of tactical importance. As a matter of fact, after the US left & the N. Vietnam Army (NVA) took over the country the senior military NVA general admitted that the Tet offensive was a complete disaster for them. Did the NVA & VC win the PR battle of Tet? Most certainly did & it was led by Uncle Walter. The media had given us little positive & Tet was their big thing for the war being lost. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam”[1] The impact of the media on society had never been seen to the extent of its impact on the Vietnam conflict. He said that, because of the scale of a television, the war is “a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, and trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.”. The constant barrage of television with its body bags in the field and coffins in returning airplanes brought home the cost of the war. There was no government censorship, but negative news reports infuriated President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he didn’t hesitate to let the networks know it. No scheduled dates at this time. Hallin argues that the media methodically reported the Vietnam War (69). DISCUSSIONS. The US military was unable to … Sounds interesting thought. Learn how your comment data is processed. The United States had fought many wars prior to Vietnam but this was the first war under the scrutinizing eyes of the American public. The media may have helped lose the war for Americans, but in Vietnam it showed how it could be a tool of unimaginable social power and help to mobilize the power of the people in order to achieve what is right. [I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. President Johnson was deflated by Cronkite’s report, saying, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”. Media reporting and the general attitudes about the media on the whole, as well as how segments of society interpreted the events of Vietnam is interesting and important. Please click above to be notified when we announce new dates. Since the beginning of the World War II, television gradually became familiar to the public. After the US troops left the Congress cut the appropriations for the S. Vietnamese by 50%. That meant their ammunition requests , money for spare parts, etc was lacking & the NVA overran the country. As for Vietnam, one may argue the merits of American involvement at all, but if you decide to become embroiled in a war, you better set out to win it, . Not a single defeat - Not a single battle lost - 58,000 men died - But the military lost not a single battle. “Uncle Walter” had developed a reputation as the ultimate straight shooter, “the avatar of objectivity,” in the words of Richard Perloff, a professor of communications at Cleveland State University. Nov 16, 2014 7:14 AM. At the close of the hour, Cronkite, back at his desk in New York, delivers his verdict. m. I am a history major at CSU Fresno and have been studying the Vietnam conflict for about a year and a half now. Was the war winnable? I think so. Images of warfare and dead or wounded American soldiers brought the war home. The media lost the war for America. The role of the media in the perception of the Vietnam War has been widely noted. When we finally left in ’75 every provincial capital was in S. Vietnamese hands & the casualty rate for the NVA & VC was horrendous. More than 20 years ago, Neil Postman warned that one of the great dangers of television news was that it conveyed what he called ‘the illusion of knowledge’. The superficiality that television almost mandates, married to a superficial understanding of complex issues can be dangerous. Was it so with Uncle Walter in Vietnam? media lost the war in Vietnam. His work has included: The complete transitioning of The BBC's national network (UK) to a VJ-driven model, starting in 2002. Now people are worried about the rise of China as a capitalist power. S soldier was forgotten in Vietnam. His generals claimed to see light at the end of the tunnel. McCarthy ran a shockingly strong second to Johnson in New Hampshire. During this time, he has lead a drive for videoliteracy, and the complete rethinking of how television is made and controlled. As the pundit class sinks into a new quagmire debating former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s Vietnam mission, it’s a good time to dissect the myth. To assume that, then publish an entire post based on this narrow assumption, is silly and misleading. NOTIFICATIONS . The Gallup organization had been asking Americans since 1965 if the U.S. made a mistake by getting involved in Vietnam. : Gary R. Hess. He flew to Vietnam and at first stayed at the Caravelle Hotel, a favorite place for journalists who wanted to witness the war in comfort in a place where the bar stayed open late. Even in the field of academics, there is still a lot of debate on . In the episode on Tet, he addressed the criticism that reporters got the story wrong. There was a stable build up of US military support activity in Vietnam during the period 1954 to 1965, but the first combat troops did not emerge until March 1965. Instead, Cronkite and his producers assess the progress of the war on the terms set by U.S. commanders, such as whether the “pacification” program had suffered a setback from the Viet Cong. In speculation, even if we had 1 million troops on the ground, we could not have defeated “the will” of the North Vietnamese. April 30,2000, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the real end of the Vietnam War: the "fall" of Saigon—which was quickly renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Charges that the media in Vietnam systematically portrayed American soldiers in a negative light are also untrue. There are two solutions: either we learn to pay far less attention to what we see on TV news, or we create some kind of countervailing sources of information. I, for one, am a fan of the latter, believing that the former is simply unattainable. Last week, at the height of the Cronkite memorabilia-fest, I watched, along with everyone else, as TV news ran the famous ‘we can no longer win the war in Vietnam’ clip over and over. Second our bombing of N. Vietnam was haphazard & Lyndon Johnson & SEC DEF Robert Strange (& he was) McNamara commanded when & who to bomb. He was an old-school journalist, a patriot, a man who came of age covering World War II as a wire-service reporter and then taking over as the anchor of “The CBS Evening News” at the height of the Cold War. Cronkite told Kennedy that he should run for president. See all posts by Patrick Hollis → The Longest Wars in Human History. For more than 25 years, Mr. Rosenblum has been on the cutting edge of the digital ‘videojournalist’ revolution. Like most journalists of his generation, he embraced the fight against communism and understood why the United States had intervened in the war raging in Vietnam. I do not believe this is an accurate assessment of the war, especially with all of the academic scholarship out to refute that revisionist theory. Cronkite’s remarks were decidedly more temperate than other contemporaneous media assessments about the war. For more than a decade, the U.S. had declared that it would not let Vietnam fall to the communists. And when ‘the most trusted man in America’ speaks to half the nation, people listen. In Saigon, 19 guerrilla fighters entered the U.S. Embassy compound through a hole they’d blown in the outer wall. The role of the news anchor has been diminished. The United States had fought many wars prior to Vietnam but this was the first war under the scrutinizing eyes of the American public. Rosenblum was both the founder and President of NYT TV, (all based on the “VJ†paradigm – 1996-1998). How, in effect, we could kill more Vietnamese. A meeting place for all Army and Navy veterans who served in Vietnam on the waters of the Mekong Delta. Share. As a former PhD candidate in Islamic Studies, I can tell you that that was a tsunami of inaccuracy, misinformation and sloppy reporting. You must also remember that on my 1st tour I was a Lt Col & was interested in my unit. I was a Battalion Commander in a Separate Parachute Brigade. Our unit killed a hell of a lot of bad guys & suffered minimal friendly casualties. My 2d tour I was promoted to Colonel & for part of the time was at Khe Sanh helping the S. Vietnamese as they went into Laos. The context in which Vietnam appeared to fall under Soviet influence is critical. But I could see that the body-count war was being lost. One that media did not print the US military effort and sacrifices of the army and on another end, a post-war scenario was full of a critic, which had very demoralizing effects on troops and also on the nation as a whole. . When Michael Arlen coined the term, he didn’t say that television brought the reality of the war into people’s homes. By Quora Contributor. In essence, we got into the war to prevent the toppling of dominos in Southeast Asia, and we effectively succeeded, which was, in reality, a strategic victory. That allowed him to fly to Vietnam like an intercontinental ballistic missile of objectivity. By the end of the war in Vietnam, the North had lost more than 2 million dead and was too weakened to pose a threat to any but its neighbors Laos and Cambodia. When the Founders drafted the Constitution, newspapers were in their infancy. Benjamin Franklin was printing one of the very first papers in the country in Philadelphia. America was deeply affected by these heavy losses and struggled to understand the meaning, significance and lessons of the Vietnam War. The war persisted from 1955 to 1975 and most of the fighting took place in South Vietnam; accordingly it suffered the most casualties. The President and Founder of Video News International, a global VJ-driven newsgathering company, with more than 100 journalists around the world. But that’s life. As Susan Carruthers (2000) notes, it was the first ‘television war.’ Vietnam received sustained… The United States lost almost 60,000 personnel and civilians in Vietnam: 58,269 servicemen were killed and another 1,672 recorded as missing. After France's defeat by the Vietnamese in the First Indochina War, the U.S. became embroiled in a second war, which Americans call the Vietnam War. . The major U.S. strategic objective in Vietnam was to prevent the expansion of Soviet and Chinese Communist influence in South East Asia. There are just the names of the Americans who lost their lives in Southeast Asia. And Its Japan's Fault. Intense levels of graphic news coverage correlated with dramatic shifts of public opinion regarding the conflict, and there is controversy over what effect journalism had on support or opposition to the war, as well as the decisions that policymakers made in response. More Americans have perished from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined. (That’s 3 stars for those of us who live in NY or LA.). However, it is perhaps also possible to speculate that an integrated American war effort that included the conscious use of the media as a propaganda tool on the home front might have limited the disenchantment of the American public enabling the United States to sustain its war effort in Vietnam for longer. “He was just doing the gumshoe reporting all over Vietnam, and the print reporters all swooned over Cronkite for doing it,” says historian and Cronkite biographer Douglas Brinkley. When you root around in the history books, you realize there’s little consensus about anything. The VC matched it since 1965. history. “Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. There are no dubious metrics of enemy deaths, no media reports, no speeches. One would not know that 416 Americans were killed in Vietnam in the week ending Feb. 3 and another 543 in the week ending Feb. 17 — each a record to that point. Vietnam was a war of firsts in many respects. The war was ended when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided it was getting in the way of their own grand strategic designs. Hi Dave In the 2017 book “The Myths of Tet,” Edwin Moïse pushes back, saying the news media largely got it right. Verfügbar seien genug Tests, die Hersteller berichteten, ihre Lager seien voll, ein Hersteller habe ihm etwa gesagt, er könne wöchentlich 20 Millionen Tests liefern.