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Media Role In The Vietnam War Essay

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The number of press corpses recorded in South Vietnam became more intense. In an extract from Media Role in The Vietnam War (Source A) it is understood that in just a space of a year the death toll had climbed tremendously with 40 corpses in 1964, to 419 deaths in1965. America now had to deal with the large rise in press corps, and decided that they had to apply a more effective method to keep the public out of knowledge. In 1964, the United States Mission and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam decided to appoint an “information czar”, Barry Zorthian, to keep the correspondents in line. From 1965 to 1967, Barry Zorthian, with his experience with the media, had influenced major television networks such as CBS, labelling the war as a “good guys shooting Red’” story. (Source A) The US media had given the American public the …show more content…

The surprise nature of America’s attack coupled with the warfare inexperience of many journalists present in Vietnam saw many of them change their perspectives on their countries involvement in the war. During the war, medias role in the war was changing and this then became another “check and balance” for the United States’ government. (Source B) The Vietnam war was considered as a “living room war” in the sense that the battles and casualties were being shown everyday on American television screens as daily television programs. Source B states that the fact that violence was viewed in the homes of many Americans made the anti-war protests to follow “extremely personal and surreal”. This affected many Americans in their views of the war and the public started to doubt the success of America in Vietnam. (Source E) The newspapers initially published by the New York Times demonstrated that the government had “systematically lied” (Source A) to the public about the entire

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