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My Lai Massacre And Watchmen Analysis

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Massacres and Watchmen: How the My Lai massacres Changed War Reporting Freedom of the press is a right held very dear by Americans, but out of what was this devotion to the media born? Unfortunately, that answer is not as simple as one event, one person, or one story. The government is an integral part of our daily lives which oversees all and controls most. Many of the instances that have gleaned the admiration of the American people for the press have undermined this, occasionally, overreaching powerhouse. “Woodstein” and Watergate, Edward Snowden and the NSA, and Seymour Hersh and My Lai exposed the hidden wrongs of the US government with staggeringly influential power to change both the government and journalism. Here, we will be focusing on the fallout from Hersh’s reports on the 1968 massacres at My Lai (“Pinkville”), Vietnam. With the exposer of US Army immorality by Seymour Hersh of the St. Louis Dispatch in a series of reports the field of war journalism was forever changed into two distinct eras, Pre and post Vietnam and fundamentally changed the journalist, military relationship. …show more content…

With the initiation of World War One governments on both sides of the Atlantic began to exhibit control over war correspondents, keeping tabs on where and who they were with, often through incentives. Good public opinion abounded for the wars and the war correspondents (Smith, 2012). By the second world war people would flood into movie theaters to receive news of the previous week’s events on the war front, idolizing reporters (Siegel, 2003). Unsurprisingly, such reports often biased and focused on the heroisms of the allies, any atrocities were assumed better left unsaid (Smith,

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