Vietnam (war)

Vietnam was the first war that issued full freedom to the press, allowing media to cover the war as they saw it. Without censorship, appalling images enabled the public to see war, as they never had before. Many people believe that it was the media that sparked the lack of support for the war. The Tet Offensive, for example, would become one of the most controversial and climactic events in which the media played a role. Up to that point, the media had portrayed the U.S. as winning the war. When the North Vietnamese sprung an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon, however, the American public watched on as if they were there. As the images filtered across TV screens and magazines pages, people began to doubt President Johnson’s creditability. In just a few days American support for the war took a rapid turn around.
The Tet offensive was clearly a military failure, but thanks to media coverage it came across as propaganda-like triumph for the Communists. In other words, television footage boosted the morale for the "enemy". The media widely reported that Vietcong soldiers had invaded the U.S. embassy building, when in fact they never made it. Twenty-six men did make their way inside the walls of the embassy compound, but three marines kept them from entering the actual building. The media, however, never retracted their stories. This pattern was repeated throughout the war.
In the wake of such death and destruction, it isn’t surprising that peace, love and sexual freedom became the mantra of a new generation. The youth movement challenged authority on all fronts, and authority frequently fought back. As the Sixties unfolded, no institution remained untouched, no belief unchallenged. It was a climatic decade. A dashing young president was shot only two brief years after being elected. The struggle for civil rights was gaining momentum, while riots broke out in the wake of Dr. King’s death in April 1968. And in a brief moment of American pride, families across America watched as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon on July 20, 1969. All of these events occurred in the backdrop of what seemed to be the never-ending war.
Due to the explosive response to the Vietnam War many people have said that television should not be present in warfare situations. As the notorious author, Michael Herr, stated, television camera’s can cause some soldiers to create "war movies in their heads, it causes men with guns to do things that they wouldn’t have done for a pad and pencil”

Taking a public protest:
The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre) occurred at Kent State University in the U.S. city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.
There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of four million students, and the event further affected the public opinion—at an already socially contentious time—over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.

Negative Impact of Media On The Vietnam War Outcome
The majority of Vietnam veterans think that overly negative television coverage helped turn the American public against the war and against the American troops deployed in Vietnam. The media is called the fourth estate for its capacity to form opinions, that is to say the power to shape patterns of thinking, feeling and reacting before certain circumstances, events and famous people.
Negative Impact of Media On The Vietnam War Outcome
Even trained military personnel sometimes have difficulties in withstanding the horrors of war. During the Vietnam War it was the first time that the horrors of an armed conflict entered the living rooms of Americans. For almost a decade in between school, work, and dinners, the American public could watch villages being destroyed, Vietnamese children burning to death, and American body bags being sent home. At the beginning the media coverage generally supported U.S involvement in the war, but television news dramatically changed its frame of the war after the Tet Offensive. Images of the U.S led massacre at My Lai dominated the television, yet the daily atrocities committed by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong rarely made the evening news. Thus, the anti-war movement at home gained increasing media attention while the U.S soldier was forgotten in Vietnam.
Coverage of the war and its resulting impact on public opinion has been debated for decades by many intelligent media scholars and journalists, yet they are not the most qualified individuals to do so: the veterans are. Journalists based in Saigon daily reported facts about battles, casualties, and the morale of the troops, yet only a soldier could grasp the true reality of war. The media distortions, due to television’s misrepresentations during the Vietnam War, led to the American defeat, not on the battlefield but on the political and social arena.

Unlike previous wars, the participants and interpreters of the Vietnam war have yet to reach any kind of consensus, and it is unlikely they ever will. This has a great deal to do with the authenticity of oral history accounts. The Vietnam War has been written, and then rewritten. Americans either won the war, lost the war, or were neither winners nor losers.
This does not necessarily mean the narrator is not telling the truth, it means that each person is approaching the same remembered event or emotion from a different perspective and is therefore limited to interpretation. Writing history is by its very nature unreliable because it requires the selection of incidents for recording, the treatment of time and its effects, and the kind of connection, which the historian establishes between events.