The role of the media in the perception of the Vietnam War has been widely noted. 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.
Heavily influenced by government information management in the early years of the conflict, the U.S. media eventually began to change its main source of information. Journalists focused more on research, interviews and analytical essays to obtain information rather than press conferences, official news releases and reports of official proceedings.
As more American households obtained television sets, it became easier for citizens to keep up with the war. The media played an immense role in what the American people saw and believed. Early American journalists in South Vietnam, like American policymakers and diplomats, lacked knowledge of the Vietnamese language and struggled to understand the country's culture and politics.
By the mid-1960s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the war was not going well for the U.S. and South Vietnam, despite the optimism of official accounts. As reports from the field became increasingly accessible to citizens, public opinion began to turn against U.S. involvement, though many Americans continued to support it. Others felt betrayed by their government for not being truthful about the war. This led to an increase in public pressure to end the war. By early February 1968, a Gallup poll showed only 32 percent of the population approved of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the war and 57 percent disapproved. The remaining 11 percent had no opinion.
Critical "failures to convey" occurred. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese government erred in its certainty that widespread assaults would trigger a supportive uprising of the population. People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and Viet Cong (VC) troops throughout the South attacked in force for the first time in the war; over the course of the offensive, 50,000 of these troops were killed (by Army of the Republic of Vietnam and American troops).. The Viet Cong would not fight effectively as a cohesive force again until after two years of regeneration. These reversals on the battlefield failed to register on the American home front, as shocking photos and television imagery, along with critical appraisals by influential commentators such as CBS television anchor Walter Cronkite, undermined the U.S. position that the Tet Offensive was a failure.
French Indochina War The French lost control of Vietnam, which they had ruled as part of French Indochina, during World War II. In September 1945, they returned to reconquer Indochina; meanwhile, the Vietnamese were locked in a civil strife over the destiny of their postcolonial state. After the communist-led Viet Minh purge of rival political parties and the breakdown of negotiations, tensions between the Viet Minh and French authorities erupted into full-scale Indochina War in December 1946.
In 1949, the French and certain Vietnamese nationalists established the anti-communist State of Vietnam under Bảo Đại. In 1950, the United States began quietly supporting the French and the State of Vietnam, while media coverage emphasized the French Union rather than the American role. The French colonial government set up a system of censorship, but correspondents traveled to Singapore or Hong Kong to file their reports without constraint.
Early US war, 1955–1965 The news then reflected communism and the Cold War. In asking how the United States got into Vietnam, attention must be paid to the enormous strength of the Cold War consensus in the early 1960s shared by journalists and policymakers alike and due to the great power of the administration to control the agenda and the framing of foreign affairs reporting.
The first editorial about the rise of communism in Vietnam was published by The New York Times in January 1955. After the United States threw its weight behind Ngo Dinh Diem, who became South Vietnam's president in 1955, media in the United States ignored the new leader's despotic tendencies and instead highlighted his anti-communism. The death of civilians in an attempted coup against President Diem at the end of 1960 started to change how South Vietnam was viewed by the media. As a result, The New York Times sent the first reporter to Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. That was followed by other journalists arriving from Reuters, Agence France Presse, Time and Newsweek. The basic policy governing how the US mission in Saigon handled the reporters reflected the way the administration of President John F. Kennedy conceived of the American role in the war. Under that framework, the Americans' role in South Vietnam was only to render advice and support in its war against the Communists.
Ap Bac In January 1963, South Vietnamese forces engaged the Viet Cong at the Battle of Ap Bac. The reporting of what became a debacle for the South Vietnamese military, and the condemnation heaped upon it by the Western press became a controversial issue that then attracted a great deal of public attention. Both the US mission and Washington condemned the reports and questioned the motives of the correspondents involved. The Kennedy administration then went on the offensive, bombarding news editors in the US with complaints concerning the accuracy of the reporting of the Saigon press corps. The chain of events led to the interesting conundrum of American periodicals attacking the accuracy of their own on-the-spot reporters. The correspondents, however, did not question the black-and-white assumptions of the time that the war was a part of the larger struggle between the free world and totalitarianism or whether the war was beyond America's ability to win. They perceived their issues with the Saigon government as a conflict over tactics, not principles. Diem's government and military were hindering a positive solution to the problem. According to the reporters, the solution was for the US either to get rid of Diem or to take over direct control of the war itself.
Although the US mission was irate over the reporting of the battle, even the US Public Information Office (PIO) in Saigon had to admit, from partial information on an emotional subject, the reporting was "two-thirds accurate" and that the correspondents had done quite respectably. Ap Bac and the controversy surrounding it, however, marked a permanent divide in the relations between the official US position and the news media in South Vietnam. Before the battle, the media had criticized Diem and argued for more US control of the war, but they were still agreeable to the position of the diplomats and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). After it, correspondents became steadily more convinced that they (and, by extension, the American people) were being lied to and withdrew, embittered, into their own community.
Buddhist crisis The situation was only exacerbated during the Buddhist crisis of May 1963, when the Diem government considered the foreign press as its enemy and was unwilling to communicate its side of the story effectively. While the top levels of the US mission in Saigon were inordinately closemouthed around reporters during this period, others, especially those who disagreed with the policy of supporting Diem, were not. They leaked information from discussions with Diem to the press, embarrassing him and thwarting the embassy's vigorous efforts to win an end to the anti-Buddhist repressions. Once again, however, despite occasional factual errors and conflict between the press and the embassy, most of the news commentaries were reasonably accurate. The US Army's official history of military-media relations reported, "Although marred at times by rhetoric and mistaken facts, they often probed to the heart of the crisis." During the Buddhist Crisis, the number of correspondents in South Vietnam swelled from an original nucleus of eight to a contingent of over 60.
By 1964, the leadership of both the US and South Vietnam had changed hands. US President Kennedy had been assassinated, and Diem had been murdered during a US-backed military coup. Instead of paving the way for political stability, however, Diem's demise only unleashed a maelstrom of political unrest. Coup followed coup as South Vietnamese generals vied for power. There were seven governments in Saigon during 1964: three between 16 August and 3 September alone. The war in South Vietnam ground on, and the Viet Cong was making serious headway. Following the recommendations of an internal report, MACV made the decision that since news correspondents were "thoroughly knowledgeable" about the war, its Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) would attempt to woo reporters by providing them with "up to date, factual information on current operations and policies".
Problems Although Operation Candor was a welcome relief for correspondents, it did not halt the media's dubiousness concerning the efficacy of the Saigon government or further American involvement with it. Reporters had also become quite aware that all sides (the South Vietnamese and American governments, the US mission, MACV, the Buddhists, and the Viet Cong) were trying to manipulate them. It did not help matters that JUSPAO was also MACV's propaganda arm, a fact that was well known to news correspondents. The American public was also dissatisfied with the course of events in South Vietnam. A January 1965 Gallup poll indicated that two out of three Americans agreed that the country would never form a stable government and that four out of five Americans felt that the communists were winning. Few, however, wanted a unilateral US withdrawal and 50 percent believed that the US was obliged to defend independent nations from communist aggression.
From the early stages of the war and until its end, the South Vietnamese people were regularly viewed by the media with condescension, contempt, and disdain. The media exhibited the "Cold War myopia, ethnocentrism, cultural bias, and racism embedded in American ideology". American journalists arrived in Vietnam with almost no knowledge of its culture, history, society, or language, and they did not attempt to learn. One reason was that most journalists spent on rotation only six to twelve months in South Vietnam, providing little incentive for reporters to learn the language. Although the US Department of Defense offered a brief introductory course for journalists on the history and the culture of Vietnam, few attended it. Meanwhile, none of the networks trained their correspondents to understand military matters. Although the "pacification" of South Vietnam's villages was the continuously touted supreme goal of the Saigon government, the U.S. Mission, MACV, and the media, there was little real discussion within the media as to why it was so difficult to convince the Vietnamese peasantry to join the side of the Saigon government.