American Media In Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, whose influences and ramifications are still fresh in the American society, is a most studied and discussed topic in the academia as well as in the general public. After the years, the brutality, futility and grimness of the tragic and tumultuous war revealed in front of the public. The Vietnam War is now deemed as an unjust war fought for an unjust end on a foreign land with massive damage done to the Vietnam and with cost not worthy of the effort. The war took place in a time when the print media had matured and the television networks were enjoying their golden-age development. As an event that literally involved the service of the whole nation, the Vietnam War was inevitably the news in the print press and later even more so on television news in the years that it was fought. The media reporting primarily involved four parties:the American government, the soldiers in the battle field, the media itself and the American public. The media mainly sourced from the government officials, and also the soldiers in the field, and presented the war in this way to the public. The media and the war had intense interactions in between and mutually exerted influence on each other.With respect to the media’s role in the war process and the media performance during the war, there have been affirmative voices and contending voices. The affirmative side argued that the media did its best in covering that most complicated war under that specific social and historical background, while the contending side challenged that the media didn’t do its due diligence, criticizing the media for not delivering more in-depth reporting. Nevertheless, both sides shared certain objective parts in the analysis. It is this paper’s intention to draw on the strengths of previous studies while shedding their defects by isolating opinions from facts, so as to attain a most objective and comprehensive assessment of the media’s performance in the Vietnam War.Conceived in this way, the paper begins with the introduction of the Vietnam War in relation with the media and the media development in relation with the Vietnam War. Subsequently, the paper proceeds to the literature review, which is the summary of previous study on the topic with isolation of useful information from dubious analysis. On this basis, the paper defines its research methodology, a synthesis of social, historical and political approaches, because these approaches in combination can most amply be applied to analyze, interpret and explain why the media did what it did. Then, the paper moves on to the media performance in the war itself and the analysis of media performance, largely in chronological order through the three administrations, namely the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration, and the Nixon administration, with highlighted episodes representing the media performance in each individual period, as well as a panoramic view of the media performance as a whole, analyzed from the aforementioned angles, that is, social reasons of the Cold War ideology, historical reasons of the media themselves, and political reasons of the U.S. government. Based on the detailed analysis, the paper finally further clarifies the evaluation of the media performance in the war, which is that the media didn’t perform a duly satisfactory job expected of them, but it was due to some certain forces rather than purely their own faults. Therefore, the media should not be too harshly criticized for the sake of criticism; rather the media’s role in the Vietnam War should be perceived as assets to tap into for lessons.In the concluding part, the paper further analyzes how the media performance in the Vietnam War influences other media coverage in times of emergency, and how through the lessons learned in the media coverage of the Vietnam War, readers should accept and analyze media coverage even in the daily news with a critical mind.