Media Representation: Vietnam War, a Lasting Impact

Media can have a profound and lasting impact on culture and society for better or for worse.  The imprint of images stay with us, long after the story has passed a new one has taken it's place.  The Vietnam War was the start of a new era of media coverage.  Radio was no longer the number one, television was now taking the lead.  The intensely negative coverage of the war influenced both politicians and the public.  Americans depended on television to see and understand the war, but the death and destruction they saw appeared as irrational killing when prospects for the war became increasingly negative.  Therefore, the majority of Americans withdrew their support for the war after the Tet Offensive.  War coverage declined from 90 percent of all newscasts to 61 percent from Richard Nixon's election through February 1969.  Though the media had been covering the anti-war movement before 1968, it now overshadowed the war itself.  Draft-card burning and demonstrations provided television with fresher conflict, human impact, and moral issues.  With the massive loss of public support for the war, politicians initiated withdrawal policies.  Television no longer focused on combat, but on the political process.
John Laurence, a CBS reporter who covered the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1970 admits that the truth rarely got reported: "We decided where to go, what to observe, what to film, what not to film, what questions to ask, and how to describe what we saw and were told.  Veterans referred to atrocities committed by the North Vietnamese (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) armies, which outnumbered U.S. committed atrocities by "one thousand to one".  "The North Vietnamese thought nothing of attaching a bomb to a little kid and sending that kid into a group of American soldiers."  Veterans claim that the media only covers what makes a profit: "The media tends to cover what they think they will sell."
"The North Vietnamese thought nothing of attaching a bomb to a little kid and sending that kid into a group of American soldiers."  From an american viewpoint, the Vietnam War is not well understood.  Even though it was part of the American daily life for some fifteen years, there is no consensus as to its purpose and result.  Some Americans believe that Vietnam was a national policy blunder costing some 58,000 American lives and billions of tax dollars.  That it divided the country at a time when it most needed to be unified, leaving scars that are yet to be healed.  Others believe the war was a noble cause similar to the United Nations effort that kept South Korea free.  During the war, America dropped 8 million ton of bombs between 1965 and 1973.  Bombs that failed to detonate on impact became de facto land mines.  The Vietnamese government estimates that more than 100,000 people have been killed or injured by exploded ordnance since the war ended.
We are influenced by what the media says, whether we want to be or not.  What if people were given the opportunity to discover war for themselves and war through falsely leading eyes.