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By Root 2728 0

” in January–February 1968, when the military lost its “control over the movements of the press,” who could step outside their hotels and find “themselves willy-nilly in the midst of bloody fighting.” For this brief moment, correspondents sent on-the-spot reports that were aired in place of “the usual carefully edited view of an orderly, controlled war,” and the policy of “shield[ing] American viewers from the grisly closeups of wounded Americans, body bags and death” briefly collapsed, though newscasts continued to be edited in home offices as “too strong,” in the words of NBC producer Robert Northshield. This coverage convinced Walter Cronkite that the war had become “a bloody stalemate,” in a controversial report to which we will return.

The Tet offensive convinced U.S. elites that the war was becoming too costly to the United States, and the government shifted toward the policy of “Vietnamization,” large-scale massacre operations to destroy the indigenous resistance and its civilian base, expansion of the war in Laos and Cambodia, and the commencement of negotiations with North Vietnam. “Accordingly, the networks again changed the focus of their coverage, this time from the battlefields in Vietnam to the negotiation tables in Paris . . . The ‘story’ was now the negotiations, not the fighting,” Northshield explained, adding that “combat stories seemed like a contradiction and would confuse the audience.” “Similar decisions were made at the other networks,” Epstein adds, as all “altered their coverage in late 1969 from combat pieces to stories about the ‘Vietnamization’ of the war” and the negotiations in Paris. The post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign, one of the most crucial and murderous operations in the U.S. war against South Vietnam, received little attention.

Epstein believes that “there is a marked difference between the coverage of the formative years of the war (1962–1967) and the later years (when the antiwar movement was at its height).” “Up until 1968, television coverage was controlled to a large extent by the American military, and generally it reflected a controlled American initiative which seemed to be winning the countryside and decimating the Vietcong. The searchlight rarely focused on related questions, such as the sufferings of Vietnamese civilians.” During the Tet offensive, the focus changed to Americans “shown on the defensive, endangered and helplessly frustrated,” then to “the story of the American withdrawal” as “negotiations began at the end of 1968.” The differences, however, are misleading. Apart from the live coverage during the Tet offensive, there is very little departure from the principle that the war must be viewed from the standpoint determined by official Washington doctrine—a standpoint that broadened in scope after Tet, as tactical disagreements arose within elite circles.

In his survey of network newscasts from 1965 through the January 1973 peace treaty, Daniel Hallin reaches similar conclusions. Until the Tet offensive, television coverage was “lopsidedly favorable to American policy in Vietnam,” well beyond even the “remarkably docile” print media. Like Epstein, he notes the “dramatic” change after Tet, “part of a larger change, a response to as well as a cause of the unhappiness with the war that was developing at many levels, from the halls of the Pentagon, to Main Street, U.S.A. and the fire bases of Quang Tri province”—and, much more crucially, the unhappiness that had become quite significant by 1968 among business elites, leading to the changes in U.S. government policy already discussed. “Before Tet, editorial comments by television journalists ran nearly four to one in favor of administration policy; after Tet, two to one against,” reflecting divisions in the “establishment itself.” He quotes New York Times editor Max Frankel, who said in an interview that “we”re an establishment institution, and whenever your natural constituency changes, then naturally you will too.” The same was true of television, and it is hardly surprising—and quite in accord with the propaganda