Page 225 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

pursuit of military public relations when they came to power in the
1980s, the rise of the anti-war movement among the young people
of America and the widespread revulsion which accompanied
growing awareness of US military brutality in South-East Asia
were the product of a media out of control and running loose on the
battlefield.
As was noted in Chapter 4, this ‘common sense’ view of the
media’s relationship to public opinion about the Vietnam War has
been challenged by a number of authors (Hallin, 1986; Williams,
1993). Bruce Cummings asserts that between 1961 and 1968 the
US media, including television, enthusiastically performed their
patriotic duty on behalf of the government’s war efforts, and that
after 1968 ‘television brought into the home not the carnage of war,
but the yawning fissure in the American consensus that under-
pinned this war in the previous period’ (1992, p. 84). Reportage
of the war in its latter stages was not ‘anti-government’ so much
as reflective of the divisions which afflicted the politico-military
establishment on policy. Daniel Hallin’s detailed study has estab-
lished that Vietnam coverage was at its most diverse, critical and
negative during periods of political conflict around the issue, but
that journalists never challenged the fundamental legitimacy of US
war aims (1986). Even the My Lai massacre was virtually ignored
by the US media for two years after it happened.
While, however, reportage of the Vietnam War does not merit the
charges of subversion made against it by some US politicians as they
sought to find explanations for their country’s humiliation at the
hands of the North Vietnamese, the information environment in
which journalists found themselves was relatively unrestricted.
While the administration pursued its public relations activities,
journalists in the field were permitted a degree of latitude with
which to film often shocking images of death and destruction.
Television viewers in the US and elsewhere saw pictures of children
being burned to death by (US) napalm; of villages being torched by
US troops; of summary executions of suspected communists by
South Vietnamese officers; and, most significantly in the view of
contemporary commentators, US troops in disarray as the North
mounted its ‘Tet offensive’. These images were the product of the
US administration’s view, in accordance with the strongly liberal
tradition of American democracy, that ‘the public have a right to
information’ (Mercer et al., 1987, p. 5). There were substantial and
largely successful efforts made to manage news and public opinion,
as we have noted, but control over journalists was far from

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