The Vietnam Conflict & The Persian Gulf War

" Media shape of events need non reflect the outlines provided by elite approaches to the stories. But, it is frequently the case that sufficiently sophisticated framing efforts produce media agreement with the formalized line. In both the Vietnam and the Persian Gulf wars, for instance, the word media supported the official position of the American presidents. Popular support for both initiatives was, accordingly, kinda high. In Vietnam, it was not the decline of popular support, but the chipping of elite support that brought about the government's decision to withdraw from the on the face of it endless conflict. This change resulted, in part, from the response of the media to the Tet offensive of 1968, when some former hawks were able to see the difference between what the American military believed was possible, and what reporters were seeing. In the Gulf, however, events happened quickly, and were astutely managed from the beginning of the invasion crisis, in August 1990, through the Iraqi surrender in latterly February 1991. The media, lacking in alternatives, and needing to fill space, very consistently echoed the framing devices employed by the government and the armed forces.

For the American people, and their news media, the story in Vietnam was only the story of American conflict there. The country's direct involvement in Vietnam's civil war began with fanny F. Ken

Depending on the speaker's maneuver of view, the American news media have been blamed for, or credited with, the break off of public support for the U.S. effort in Vietnam. This overstates the influence of the media--though it is impractical to deny that they did have a considerable impact on the course of events. Certainly, the relatively free access of reporters in Vietnam enabled them to groom their own perspectives on the story, even though the majority were, during the 1960s, jolly supportive of the American effort. The government decided, from the outset, that general censorship would not be imposed on the press. But, there was a capacious deal of fear in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that some young reporters could not be controlled. The U.S.

Information Agency, for example, instructed its Saigon mission to "steer the news media forward from events that [were] 'likely to result in undesirable stories.'" This proved to be a reasonable fear, as a chronic credibility scuttle developed between Washington's perception of the war, based on deplorable intelligence and the military's manipulation of the facts, and what the reporters observed, or were told by Army land advisers "who mocked official optimism and supplied contrary facts for publication." For the most part, however, the American media relayed the official breeding "virtually unchanged and unchallenged." Reporters' "sour, recurring skepticism toward official pronouncements" only occasionally made its way into press reports, and, accordingly, made only a limited impression in Washington--until the 1968 Tet offensive, the turning point in American involvement in Vietnam.

Far much importantly, support for the war effort had never been particularly sinewy among the nation's political elites. President Johnson's notion of a "limited war" had only "fragile" support which began to fragment when active phalanx were sent to Vietnam in 1965. After the surprise of the Tet offensive, support for the wa
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