Choice of Journalist

Embedded journalism has a tumultuous history in which the ethics of journalists are called into question as the journalist faces the dilemma of choosing between nationalism and unbiased reporting. The United States is well known for its use of this style of journalism to raise public support for the military during the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. However, public outcry during the Vietnam War greatly changed the way the nation utilized this nationalist tool for propaganda and paved the way for embedded journalism’s eventual use in the Iraq War.

The Vietnam War was a controversial war that left a bloody scar on America’s military’s history. Fresh from the Cold War culture that had begun after the Second World War, America fully immersed itself in Vietnam, Laos, and eventually Cambodia, to try and slow the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. United States involvement lasted almost twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, and the course of four presidencies. While there was no direct, outspoken opposition in the beginning decade of the war, during Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s administrations in the 1950s and 60s, public opinion began to radically change towards the end as the war dragged on.

1967 was a pivotal year for the war’s popularity as the Just War movement grew in popularity amongst the counterculture which led to protests, unrest, and the Kent State Massacre in 1970. The Massacre, which resulted in the death of four students, pushed the opposition to the war to a breaking point after the American public discovered that Richard Nixon had been illegally providing and placing troops in Cambodia.

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After this revelation and outbreak of violence, 1/3 of the American population was against keeping and involving troops in the conflict in Southeast Asia.

The United States and President Richard Nixon were facing a domestic crisis, leading to even greater mass protests and demonstrations that placed the United States on the world stage. Nixon knew that a country divided threatened his power and the potential for an American victory in Vietnam, so he turned to a practice that his predecessors had been utilizing in the war decades before him. Nixon wanted to continue to encourage newspersons, such as photographers and journalists, to attach themselves to military units in action, but in greater numbers than the country had previously seen. However, unlike Nixon’s predecessors, his plan to expand the number of journalists in combat had the exact opposite of his hope to renew public vigor.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the very beginning of the war in 1955, began to send journalists into Saigon and Southern Vietnam to write stories that would perpetuate the idea that American involvement in the fight against communism was an important and necessary job. As “leader of the free world,” the president felt that America had an obligation to protect the interests of capitalism and democracy, and in the beginning, American journalists believed this too. The journalists followed their units in war as the soldiers “fought the good fight” and defended the “weaker” country against the communist revolutionaries that threatened them. The American government provided transportation to news staff through their Military Assistance Command, Vietnam unit and encouraged as many journalists as possible to come and see the war for themselves, despite the deaths of close to 60 journalists throughout the war. Over time the government began to lose control over the visiting media personnel and the journalists began to see American involvement in a different light. By the time Nixon came into office, this evolution of perspective led to disillusioned journalists who began to report with a smaller focus on American victory and a larger focus on the atrocities that were occurring due to ill-trained soldiers and the consequences that occur when a nation enters a war that it should not be in. Thus, when Nixon tried to rely on this stereotypically nationalist reporting, he was left with little support from the journalists and an almost nonexistent supply of positive pro-war propaganda. At-home-viewers of the nightly news and regular readers of the national papers had been bombarded with stories of violently displaced Vietnamese women and children as well as tales of wrongful deaths in innocent villages by the hands of American soldiers which demeaned many of the attempts that Nixon did make to defend the draft and American involvement.

Once the Vietnam War was over, the Pentagon was horrified and angered by the copious amounts of negative press that the war had received. The damage to public opinion that the negative media had caused resulted in the government putting in place new restrictions and laws on journalists on the battlefields which would greatly affect the reporting of the Iraq War close to 30 years later. One of the greatest changes that occurred was the installation of the public affairs staff and ministers, dubbed “minders” by journalists, at battlefield sites and war zones that prepare informational handouts on the big events that journalists are encouraged to cover and are put in place to accompany these same journalists in their movements within the field. In some cases, the “minders” prevent journalists from speaking with local individuals of the area about the atrocities and violence occurring around them as the interviews could be a security threat. Although these public affairs officials may sound similar to the Joint Public Affairs Office’s daily briefings, or “five o’clock follies,” during the Vietnam War, the new officials’ difference lies in the restriction that now surrounds what journalists can do with the information given to them and the monitorization of the work that the journalists send out to the public.

The newly strict control was an ingenious way for President George W. Bush to rally the public around his much-idolized Iraq War without repeating similar propagandist missteps that occurred in the Vietnam War. Bush and his military command began to train journalists for combat immersion in 2002 before the war officially began so that the media would be prepared when the time came for action. The journalists and photographers were also forced to sign a contract that prevented them from releasing information that could potentially compromise their unit’s mission; information such as positioning, the weapons possessed by the unit, and the transportation methods used to get from one mission to the next. Once the war began in the March of 2003, there were over 700 journalists and photographers on-site to begin reporting.