Commonwealth of Australia Television Wars, Vietnam and After - Sociology Assignment Help

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Americans     

Americans continue to disagree about almost every aspect ofthe Vietnam  War more than 30 years after it ended. What purpose intervention in  Indochina why America's military commitment escalated, how  the war was fought, whether it could have been won, and if it should have  been waged at all are questions that still generate vehement dispute. On  one issue alone has something akin to consensus emerged: namely, tele vision's pivotal role in turning American opinion against the war.  Television, it's widely believed, lost the Vietnam war - for better or  worse (Hallin, 1989, 105-6).  Although television ownership became widespread in the United  States in the early 1950s, precisely as US forces were engaged in an  unpopular and unsuccessful 'police action' in Korea, Vietnam was the  first war to receive sustained TV news coverage. In technological terms,  the Korean War (l95(}"3)'resembled World War II more closely than it  foreshadowed the war in Vietnam. About one third of A~erican homes  possessed' a television set by the early 1950s, but this new medium's exis tence barely dented military consciousness in Korea. Weighing some 50  pounds and requiring three men to carry the necessary cables, batteries  and sound equipment, cameras weren't readily transported onto the  battlefield. In the main, network news relied on moving imagery supplied  by the Army Signal Corps for stories from Korea, if they were illustrated  at all. When venturesome reporters attempted to procure more graphic  glimpses of combat they generally came up empty-handed (Casey, 2008,  312-13).  By the time that Vietnam began to attract regular attention from US  news media in the mid-1960s television had advanced considerably as a  medium. The introduction of communications satellites made footage  fresher than in the early days when of film had to be flown from the  location of shooting to the point of broadcast transmission. With up-to date images more readily available television news evolved from a staid  recitation of daily happenings - delivered by a sedentary, studio-bound  96  

Television Wars: Vietnam and After 97  
talking head to a more dynamic format that incorporated video clips  transporting viewers.to the scene of action. For the first time television  news assumed a half-hour format in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, given  that 90 per cent of US households now boasted a television set, this new  medium came to supplant newspapers as Americans' primary source of  news (Brewer, 2009, 181). Television's primacy, coupled with its visual  potency, strengthened the widespread impression that television cover age of the war must explain declining popular support for it. The first  'living room war,' as Michael Arlen termed it, was also America' s lea~t  successful, most unpopular engagement. For many observers, television  had to be the culpable variable that explained defeat (Arlen, 1982; Hallin,  1989,105).  Such assertions mounted while the war was still in progress. Richard  Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew frequently blasted the media for  conspiring to 'sell the liberal ideology of the New York-Washington  axis' - in other words, for pushing an anti-war agenda (Gans, 1970,222).  But it was a British broadcaster, Robin Day, who delivered the most  memorable prognosis about conflict in the television age at the height of  the Vietnam War. In Encounter magazine's April 1970 issue, Day  offered a speculative judgement that would be widely repeated:  One wonders whether in future a democracy which has uncensored  television in every home will ever be able to fight a war, however just.  However good the cause - self-defense, resisting aggression, or even  fighting under the United Nations flag - the brutal details of military  action may be there on the television screen to shock and to horrify,  sapping perhaps the will of the nation to resist the forces of evil or  even safeguard;its own freedom. (Quoted by Sulzberger, 1970, 39)  
 

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