Walter Cronkite, RIP

There have been several studies of the matter, suggesting a rather different picture. We will return to some of these issues in discussing the coverage of the Tet offensive, but we should observe that there are some rather serious questions about the standard formulations. Suppose that some Soviet investigators were to conduct an inquiry into coverage of the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Pravda should be blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the Soviet public with the war. Would we consider such an inquiry to be meaningful without consideration of both the costs and the justice of the venture?

Epstein notes an obvious “logical problem” with the standard view: for the first six years of television coverage, from 1962 and increasingly through 1967, “the American public did approve of the war in Vietnam” according to polls. Furthermore, in a 1967 Harris poll for Newsweek, “64 percent of the nationwide sample said that television’s coverage made them more supportive of the American effort, and only 26 percent said that it had intensified their opposition,” leading the journal to conclude that “TV has encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war.”

Epstein’s review of his and other surveys of television newscasts and commentary during this period explains why this should have been the case. “Up until 1965, the network anchormen seemed unanimous in support of American objectives in Vietnam,” and most described themselves as “hawks” until the end, while the most notable “dove”, Walter Cronkite, applauded “the courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia” in 1965 and later endorsed the initial US commitment “to stop Communist aggression wherever it raises its head.” In fact, at no time during the war or since has there been any detectable departure from unqualified acceptance of the US government propaganda framework; as in the print media, controversy was limited to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the US.

The network anchormen not only accepted the framework of interpretation formulated by the state authorities, but also were optimistic about the successes achieved in the US war of defense against Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam. Epstein cites work by George Baily, who concludes: “The resultes in this study demonstrate the combat reports and the government statements generally gave the imporession that the Americans were in control, on the offense and holding the initiative, at least until Tet of 1968,” a picture accepted by the network anchormen. Television “focused on the progress” of the American ground forces, supporting this picture with “film, supplied by the pentagon, that showed the bombing of the North and suggesting that the Americans were also rebuilding South Vietnam”–while they were systematically destroying it, as could be deduced inferentially from scattered evidence for which no context or interpretation was provided. NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report” described “the American forces in Vietnam as builders rather than destroyers,” a “central truth that needs underscoring.”

What made this especially deceptive and hypocritical was the fact, noted earlier, that the most advanced and cruel forms of devastation and killing–such as the free use of napalm, defoliants, and Rome plows–were used with few constraints in the South, because its population was voiceless, in contrast with the North, where international publicity and political complications threatened, so that at least visible areas around the major urban centers were spared.(86)

As for news coverage, “all threee networks had definite policies about showing graphic film of wounded American soldiers or suffereing Vietnamese civilians,” Epstein observes. “Producers of the NBC and ABC evening-news programs said that they ordered editors to delete excessively grisly or detailed shots,” and CBS had similar policies, which, according to former CBS news president Fred Friendly, “helped shield the audience from the true horror of the war.” “The relative bloodlessness of the war depicted on television helps to explain why only a minority in the Lou Harris-Newsweek poll said that television increased their dissatisfaciotn with the war”; such coverage yielded an impression, Epstein adds, of “a clean, effective technological war, which was rudely shaken at Tet in 1968.” As noted earlier, NBC withdrew television clips showing harsh treatment of Viet Cong prisoners at the request of the Kennedy administration.