Media at War

Enemy Image

I just watched this documentary on war reporting and how it works and has worked in America from Vietnam to Gulf War II. It was very interesting, enlightening, and somewhat frightening.

The documentary starts looking at how television reporters covered Vietnam. In Vietnam, they had the freedom to go where they wanted, when they wanted, without being looked after by military caretakers or press officiers. They showed the effects of the war on Vietnamese civilians, they showed American and Vietcong casualties, they showed American soldiers burning a Vietnamese village. These images shocked the American public, and shattered their faith in the military.

The military didn't like this.

They decided to establish systems to control the information flowing to reporters and therefore to the public. Embedded reporters were not given the freedom to leave their units. Military press officiers were assigned to reporters to look after them. The media showed few casualties, and fewer images from the other side. The news anchors and talking head provided their interpretation of images from the front rather than the correspondents themselves.

The military created stories to feed to the media. The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein? If you look closely at the footage, you'll see that the crowd is mainly made up of reporters, shuffled there by the military, with a few Iraqis sprinkled in. The event was iniaited by a military psychological warfare unit. After the war was over, it came out that Private Jessica Lynch never fired a shot, and the hospital that she was "rescued" from didn't have a single Iraqi soldier within. In another piece of footage in the documentary, you see an American helicopter firing on a wounded Iraqi soldier.

The documentary ends with a reflection. Americans who questioned the war were called unpatriotic and unsupportive. Is it not the duty of a citizen of a democracy to question and reflect upon the actions of their government, especially in war? Apparently not. And should we allow the military to control the reporting of a war, or the journalists?