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Media's Role In The Vietnam War

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In an article, Robert Elegant, a former Vietnam War reporter, wrote: "For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen . . . never before Vietnam had the collective policy --no less stringent a term will serve--sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents' own side." His point of view on the war summarized the effect of media on ending the Vietnam War.
To obtain understandable on the roles that media played during this war, it is important to first explore the history of the war. The longest war in the history, a proxy war between those that support communism and those that did not. The United States supported the South against the North that advocated for communism. In 1954, Eisenhower wrote a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem offered to aid Diem in preventing Vietnam from being a communist country. Following Eisenhower’s promise to Diem, Kennedy aided South Vietnam with military support to fight against North Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a catastrophic since it fought against itself and destroyed its own people. It is significant to take notice of the fact that at the beginning many Americans supported United States in this war.
Many Anti-war protests occurred on college campus across the nation because of events like the Tet Offensive and My Lai Massacre. United States finally withdrawn in 1973. Therefore, without the media, many lives would have suffered, killed, injured because of the continuation of the war. Many American soldiers and Vietnamese citizens were killed. This …show more content…
U.S. soldiers in Charlie Company brutally killed the majority of the population of the South Vietnamese village of My Lai in March 1968. Many innocent civilians were killed or violated by soldiers with no consideration

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