The Vietnam War: The Impact Of War On Popular Culture

War has a big impact on popular culture within society and in fact works into every aspect of pop culture such as music, television, film, and even video games. This is highly evident during the present war in Iraq which followed the tragic events of September 11, 2001. However the impact of war on popular culture can be traced back to World War I in the United States and even further in world history. As seen in the documentary “Militainment INC” we see fascinating, disturbing, and timely glimpses into the militarization of American popular culture, and seeing how U.S. news coverage has come to resemble Hollywood film, video games, and reality television in its glamorization of war. As Neil Postman states “we couldn’t know anything in the
world without different forms of media to convey information.” This paper will discuss the evolution of the media coverage over the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the War on Iraq.
Reporters and photographers went through a big change in the Vietnam War and changed the style of reporting the war for future journalists.
They went from reporting directly off of press releases and forming good, enthusiastic stories to investigative reporting and writing hard truthful stories. The stories coming from Vietnam and the photos coming from the front line did more than sway public opinion, they helped end the war. The media's job was to keep the American listeners and readers optimistic and panic free. Reporters in the Vietnam War began to show skepticism of the government's presence and their intentions their reports began to reflect the popular doubts that had been rising among the American public because of the increasing numbers of casualties. The reporters and photographers did not have as much enthusiasm as they had when they were first went to Vietnam and they were finding sad stories and painful pictures. Coverage of the Vietnam war taught the American government two valuable lessons one never allow the media unrestricted access to the battlefield and two always practice news management by controlling the stories that are given to the media and by extension to the
public.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
Truth is not always killed in war it is missing, or being held prisoner. During the Gulf War, the Allied Coalition tried to ensure that the media reported the truth as the military saw it. This goal required heavy controls on what the media saw and how they reported it. Censorship was practically non-existent, instead, the military limited access to the story and the players in it. The military won extremely positive coverage during the war at the price of a dissatisfied press and doubts about whether what the press saw was the whole story. The same factors that produced the military victory over the Iraqis aided the military victory over the media. Empty deserts and vast distances provided both an ideal theater for mobile armored warfare, and for keeping the press at the mercy of the military. Press controls included limited access to the theater in Saudi Arabia, pooling the press to reduce the logistical demands on the military, and reporting restrictions on what could not be reported. The Gulf War created a new body the Department of Defense News Media Pool that was put in place to effectively control and manage the media’s access to the battlefield. This censorship caused many problems that were fixed in the War on
Iraq.
The Iraq war gave an up-close view of combat missions; the military used the strategy of embedding to get the media back on side after the contentious relationship that had developed between the two wars during the 1990’s (Pfau et al. 2004: 75). Although the media had more freedom than they did in the Gulf war they did have limitations such as not reporting future operations, no photographs of prisoners of war and prevented them from carrying private mobile phones or satellite telephones, or traveling in their own vehicles (Tumber and Palmer 2004: 16). Each member became a member of the military troops; they would bond with the soldiers and actually depend on them for food, transport and security. As a result, even the most experienced journalist became, in effect, a propaganda tool for the government (McLane 2004: 82-3). As Debbie Lisle states in her chapter called “How do we find out what’s going on?” “how information is transformed during the process of communication. Whether it is the government trying to control journalists access to the battlefield, or reporters trying to reveal the military’s less palatable actions to audiences back home, it is clear that nobody remains neutral in their efforts to use and abuse information during the war.”