How media affected public perception of war veterans

The Vietnam War has also been called “television’s war,” as the first war to have video and images of combat published by media and widely available for consumption by the general public. This article from the New York Times details the experience of a news producer on the ground at Vietnam. In the article, the author talks about the logistics of filming a war like Vietnam:

“Vietnam was the first truly televised war; the war and the medium through which millions of Americans experienced it were inextricable. To understand the war, one needs to understand how NBC — and our colleagues at CBS and ABC — shaped how that story was told.

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We filmed street demonstrations and terror attacks, we produced political and social stories. But our most important job in the bureau was to keep America in touch with what we knew as the reality on the ground, meaning to show as much as possible American servicemen in action, their problems and the perils of war.

We rarely saw how editors and producers cut our stories. The quality and accuracy of our work was high, so that was not a problem for my staff. We knew which NBC shows used our stories, because I got a report each day, often with criticism that was sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Those reports were important for morale because this way the staff knew the show producers valued their work.

The truth is that much of what we covered in 1967 was the same day to day... We covered almost everything that moved, especially when it involved big American operations.”

Because the Vietnam war was televised, it became easier for news networks to sway public opinion about it. This also means it affects how the war is remembered because it allows people to see the destruction that war caused in real time and, thus, causes more people to hold a negative view about those involved in the conflict.

In her book, Sturken cites one Vietnam veteran who recalls that Vietnam veterans were labeled as “malcontents, liars, wackos, losers…” a tactic which Sturken believes was meant to “[absolve] the American public of complicity and [allow] the narrative of American military power to stand” (66). It's fair to say that many of these stereotypes perpetuated about Vietnam veterans began on television, because that's how most people experienced the war and its' soldiers. 

Keep in mind, though, that anytime an event is mediated (that is, communicated to the public through media) certain editorial decisions are made. This has consequences for how the memory is constructed: it means the reality of war we see on TV is no longer true reality, but reality as seen through the editors' eyes. Because of its visual nature, it’s easy to forget that video footage can also be manipulated in ways that tell a certain kind of narrative and are just as easily subjected to social and political agendas as print media.