The vietnam war

The Vietnam War: the power of the media

I’m going to present you three documents related to the Vietnam War. The first one is a photography of a television which diffuses news of the Vietnam War. This document is taken from an article entitled “The presumed power of the images” written by Lara Elenak in 2014 in the section Media, Vietnam. The second one called “Vietnamese and children killed on a road in South-Vietnam” is the front page of the newspaper the Plain Dealer published in November the 20th of 1969. And the last one is a photography of the Anti-Vietnam war protests in San Francisco in 1969. First of all the Vietnam War lasted from 1957 to 1975 and it was the first war in which journalist had the right to access to combat zones. So we can wonder to what extent had the media a huge impact on the American population during the Vietnam War? In a first part, I will explain the context of this war and how it went. In a second part I will deal with the impact of the media on how the Vietnam War was seen in the world and more specifically in America.

In 1954, three years before the beginning of the war, it was the end of the first Vietnam War. Vietnam got its independence at the end of this war and was divided into two separated parts. Each part had its main leader: Ho Chi Minh in the North who was a communist, and Dinh Diem in the South who was a nationalist but also the leader of a dictatorship. The war between these two parts of Vietnam began because they wanted to reunite the country. That's the main reason that can explain why the North invaded the South in 1957. The US government decided to intervene in 1964 because they believed in the domino theory. According to this theory if one country falls into communism, all the countries around will also fall and it will lead to the spread of communism which was the exact opposite of what the US government wanted. That can explain why the US supported South Vietnam during this war. The north was supported by China who was already at this time a communist country. American troops have been send into Vietnam but the fighting conditions were too different from what American soldiers were used to. The American used massive airpower by sending chemicals defoliants like Napalm to destroy area of the countryside. About 50,000 communist troops were killed between January and March 1968.

Now that I have explain the historical context of this time I will deal with the power of the media during the war. Like I said in the introduction, it was the first time the press was given the freedom of access to combat zones. So all of the American population but also the rest of the world was able to see what was really happening in Vietnam. Shocking photographs but also video have been taken by the journalists, those photographs were immediately send and report to the US and were then broadcasted all over the world.

These two documents are perfect examples. One the first one, we can see a Vietnamese soldier in the middle of the picture who is holding a  Vietnamese ten-year-old boy in his arms and another man to his left is helping him to carry the small child. What is shocking in this picture is that the boy have a serious injury on his stomach. We can suppose that the child has been wounded by an American attack. All around them in the background of the photographs we can see civilian Vietnamese and another soldier on the right side of the picture.

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