Reviews for The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam

The average rating for The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-12 00:00:00 Andrew Dobos Hallin does an excellent job puncturing the myth that the media--newspaper and television--was hostile to the war in Vietnam, and hence, to some degree responsible for its failure. The hostile media theory holds no water up until the Tet offensive in 1968 and is a relatively small piece of a larger complicated picture thereafter. The book is divided into two sections, the first focusing on coverage of the war in the "liberal" New York Times up to 1965, the point at which reasonably complete archives of televised coverage become available. The pattern is clear: the newspaper coverage, grounded in contemporary understandings of "objective journalism," holds very tightly to reporting statements from official spokesmen, focusing on "news"--events that took place within a couple of days--and pays next to no attention to the larger questions that might have emerged from paying attention to history or context. Once television enters as a major player, the issues are a bit different; Hallin accurately describes the relationship between three spheres of discourse: a sphere of consensus, a sphere of legitimate disagreement, and a sphere of divergence. During Vietnam, the idea that the war was being fought for admirable purposes was located in the sphere of consensus. Only as the failure of the war became increasingly obvious--largely as a result of interviews with soldiers in the field--the way the war was being fought became the subject of legitimate controversy. But at no point did anything resembling a radical criticism of the war move out of the sphere of divergence and receive serious attention. The Uncensored War was published in the 1980s and there are points at which it's description of how the media operates is obviously dated. I would also have liked to have seen the attention to print media (and sources other than the Times) expanded. But it remains a very valuable book that helps explode enduring myths of the Sixties.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-06 00:00:00 Rick Kullman I really found this book quite useful as a reference tool concerning media representations during the Vietnam War. I wish the study had actually gone a little bit further in its chronology, looking at how exactly the news stations chose to depict the fall of Saigon.