War And Media Essay Research Paper Allyn — страница 2

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we had never been forced to confront before the Vietnam war. Stories about villages being burned and possibly innocent people being massacred were actually being reported more in Vietnam, something that didn?t sit well with a public that had a hard time accepting that we were in a war and that in wars unthinkable acts are committed on a daily basis. This coupled with the fact that the government never really gave us a real reason for even being in the conflict in the first place made public opinion for the war steadily turn sour. The media hadn?t anticipated the huge effect that it?s coverage of the war would have on the public. It swayed the public?s opinion so much that many of the men who fought in Vietnam came back to much less than a heroes welcome. People were outraged at

what was going on and refused to accept our involvement. Many have heard first hand stories of how Vietnam veterans were treated when they got home, and much of the way they were treated is due to the way the war was presented to the public. My Swim coach in high school told us stories about how he would get into fights everyday when he got home from Vietnam because of the way he was treated. This is a very major drawback to covering a war so objectively. Is it fair for our soldiers to be treated like dogs for the benefit of our information. This is a very hard question to answer because we feel that we are entitled to all the information that is out there when it comes to our national security, but can we really handle all of the information? The government and media decided

that less was more in the case of the Gulf War in light of the way Vietnam was treated. The government chose to just have press conferences to release the information that it felt was necessary for us to have. This led us to be very supportive of the Gulf War and the troops that fought in it. Whether or not public support affects the outcome of a war is also a tough question in itself, but it didn?t seem to hurt in the case of the Gulf War. Wars have also become a lot more high tech in the years since Vietnam, switching from more of a ground based type of battle to more use of high tech laser guided missiles and long range attacks on unsuspecting targets. This makes it harder to report a war in terms of whose winning by just listing casualties and battles, because many of the

operations are highly secretive maneuvers that the enemy can?t know about. It was also easier to support the Gulf War because we had a tyrant to hate- Saddam Hussein. Everyone loved to hate Saddam during the Gulf war, just like it was easy to hate Hitler and Mossoulini and the boys. It was easy for the media to give us lots of propaganda against Hussein because he was so clearly anti- American and such a tyrant (according to what the media told us). In Vietnam there wasn?t really a clear dictator or tyrant to hate, we just knew we were fighting for democracy which seemed to be less significant in light of the horrors our countrymen were facing. Whether giving us a face to hate is really helping us understand the war or not is another issue, but it did seem to help us to accept

and support our involvement. Another part of this issue is the role movies play in our perception of the conflicts our country is involved in. Even though we generally see movies as just a form of entertainment for us to watch, movies can have a large impression on how we feel about our wars. Movies are even more notorious than other forms of media in the way they portray our soldiers as heroes. This is especially true in older movies, as recently more and more movies are having a tendency to show both sides of the issue, as it really probably was. If you ever watch an old movie about World War II you know for sure that the Americans are going to come across looking like heroes and the Germans and Japanese are going to look like the bad guys. All in all it is obvious that media

has a huge impact on how we view our involvement in wars. The part that is lees obvious is the way that media should cover our involvement. We have seen different ways of covering it throughout the years and overall that the way coverage is handled should depend on the situation, the war, and society. It would be impossible to say that there is a clear cut way that every war should be handled, because every war is crazy and different. I guess we?ll have to wait until the next war to see how it will be covered. 321