Daniel C. Hallin

In The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam, Daniel C. Hallin argues, “The apparently growing prominence of the media coincided with what seemed to be a crisis in political institutions: public confidence in government declined dramatically during these years, public attachment to both political parties weakened, and the political system began a twenty-year period during which not a single president would serve two full terms of office. These developments, along with Vietnam, have provoked a broader controversy about the relation of the media to the institutions of American government” (pg. 4). Hallin focuses on the print media and television. He follows print stories chronologically, but admits a gap in the record of television stories as most were not recorded nor did stations keep detailed transcripts of content. Despite this, he is able to refute the idea that the media was solely responsible for a loss of American will to fight.
Hallin writes, “It is only in the context of a certain political climate and a certain conception of what journalism is about that an administration’s control of information can give it this kind of control [as in the Gulf of Tonkin incident] over the content of the news” (pg. 21). He continues, “The president’s power to control foreign affairs news in the early 1960s rested primarily on two factors. The first was the ideology of the Cold War: the bipartisan consensus, forged during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, that had identified foreign policy with ‘national security,’ and hence removed most foreign policy decisions from the agenda of political debate” (pg. 24). Secondly, professional journalism’s commitment to objectivity relied on official facts from the government. Hallin continues, “Where consensus reigns, however, they [journalists] rely as heavily as anyone else on the symbolic tools that make up the dominant ideology of their society” (pg. 50). He argues, “The continuing strength of the Cold War consensus is no doubt the most important reason the [Johnson] administration was able to contain the debate over Vietnam policy” (pg. 61). Hallin further argues, “In many ways, the professionalization of journalism in the United States has strengthened rather than weakened the tie between press and state” (pg. 64).
Hallin writes of early television coverage of the war, “While the coverage of a paper like the Times had a dry and detached tone, television coverage presented a dramatic contrast between good, represented by the American peace offensive, and evil, represented by Hanoi” (pg. 118). Beyond this, “Television, moreover, tends to ‘thematize’ – that is, to simplify and unify – not only within a particular story or broadcast, but over time as well. Television tends, in other words, to pick out a limited number of ongoing stories and cover them day in and day out” (pg. 120). Hallin continues, “Television reporting of Vietnam was structured primarily by a different, much less conscious level of ideology: it was structured by a set of assumptions about the value of war – not so much as a political instrument, but as an arena of human action, of individual and national self-expression – and by images and a language for talking about it” (pg. 142). In examining the media itself, Hallin writes, “From 1961 to 1967, for all the tension between the media and government, and for all the mythology about the press as an adversary or watchdog of the state, the independence of the American news media – at least those parts of it we are covering here – was very limited” (pg. 162). This changed, as “By 1968, the establishment itself – and the nation as a whole – was so divided over the war that the media naturally took a far more skeptical stance toward administration policy than in the early years” (pg. 162). Even with this change, “For the most part, television was a follower rather than a leader: it was not until the collapse of consensus was well under way that television’s coverage began to turn around; and when it did turn, it only turned so far” (pg. 163).
Hallin concludes, “It is not clear that it would have been much different if the news had been censored, or television excluded, or the journalists more inclined to defer to presidential authority” (pg. 213). Further, “The collapse of America’s ‘will’ to fight in Vietnam resulted from a political process of which the media were only one part” (pg. 213).… (plus d'informations)