The following is a synopsis of a discussion of Vietnam War coverage by Charles Mohr, the late war correspondent who covered the Israeli-Arab Wars and Vietnam for Time Magazine and later the New York Times, to the National Defense War College in 1982:   [I]t is clear that myth has tended to displace historical reality in contemporary [times]. What is much less clear is whether the media and the Pentagon and the executive branch of government learned or has remembered much, and whether remedies for a sometimes awkward relationship can be applied in a future conflict of the magnitude of Vietnam. The sins and failures of the media in Vietnam are worth examining. However, it is necessary to separate mere failures in journalistic art [and] lapses in professional excellence from the more complex and emotional questions of whether journalism unintentionally or intentionally poisoned the well. As for flaws in media art, the media under-covered the early phase of the conflict from 1961 to 1965. More surprisingly, it is possible to argue that the media continued to under-cover Vietnam at the height of American involvement from 1965 onward. The blame [falls] mostly [on] editors and publishers [for coverage that] did not constitute a really appropriate institutional commitment to the story… All war correspondence is difficult, including coverage of more conventional conflicts…What seems so simple becomes, in war, quite complicated. Mechanics is, perhaps, the least of it. A reporter who cannot communicate, who is unable to “file,” will find aptitude, or even brilliance, useless. However…communications proved to be merely tedious, not impossible… The proper aim of war correspondence is clarity and coherence; to give readers and viewers some faint idea of the progression of events. This may never be easy. A reporter hypothetically privileged to have access to all of the operational reports reaching a senior commander might still be confused. Personal recklessness in combat is no substitute for clear thinking. Stories that recognized the significance and intentions of the Israeli canal crossing in 1973 were more important by orders of magnitude than eyewitness combat narrative… Conventional methods of military scorekeeping simply did not work in Vietnam. It was a problem of detecting long-range trends, of sifting grains of relevance from the chaff of drearily reminiscent episodes, endlessly repeated in detail that varied only slightly… But how well did journalism do[in Vietnam]? It had trouble following the progress of pacification programs. In this regard, cynical but well-merited scoffing at the computerized “Hamlet Evaluation System” was not a satisfactory substitute for independent assessment…Reporters almost certainly concentrated too much on United States combat units and too little on the South Vietnamese army and regional forces. The real “political” story of the war, which was the contest for the hamlets, was under-reported. In the early 1960s, [the New York Time’s Homer] Bigart, [David] Halberstam, [Malcolm] Browne, and [United Press’s Neil] Sheehan recognized and devastatingly chronicled the basic weaknesses in Vietnamese bourgeois society that crippled prosecution of the war and contributed to the ultimate collapse more than a decade later. The reporters, of course, did not do this by themselves, by any means. They were, in the most basic sense, reporters. To the extent that they did become increasingly sophisticated they did so by mining the knowledge of a wide range of American field advisors and, to a lesser extent, thoughtful commanders of combat units and such Vietnamese realists as pacification commander Major General Ngyuen Duc Thang… Journalism did not create the pessimist-optimist debate. It described it and made it public… [I]t is useful to draw again the distinction between myth and reality. Much of journalism is distressingly related to mere stenography. The “officials” and the “mission” certainly go their say. Far more space and time was consumed by reporting the usually optimistic appraisals and forecasts…than the “think pieces” that cast doubt on those appraisals. One charge of the most embittered critics is that the 1968 [Tet] Communist offensive was a military victory for the allied side, but was reported as a defeat by journalism, thus suffocating public support for the war in the United States…I know of no case (and [Peter] Braestrup’s exhaustive research [for his book, “The Big Story”] supplies none) in which Vietnam-based reporters called the Tet a military defeat. Almost all of us, in fact, regarded that as a physical impossibility because we understood the force ratios involved. Almost a week after the offensive began and when much of the Chinese sector of Saigon was still being fought over, a New York Times story remarked that the enemy offensive was embarrassing precisely because it had lasted “so long.” Such a conclusion was based on a belief that the enemy had been far too weak to undertake a conventional, head-on contest with U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in cities and towns. The real indictment seems to be that we did not instantly declare it an unambiguous Allied victory, and thus squelch war revulsion in the United States. After much reflection, I cannot see how the media could have done this. General Floyd Weyand, then a corps commander, and General [Creighton] Abrams, the deputy commander, warned us early not to draw sweeping conclusions. We were constantly harangued about “next wave” attacks, some of which materialized. It was, for instance, not until May that the worst single week for U.S. killed, more than 1,000 K.I.A., occurred… My own opinion, reached in 1968 and adhered to since, is that Tet was a tactical defeat of major proportions for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, but that it did not constitute a strategic victory of the United States. Having lost much of the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese found other ways to continue the war. The attack was not a fatal setback. In short, lapses in journalistic excellence were probably not the main root of withering support for the war, although that does not excuse them. In his book, “The 25-Year War,” General Bruce Palmer remarks that military and government failed to recognize the “criticality” of the time factor. After less than three years of combat by American forces, the public was getting impatient and Tet made them hopelessly impatient. Cheerleading journalism could not have concealed, nor much ameliorated, the passage of time… As entrenched as they have become, some of the myths about Vietnam journalism [linger]. [T]he worst of these myths is that a bitterly hostile tension is the natural state of affairs and existed between the press and the military at the time of the war. That is simply not true…Those of us who covered the war (and I did so for about four-and-a-half years in all, over an 11-year span) encountered almost no hostility from troops and officers in the field. One reason for the now current belief that press-military relations should naturally be adversary is a belief that reporters constitute a sort of intolerable physical nuisance to unit commanders in combat. This has never been true in the past. Reporters learned how to walk with battalion and company commanders in the field and wait for the war’s friction to provide the opportunities for pause and conversations. We weren’t going anywhere and did not require running commentary during the course of a firefight (we soon learned to understand the radio traffic on our own, anyway). I covered the divisions of Israeli Major General Ariel Sharon in two Israeli wars. That he once talked for four hours about how he crossed the Suez Canal was due more to Sharon’s gregarious volubility, not my persistence. Self-assured, competent soldiers do not fear reporters.[top]