As Propaganda Affected The United States During The War

As propaganda affected the United States during the war

Today, there are many who attribute the failure of the United States to the press and television. You have to be cautious, however, there is not really a cause-effect relationship between the elements;Nor was my intention to look for it. With this work my objective was, however, investigate the relevance of the media in this concrete war context and from the American point of view.

In parallel developing the events of the Vietnam War and the evolution of media coverage, we can see in the first place that journalists were evolving their way of covering the war from an objective point and suggested by the Government, to a position committed to the truthand transparency. This evolution was more enhanced with the growth of television and its settlement in the American houses, which brought the war closer to families and showed them the tragedies committed in it with the help of photography and cinema. As a consequence, mobilizations of students and other sectors of the population protested against the actions carried out in the war, with manifestations throughout the country.

For its part, the government, which had been manipulating the information that made the public reach, tried. All this has served us to verify, once again, the real power of public opinion and, at the same time, their vulnerability: it is we who decide who possesses the truth, but our criteria is really based on seeing who better sells us better thehistory.

Thus, the United States lost the war because public opinion was against? From my perspective, maybe this is too supposed. However, if someone believed this and thus transmitted it to the Americans was Lyndon Johnson, who said:

While I sat at night in my office, waiting to speak, I thought about the number of times that television carried the war every week to the American houses. No one can say exactly what effect these vivid scenes have had in American opinion. Only historians can in the future of this nation hit the effect that television could have had in previous conflicts […].