The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists. In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict
The last helicopter liftoff from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam war. Fifty years later, mythology about US media coverage of the war is locked into the faulty premise that news outlets were pivotal in causing Americans to turn against it. Some say that mainstream media undermined a noble war effort, while others say that coverage alerted the public to realities of an unjust war. Both assertions are wrong.
Scapegoating the media fits neatly into “stab in the back” theories of Americans who can’t stand the fact that their country lost a war to impoverished Vietnamese fighters. And praising the media as catalysts for the nation’s roused conscience gives undue credit while fostering illusions about mainstream news coverage of America’s wars.
Today, the bulk of the populace remains nearly clueless about what the Pentagon is up to on several continents. Fleeting news reports about US missile strikes on various countries – including Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia since last year – habitually rely on official sources. In addition, the Costs of War project at Brown University reports, the United States has “military operations and programs run out of civilian departments for military purposes in at least 78 countries”.
When US military action is involved, the reporting routinely amounts to stenographic services for the White House and Pentagon. The pattern for the Vietnam war was set in early August 1964, when American media credulously reported claims from President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, that North Vietnamese gunboats had made “unprovoked” attacks on two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The official narrative, filled with deception, led Congress to quickly pass (with only two dissenting votes) the Tonkin Gulf resolution – providing an unconditional green light for war on Vietnam. Reporting absolute lies as absolute truths, the country’s most esteemed news media cleared the way for escalation of a war that took upward of 3 million lives in Vietnam.
Typical coverage came from the Washington Post, which ran this banner headline on 5 August 1964, two days before passage of the war resolution: “American Planes Hit North Vietnam After 2nd Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression”. Twenty-four years later, I inquired about whether the newspaper had ever retracted its bogus reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin events. When I reached the reporter who had written much of the Post’s political coverage of those events, the former chief diplomatic correspondent Murrey Marder, he said: “I can assure you that there was never any retraction.”
When I asked why not, Marder’s voice was tinged with sorrow. “If you were making a retraction,” he said, “you’d have to make a retraction of virtually everyone’s entire coverage of the Vietnam war.” He added: “If the American press had been doing its job and the Congress had been doing its job, we would never have been involved.”….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/01/us-vietnam-war-media
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