The CBS show “60 Minutes” had an interesting retrospective on the journalistic career of Morley Safer who is retiring. A segment on his coverage of the Vietnam War showed his report & video of US soldiers torching a village to punish them for collaboration with the Viet Cong. Safer said it was part of the “pacification” program employed to win the hearts & minds of the Vietnamese & made a mocking comment about that in the segment.
Does anyone remember where such reporting appeared in US media? The US government allowed more media coverage of the Vietnam War than of previous wars. But the Pentagon considered the restrained coverage of Vietnam so damaging that reporters were put on lockdown thereafter & embedded up the ass of the military.
Media degraded war journalism in the 1991 Iraq War when NBC reporter Arthur Kent was dubbed “Scud Stud” for his coverage of Iraqi Scud missile attacks. His style & good looks were just as much news as the US attacks on Iraq. War journalists like war-mongering Islamophobe Lara Logan (a CBS war reporter now on 60 Minutes) became the norm.
Can anyone point to a media source for war coverage of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan? Or coverage of US troop deployments under Obama to Uganda, Central African Republic, & elsewhere in Africa; or of deployments to Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala?
Truth is, this is standard operating procedure in war & occupation & includes Israel in Palestine, India in Kashmir, Indonesia in East Timor. But this reign of militarism must be opposed & ended.
The historic imperative remains: rebuild the international antiwar movement.