State-Press relations revisited: A case study of how American media portray postwar Vietnam. Asian Journal of Communication (original) (raw)
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Vietnam US Foreign Policy and the Media
The American involvement in Vietnam between 1958 and 1975 could be considered one of the most divisive conflicts to date. After World War II, American foreign policy could be defined as being one of modernization. The United States went from being an isolationist nation prior to World War II to being one of reconstruction — particularly in Western Europe — following the fall of Axis powers in 1945. This policy started to take shape and expanded when communist North Korea invaded its capitalist neighbor to the south. American military units were used as part of an international force sponsored by the United Nations to halt the incursion into South Korea by the Chinese-backed North. This along with the fall of the Iron Curtain — where the Soviet Union divided the continent between eastern communist nations and western capitalist ones — set the stage for the Cold War pitting the capitalistic ideology against that of the communists. The policy of stopping the spread of communist ideology expanded further following the removal of French forces from North Vietnam. Once France lost control of the North, the Communist-led regime sought to reunite the country and began invading the South. With America’s foreign policy, the government believed it was the role of the United States to bolster the efforts of South Vietnam. This involvement only escalated in the early 1960s and, at its peak, American forces numbered over 536,000. From the end of World War II to Vietnam, the role of the media and its coverage of conflict abroad changed. During World War II, the media included only print and some radio broadcasters reporting from locations away from the front lines. In Korea, that practice remained the same. At home, coverage of foreign policy decisions was confined to being managed by the presidential administration. However, during the Vietnam era, journalists found themselves embedded with military units in-country and domestic coverage went beyond regurgitation of government messages as journalists exerted more freedom from political elites. Despite the increased involvement of the press in coverage of on-ground actions in Vietnam and policy coverage in Washington, D.C., the shaping of American foreign policy during the conflict was limited in more of a mirror of political elites and their growing distaste for American involvement in Southeast Asia. The question this study will address is just how did media shape the foreign policy decisions made during the Vietnam War? This study will begin with a review of relevant literature pertaining to the media and its role in shaping public opinion. From there will be an examination of the American foreign policy doctrine under the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon as it pertains to involvement in Vietnam. Following that examination, the actions of the press and its coverage of troop actions in Vietnam and foreign policy decisions made by presidential administrations and Congress will be documented. This will culminate in the thesis that the American media did very little to shape the foreign policy decisions made by leaders of the time. It is, in fact, the leaders themselves who caused public upheaval and their decisions forced a deviation in foreign policy from modernization and stopping the spread of communism to a “peace with honor” strategy that led to the end of American involvement in Vietnam.
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JOURNALISM AND FOREIGN POLICY
This edited collection brings together critical and up-to-date assessments of how mainstream American and British media cover their respective foreign policies, paying special attention to 'ofcial enemies'. In the age of the internet and social media, the reporting and commentary on world events by mainstream Western media remains tightly bound by the way in which Western governments promote their framing. This book explores the extent to which historical and recent Western media coverage has refected and continues to refect the foreign policies of the United States and the United Kingdom towards ten non-Western countries:
reasoning, and thus our actions, both in everyday life and in politics» (Lakoff 2013). The relevance of metaphors is stressed by the possibility of framing a situation: in this way, the perception of phenomena is not the reality itself, but only an intellectual representation of it. Moreover, «in politics, [metaphors] are rarely isolated. They usually come as part of a coherent system of concepts» (Lakoff 2013), of course influenced by cultural factors of the original context (Barker 2012).
11_Seo_Media and Foreign Policy
2015
This study examines journalists' role conceptions in their coverage of diplomatic issues, strongly that journalists are participants in the negotiation process and that news sources have significant influence on their judgments of the newsworthiness of issues related to the talks. This comparative study offers important implications for the press-government relationships in foreign affairs issues. The role of the media in foreign affairs and international issues has garnered growing attention from scholars, as it has been assumed that the end of the Cold War and advances in communication technologies have increased the ability of the media to influence the foreign policy process (Gilboa 2006). While scholars have presented different opinions and findings regarding the media's roles in shaping foreign policy decision-making That is particularly the case when countries use the media for communication with parties with whom they don't have effective or viable dialogue chann...
The Importance of International Media in Affecting the Course of the Vietnam War
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2008
The article shows the limitations of the 'indexing' hypothesis, an influential conceptualization of state-press relations based on the notion that the media tend to reproduce the range of debate within political elites. The hypothesis, as confirmed by an international comparative investigation of the elite press coverage of 9/11 in the US, Italy, France, and Pakistan, cannot be applied outside the American context. The analysis finds that the variation in the levels of correlation between elite press coverage and governmental discourse are explained by previously neglected variables: national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy within each media organization. The article argues that more international comparative research and multidisciplinary approaches are needed in order to renew old paradigms, especially at a time when the distinction between foreign and domestic politics is disappearing.