PC: Media Blackout in Vietnam?

How plausible is it that, but some executive level decision making, a tv/print media blackout is called for most, if not all of Vientam-related combat deployment, missions, and battles during either Johnson's or Nixon's Presidency?
 
The doctrine of working with the press established by King, Eisenhower, & others in the 1940s was to much the perception and public belief. When the US Army & other related agencies started bullshiting the press, ie: the Five O Clock Follies, it went badly & the press, all the way from the fringe reporters to central pillars among the publishers called them on it. ie: Walter Cronkites abandonment of 'journalistic nuetrality' and opposition to the war was in part due to his disgust over the (inept) efforts of the US military to conceal the reality on the ground.

A black out is simply not going to work. Conservative Republicans like my father saw themselves the public relations blundering of Westmorelands staff & the likes of MacNamarra before the press really focused on. it was one of the first steps in him & his peers losing confidence in the leaders at the DoD & the uniformed levels. The public, conservative or liberal of the era would drop their support even faster were there a attempt at a press black out.
 
LBJ could have put heavy wartime restrictions on the press coming out of Vietnam like Truman did Korea.

But, he would have to have committed to the war in a way he refused to do and even Truman committed more to Korea.

LBJ wanted the war to be a far second to his domestic programs.
 
The idea that the media lead the anti-war sentiment is a myth. The media was behind in the public sentiment against the war, which had begun to turn while the media was still rah-rah for the war. By the time Cronkite made those statements about Vietnam and how it would "end in stalemate", he was already lagging behind public opinion, which had already thought the same thing. Johnson himself never made the statement "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the nation". He was at a dinner party the night that aired.

What turned opinion on the war was when every other person in the country knew someone who had died in Vietnam, returned maimed, or returned as a very different person. You could argue television played a role via the presentation of a neutral image of combat in Vietnam, but the argument that media bias altered the public sentiment needs to be tempered. The media was the follower, rather than the leader.
 
It wouldn't have worked and even then, there would have been a political price. First, Washington leaked like a sieve back then; details would eventually leak out. Second, the TV news was coming into its own as a dominant news source. Imagine Cronkite signing off with "And that's the way it is, Tuesday January XX, 1967, the 6XXth day since the media blackout on a war in Vietnam that has so far killed Y Americans." They could black out details of the war. They couldn't black out the death toll. Finally, I'd throw in that the death toll plus a black out would make imaginations run wild. That means more resistance to the draft from draftees and, probably more importantly, parents of draftees.
 
Top