Case Study: News, Video Technology and the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War exists as a significant milestone in the evolution of video technology and news production. Consistent with the tradition of modern wars in the United States, the conflict in Vietnam faced both the challenge and opportunity of employing and regulating the use of new, state of the art equipment. Technological innovation in the news industry played a large role in the conflict, as the time required to air visual and audio signals from the battlefields in Vietnam on television in the United States reduced significantly. "Beginning in 1970, because of the new availability of ground stations in Bangkok and Hong Kong, television developed the capacity to air video the same day it was sent." As a result, much more graphic visual and audio content was aired on American television. In contrast to the pre-1970 tradition of airing only carefully edited, happy-faced depictions of the war, much more of the tragedy and chaos that characterized the fighting in Vietnam found its way onto the television sets of Americans. Many argue that this significant change in the fundamental approach to news coverage of the war had a large influence on the attitudes of Americans towards their country's involvement in the war, as anti-war sentiment increased from that point on, (Baroody 17).

Unlike the Gulf War, the government in Vietnam played a relatively inactive role in censoring the flow of information, and reporters took full advantage. It was common practice for video cameras to go out into the jungle or paddies with little supervision and take footage of fighting as it happened. The video would then be sent to one of the few ground stations in Southeast Asia capable of uplinking the signals to the satellites, and before the day was over the footage would be seen on television in America. The significance of this may be best stated by Ivor Yorke, when he wrote: "vivid, full-color pictures of this morning's fresh casualties have a gruesome reality that those of yesterday do not" (166).

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