Josh Clark

You would get news updates.

They would play in movie theaters.

By the time we got to Vietnam, they had, you know, like handheld cameras you could literally take to the front lines.

Mm-hmm.

And it really changed the way war coverage went.

And as a result, the way the way people felt about the war, because World War Two, everyone was they were pretty rah rah.

And you got these rah rah films.

So morale was big in America.

You know, they were like, hey, this is this is great.

We're fighting the Nazis.

Right.

Another huge factor was that by 1966, 93% of American homes had a TV.

And just 13 to 16 years earlier in 1950, it was 9%.

Yeah.

So TV was firmly established in the American psyche.

You remember in Wonder Years, whenever they sat down and had dinner, they always had the TV on showing Vietnam coverage?

Yeah, yeah.

That's what it was like.

Yeah, for sure.

And so the fact that everybody had TVs, the fact that now there was like cameras that you could easily allow a journalist to embed with, and the idea that the government really shouldn't control propaganda, shouldn't control the news like that, created this atmosphere where the broadcasters were willing to show like really horrendous,