Josh Clark

And essentially,

Because the public was feeling this way, their public sentiment was that way toward Vietnam.

And because if you turned on the news, the evening national news, you would see like terrible coverage that was not flattering at all to what the United States was doing in Vietnam.

Elected officials basically had no choice but to listen to people.

And it definitely led to the earlier, probably an earlier withdrawal than the United States may have otherwise taken.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, change the way that it went moving forward because, you know, the writing was on the wall at that point for the for the U.S.

government.

They're like, we've we can't go back to World War Two as much as they wanted to kind of control that narrative.

The American people at that point would not have it moving forward.

So it really kind of changed the whole relationship of how any kind of conflict is covered.

It did.

So now they've struck a balance between allowing reporters to embed and just relying on those national news reporters to disseminate the propaganda.

Because if you watch embedded coverage, for the most part, it is fairly rah-rah, even if it's not overtly rah-rah because the American public's a little more savvy than that.

It's still nothing like the coverage was of Vietnam from what I understand.

Well, yeah.

And just the way wars are fought now, there's not like a front line like you had back then.

So I remember watching the Gulf War and it was just all those like, you know, black and white shots of bombing things from thousands of feet above, you know.

Yeah, and then the beginning of the Iraq War, remember it was shock and awe?