William Westmoreland Quotes

The Vietnam war was the first television war. You didn’t have to imagine it any more. You could see it.... Television changed the way war was covered forever.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.

You have to pay attention to how a war appears on television these days, there’s no way around it.

Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.

The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.

War is big and there are only so many reporters and only so many places for their words and images to appear. Choices are made constantly.

There's a lot of peer pressure to not do positive stories out of Iraq... I think there's a sense that the administration got a pass during the hot days of war and now that the war is over it's time to even out the deck somewhat.

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.

A good war televises well; a bad war televises poorly.

Of all times in time of war the press should be free.

Reporters were all part of the war effort. They went along with it, and not only that, they abetted it.…It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.…They wrote only a part of the war

The media never covers all the evil wars that's promoted.

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

There has always been tension between reporters and the administration, particularly when it comes to war in the modern era. You can go to Kennedy or Johnson and see that they weren't happy with David Halberstam or Morley Safer.

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

After four or five different wars, I grew weary of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it's not that difficult, really.

I used to think the press was a necessary evil and now I don't think it is. I think it's something you choose.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

As far as the media is concerned, I wouldn't shoot anything down.