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My Lai Massacre And Watchmen Analysis

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Massacres and Watchmen: How the My Lai massacres Changed War Reporting Freedom of the press is a right held very dear by Americans, but out of what was this devotion to the media born? Unfortunately, that answer is not as simple as one event, one person, or one story. The government is an integral part of our daily lives which oversees all and controls most. Many of the instances that have gleaned the admiration of the American people for the press have undermined this, occasionally, overreaching powerhouse. “Woodstein” and Watergate, Edward Snowden and the NSA, and Seymour Hersh and My Lai exposed the hidden wrongs of the US government with staggeringly influential power to change both the government and journalism. Here, we will be focusing on the fallout from Hersh’s reports on the 1968 massacres at My Lai (“Pinkville”), Vietnam. With the exposer of US Army immorality by Seymour Hersh of the St. Louis Dispatch in a series of reports the field of war journalism was forever changed into two distinct eras, Pre and post Vietnam and fundamentally changed the journalist, military relationship. …show more content…

With the initiation of World War One governments on both sides of the Atlantic began to exhibit control over war correspondents, keeping tabs on where and who they were with, often through incentives. Good public opinion abounded for the wars and the war correspondents (Smith, 2012). By the second world war people would flood into movie theaters to receive news of the previous week’s events on the war front, idolizing reporters (Siegel, 2003). Unsurprisingly, such reports often biased and focused on the heroisms of the allies, any atrocities were assumed better left unsaid (Smith,

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In “The War Photo No One Would Publish”, the author Torie Rose DeGhett depicts the meaning behind censorship along with the technicalities that it has on public views. DeGhett proposes that pictures should always be published so the viewers can get a comprehensive detailed effect of what is happening around the world they inhabit. DeGhett also proposes the idea that “it’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photographs absence” (DeGhett 74). This statement leads to the idea of censorship causing the argument of whether certain media outlooks should be censored to the public or not. A media source such as TMZ is a great example that shows how it undermines the right of censorship of others privacy to make a manipulated celebrity story that

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1185 Words | 5 Pages

U.S. soldiers are trained to follow orders, which is exactly what they did as hundreds of villagers were indiscriminately killed in the My Lai Massacre. Even if the soldiers were acting under confusing orders, that is a failure of the chain of command, and even if the killings were orchestrated by a few incompetent officers, those officers never should have been placed in leadership roles. The real tragedy of My Lai represents an entire system of willful negligence and lack of accountability on the part of the military. Thus the responsibility for the massacre lies with the men involved, but also with the military chain of command that gave the order and then tried to cover it up.

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1672 Words | 7 Pages

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1487 Words | 6 Pages

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