Steven Spielberg's Film: The Post Vietnam War

Steven Spielberg's new critically acclaimed film, "The Post," centers around the conflict surrounding the release of Pentagon files regarding the Vietnam War. Though the film focuses on the journalism events post-war, journalism was a big deal during the war. Governments heavily controlled previous war coverage and most footage were censored, but this was not the case for the Vietnam war. The government allowed the media to cover as much as they wanted from the war, but they had to be present in the scene to do so. Hundreds of journalists flew to Vietnam to cover the history-making event. Unfortunately, 63 journalism were either killed or went missing during the war. We will look at the stories and conflicts surrounding the war and the media

The united states came into the conflict as an effort to stop Vietnam from becoming a communist after they won their freedom from France. In 1954, the Geneva convention split Vietnam into north and south; this worried America as they thought that if Vietnam became communist, Asia would become communist. North Vietnam tried to convince south Vietnam to turn to communism, and the US joined forces with south Vietnam to convince North Vietnam to turn to democracy. This is how the most controversial war began.

The Vietnam war is most commonly known as the first television war; this came from the real, unfiltered depiction of the war. The media diverged from the censored and optimistic depiction of the war to show a more real and unfiltered approach. The television ownership in American households skyrocketed, media cross-ownership is the ownership of multiple media outlets by a company or person, the war created household names in news coverage such as NBC, CBS, and ABC. All their programming was live and originated in New York City, just like today's media, but this wasn't always the

A section in the Pentagon papers titled "Kennedy commitments and Programs" sated the following "We must note that South Vietnam (unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia) was essentially the creation of the United States." As well as sub-section called "Special American Commitment to Vietnam" states that the US helped support Ngo Dinh Diem's regime and election. The papers quote "Without the threat of U.S. intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused even to discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Viet Minh armies." "Without U.S. aid in the years following, the Diem regime certainly, and an independent South Vietnam almost as certainly, could not have survived." As well as the overthrowing of his