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Misled Americans
Do your realize how much your news is shaped by your government and your military?
In every military conflict after Vietnam including the present ones, what your reporters and cameramen can and can't photograph, and what your reporters can and can't report has been controlled by withholding access to anything that might reflect negatively on the military's political goals.
How many wounded or dead shoulders did you see in the Gulf War; how many did you see in your needless invasion of Granada? How many innocent civilian bodies, including women and children did you see? These were people who just happened to be at the wrong place when your bombs dropped.
While you watched high-tech bombs hitting targets (you never saw the many failures), your people never knew that thousands of old-fashioned bombs killed innocent people.
In Granada you ruined an entire country simply to give your president bragging rights to get elected for a second term. While this is obvious to the whole world, your people don't know about any of this, simply because your press didn't report this part of the story.
Reporters who question government motives are said to be unpatriotic, and your networks withhold news footage what will make waves in Washington or upset super patriots in the viewing audience, and the government that has legal controls [over] them.
You don't have freedom of the press in the United States, you're just living under that illusion.
K.V., Stockholm, Sweden
Although I might take exception to the one-sided nature of your letter, I think most newspeople would agree that it contains some truth.
The military learned a big lesson in Vietnam. They lost control of news coverage, and the public saw a nightly procession of wounded and dead, soldiers hooked on drugs, etc. This, together with the fact that key people started seeing the war as "unwinable," eventually turned the public against the war.
There are those that point out that since the American public was for a long time fed false information about U.S. success and losses in Vietnam, they continued to support the conflict. It's further pointed out that had the press reported the true facts much earlier, the futility of the conflict would have probably been obvious.
Others blame the press for undermining public support in the war and stopping it before it could be won.
Since Vietnam the U.S. military has been including a lot of material on "handling the press" in their training. They even put soldiers through training exercises where they must deal with mock reporters bent on getting information that the military wants withheld.
Clearly, handling news coverage and, therefore, the public's perception of what the military is doing became a major priority for the administration. In the conflict in Afghanistan, reporters who have covered many wars complained that the press was, and is, being adroitly "managed" by the U.S. military to an unprecedented level. One reporter noted that even Russia granted him more press freedom during their war in Afghanistan.
At the same time, the "embedded" newspersons during the Iraq invasion had a greater level of access to military operations than every in history. This was admittedly designed to engender a pro-administration media stance, and stance that was popular with many Americans and one that provided a ratings boost to one of the major cable news networks, which rather clearly promotes this view.
Both the military and the press must do their jobs—even though at times they come into direct conflict.
The problem comes when the press reveals information that compromises missions, or the military keeps the press from reporting things that the public in any democratic society has a right--even a need--to know. The latter includes bungled missions, misspent funds, the killing of innocent civilians, major errors in command judgment, and the misconduct by soldiers.
Unfortunately, the military has a history of trying to keep all of these things from the public—in recent years, rather effectively. Does this mean that the public isn't getting the whole truth? At times, yes. Does it mean that we don't have freedom of speech, especially in this day of the Internet? No.
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