Special to The Japan Times In the United States, it's said that the Vietnam War was lost on TV. As the first armed conflict to receive graphic coverage on nightly news shows, the war seemed closer than it was. Consequently, questions surrounding its legitimacy eventually came to the fore and, for many people, were never satisfactorily answered.
The U.S. government learned its lesson. The news media were greatly limited in their coverage of 1991's Operation Desert Storm, a situation that reporters grumbled about, but went along with anyway. All information was channeled through the military itself, and so Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf became as big a media superstar as journalist Peter Jennings. It was only later that the world realized how many people were killed and how much destruction that brief war produced.
For the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the military offered a compromise: Reporters would be selected, trained and "embedded" in companies of soldiers as they went into combat. The experiment was deemed a success, though some media analysts observed that by spending so much time close to troops, the embedded journalists sympathized not only with their situation, but also with the ostensible cause they were fighting for. The public got teary frontline dispatches from famous folks like Ted Koppel that were more patriotically soul-stirring than anything the military could have hoped for.