policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
news. By November of 1965, CBS and NBC expanded their Saigon news bureaus
and at the end of 1967, they had staffs of two dozen employees each and
annual budgets of around $2.5 million. This increasea commitment by the
networks to reporting the Vietnam war guaranteed that every night viewers
in the US
bombardments,
would see film clips of infantry search-and-destroy missions,
US government officials.
napalm raids, etc., accompanied by interviews with optimistic
In the mid-1960s in the United States, only a handful of newspapers
supported both national and foreign reporting staffs of their own or
employed well-informed and influential commentators whose articles were
syndicated to other papers.
Interpretation of foreign and defense policy
atid events was often left to the Post and Times which had large Washington
and international staffs and were thereby better equipped to conduct indepth
analysis. 14/ Of the two, the Times, with over five hundred editors
and correspondents, provided the most comprehensive coverage. 15/ The
relative difference in the reiources of the Times and the Post compared
with other newspap~ers
gave those two organizations positions of powerful
influence in the presentation of news to the American public.
C. GOVERNMENT-MEDIA RELATIONS
The evolution c• government/news media relations dur.;:-,g the Vietnam
war was linked directly to the approaches taken by successive administrations
toward the sews media.
This section traces the evolving relationship
during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years. The so-called "credibility
gap" which developed during the Kenneay years and which widened during the
Johnson years became a centerpiece of government/media relations. Each of
the three presidents had his own style of "handling" the press, and each
had his successes and failures in manipulating press reactions to his
policies.
While government/media relations had always been adversarial 'o
some degree due to the nature of the two institutions, this adversarial
relationship was
escalated to new levels of mistrust and even hostility
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