The Coverage of the Vietnam War in an Organizational Context: The ABC and CBC Experience

Abstract

The Vietnam War occurred at a time of considerable internal disputation over the role and nature of news within the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) which had its origins in the competing and contrasting values of two groups of professional journalists. In both organizations the traditional criteria for defining and reporting news came under challenge from the new and apparently less constrained field of television current affairs. Each vied for organizational priority. In important respects this mirrored the breakdown in journalistic consensus which was occurring in liberal democratic societies worldwide over attitudes to authority and official sources and reporting of widespread social protest. The period of “high modernism” in journalism was ending. This paper examines aspects of the coverage of Vietnam by the ABC and CBC within this organizational climate.