War Policy, Public Support, and the Media

Abstract

Perhaps no element of the current conflict in Iraq engenders more emotion and acrimony within the military than debate concerning the role and influence of the news media on public opinion and national policy. Debates regarding this subject are nothing new. Since at least the Civil War, anecdotal assertions associated with media influence on American wars have caused controversy among government officials, members of the military, scholars, pundits, and members of the press as they continue to argue the media's effects. Historically, contention over the issue of media influence has become particularly acute when the policies of the administration executing the conflict are perceived as being either too slow, or failing, to achieve their political objectives at the cost of mounting casualties. Under such circumstances, critics of the press have been predictable in accusing the media of editorial bias that undermines public support for military operations, while most reporters have been equally predictable in countering that they are just faithfully reporting what they observe. This subject probably received its most severe examination and critique in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when media influence over public opinion and policy became the subject of dozens of commissions, scholarly workshops, conferences, and countless research papers and books. (1) Among the first, most notable, and most influential of the many post-mortem works was Peter Braestrup's meticulously documented book, The Big Story, an examination of the linkages and relationships of political decisionmaking as influenced by media reporting during and immediately after North Vietnam's Tet Offensive in 1968. (2) So traumatic was this train of exhaustive examinations that the question of media bias and its influence on policy and public opinion during the Vietnam War continues to surface as a fixed point of comparison almost immediately whenever the United States has become involved in subsequent conflicts. This contentious disagreement is again evident in current comparisons of the press coverage of Iraq with that of Vietnam, kindling new debates regarding the influence of the media over public opinion and policy. As a result of this reemerging debate, it is useful and appropriate to revisit the relationship of press reporting, public opinion, and policy, and to seek a theoretical understanding of how these relate to each other. A good point of departure is to examine the conclusions that many social scientists reached concerning the relationship of the media and policy during the Vietnam War. Vietnam and Subsequent Conflicts The assertion that biased media coverage was the decisive factor in turning domestic US public opinion against the in Vietnam has been closely analyzed and convincingly challenged by a large number of distinguished and disinterested researchers. Among the most respected studies were those conducted by Daniel Hallin and Clarence Wyatt, who, after analyzing the effect of so-called negative media images of the on the American people, virtually no evidence to support any causal relationship between editorial tone and bias in the media with loss of public support for the war. (3) Additionally, in perhaps the most widely quoted study of the relationship between public opinion and news reporting from Vietnam--one regarded by many as the seminal work on the subject--Ohio State University professor John Mueller compared and analyzed the effects of the media on public opinion during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. He found that support for the wars among the general public followed a pattern for decline that was remarkably similar, even though the media were neither as pervasive nor as critical during the Korean conflict as they were during the Vietnam War. (4) He summed up his conclusions as follows: Many have seen Vietnam as a war and argue that the vivid and largely uncensored day-by-day television coverage of the and its brutalities made a profound impression on public attitudes. …