Did large Vietnam protests get snubbed by the media?

[Quixote1818]

I just watched the local news here in New Mexico and they didn't mention the DC protest once???? Dick Chaney's operation got mentioned though! Rita took up 2/3rds of the broadcast. This is frankly stunning!

What kind of media did protests get during Vietnam?

Contact the station and rip them a new ass hole here:

http://www.thenewmexicochannel.com/insidekoat7/1706381/detail.html

Please proved contact info for your local news station if they snubbed the demonstration as well.

[Walt Starr]

1. Big names attended them.

You didn't have 20 gazillion fringe issues muddying the waters. It was all about ending the war.

[bahrbearian]

2. This one got snubbed, because of the the Hurricane.

They'll have more press later.

[Quixote1818]

8. But they found time to mention Dick Chaney's operation????

No, they had time to at least touch on it and if we write them then they will most certainly cover it tomorrow.

I hope you are right that they will come back to the protest later in the week.

[demnan]

3. No

back then we had a relatively honest media. I remember the pictures from Vietnam of those poor monks blowing themselves up, the cruelty. Protests were documented. Not like today. What a shame! :grr:

[Erika]

7. We were also shown daily pics of dead Vietnamese kids

and other innocents. Some were in trenches, others just lay in the spot they were killed. We saw the film on TV and the newspapers printed them. We were allowed to see the harshness and reality of war.

[Rabrrrrrr]

4. Shit, back then, the president actually went out and talked with 'em!

I can't believe I'm going on five years of saying this, but God, I miss Richard Nixon.

[blm]

5. No...the VVAW did get alot of attention. They even had Kerry on the Sunday

news shows back then.

They should have Cindy on those shows today, but they won't because the GOP controls most of the broadcast media now. They won't even feature any report Cindy and the Vets now without attaching them to the fringe groups who CSPAN focused their cameras on throughout the day.

[Imagevision]

6. Even with no Hurricanes...media wouldn't have covered this event

waaay too big...! If any network actually covered it they would be singled out as endorsing the anti-war message

[malaise]

9. They did not in the beginning

They did not even get the coverage available today on CSpan as annoying as that was since we didn't see the march. Many people seem to forget that it took a long time for the anti-war movement to gather momentum. What received better coverage was the Vietnam war and the arrival of soldiers' bodies.

Edit - included key word in subject.

[skooooo]

11. that's right...

it seems to take time for anything to really happen

[kymar57]

10. nat'l coverage

Watched 2 of the 3 "big 3" networks. Nary a word.:wtf:

[Spike from MN]

18. I saw a brief snippet on ABC.

Then I flipped through the channels but didn't see any mention of it on CBS or NBC. I could have possibly missed it since I was flipping channels the whole time but I kind of doubt it. I don't think those two covered it and I'm guessing those are the two channels kymar57 watched.

[democrank]

12. No

Vietnam War protests were huge and frequent. Protestors practiced all kinds of civil disobedience. Protesting wasn`t something we did just once in a while. It was truly an ongoing movement. We wouldn`t have allowed the media to ignore us.

[Quixote1818]

13. Please take the time to write to the station above!!!!!

I just asked them why they found time to mention Dick Chaney's operation but couldn't find a second to mention the hundreds of thousands who were protesting in Washington DC today. Stunning!


Here is their contact page again: http://www.thenewmexicochannel.com/insidekoat7/1706381/detail.html

[wishlist]

14. The Iraq deaths, prisoner torture and civil war not being covered either

Iraq is not getting much if any coverage either right now.

[Smarmie Doofus]

15. The media was very different then. Yes, it was corporate....

but among individual journalists the war was mostly unpopular, growing more so as the war dragged on. Many in the media were sympathetic to the antiwar movement.

There was plenty of network coverage of the big nat'l demos in the 60's and 70's. Not live coverage but lead story on the network news.

Locally, in NYC, there was coverage of demos as well. Last week Cindy Sheehan's rally got its sound system cut-off by the police 'cause the organizer had no permit. Had applied for one, apparently, but the city did nothing with the application. Then they arrested him for going ahead with the rally. That's generally how Bloomberg's New York tries to stifle dissent. Passive agressive... just like the mayor.

3 big papers in town: Times covered the story; News did not; Post (Fox) gave it one inch on page 11. Far as I know , no commercial broadcast teleision station mentioned it. Upshot: vast majority of NYers have no idea what happened.

My point: this couldn't have happened in the VN era, and if it did EVERYONE would have known about it.

[newswolf56]

16. At first only papers like The Village Voice covered the anti-war protests.

Also alternative radio like WBAI. Basically, if you didn't live in New York City -- or at least in a town with a viable underground press -- you didn't know there was an anti-war movement: it was relegated to the back pages by the mainstream papers in NYC, totally ignored by mainstream broadcast media there, and just-as-methodically suppressed by mainstream media -- print and broadcast alike -- everywhere else in the United States. (I can't count the number of times I witnessed some newcomer to the City look around at the tens of thousands of marchers and exclaim, "wow, back home I thought I was the only one -- this really blows my mind!")

The very first mainstream-media opposition in the U.S. came from Jimmy Breslin via the late (and very much lamented) New York Herald Tribune -- probably the finest English-language daily newspaper ever published. Breslin went to Vietnam a hawk and spent a lot of time there with Marines he knew from his Brooklyn boyhood -- fighting Marines who were in fiercely contested hot-spots along the DMZ. As a result of his experiences, which included several fire-fights, Breslin underwent a total change of heart, and he shared his transition via his columns. By the time he came back from Vietnam he was an impassioned dove, denouncing the war as a shameful squandering of human life and U.S. Vietnam policy a murderous fraud. This was in late 1965, and those columns -- because of their age unfortunately never available on-line -- were probably Breslin's best writing ever.

But the rest of mainstream media remained pro-war -- or sullenly silent -- for at least three more years. Finally of course the movement grew large enough that mainstream media couldn't ignore it -- protests were threatening advertising revenues -- and at that point the Cronkites began climbing aboard Breslin's train.

Don't expect that to happen today because things are much worse: compared to the 1960s, today's editors have no freedom at all. This is because during the '60s only about 10 percent of all mass media was monopoly owned, while today about 95 percent of all U.S. media is owned by only six corporations -- basically the same all-powerful plutocrats who put Bush in power. Our free press is therefore history -- nothing now but the propaganda apparatus of the same oligarchy that with equal glee brought us Iraq and the genocidal aftermath of New Orleans -- and I would expect it to behave accordingly: either total suppression of the story, or total distortion of it by making every protester look like a froth-at-the-mouth A.N.S.W.E.R. bigot.

[LiberalEsto]

17. Yes they got snubbed. And distorted.

If a few people got arrested, they'd focus on the arrestees, not the hundreds of thousands of peaceful marchers.

I was at a peace demo in Central Park, NY back in 1969 or 1970 and watched in astonishment as two fake hippies putting on a fake fight while a camera crew from ABC filmed the fake fight. This was propaganda to make the anti-war demonstrators look bad.

Things haven't changed, except that media ownership has become more consolidated.