Coverage of Tet, he said, "Changed how people looked at the war, and in doing so, it changed the war itself."
Another conflict from that era is still being fought, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
To engage in a bit of counterfactual history, what chance would the idea have if American reporters had covered these decades of Johnson's War on Poverty with the same skepticism they brought to fighting in Vietnam?
The impression of failure in Vietnam was intended to end the war; in the War on Poverty, the goal is escalation.
Zeitz also acknowledges some success in the War on Poverty, but mostly in the early phases.
What if reporters were as openly dismissive in probing Great Society programs? Of course, the Vietnam War piled up a very real body count, so perhaps it's not quite fair to expect the press to respond as aggressively in the case of the War on Poverty, which was never a real shooting war.
Would The New York Times bravely publish the "Poverty Papers": leaked government reports showing that Housing and Urban Development-associated entities failed to enforce the required hiring of low-income workers, costing billions of HUD tax dollars? Coverage like that might well sour Americans on opening new fronts in the War on Poverty.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/05/media-covered-war-poverty-like-vietnam/
Another conflict from that era is still being fought, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
To engage in a bit of counterfactual history, what chance would the idea have if American reporters had covered these decades of Johnson's War on Poverty with the same skepticism they brought to fighting in Vietnam?
The impression of failure in Vietnam was intended to end the war; in the War on Poverty, the goal is escalation.
Zeitz also acknowledges some success in the War on Poverty, but mostly in the early phases.
What if reporters were as openly dismissive in probing Great Society programs? Of course, the Vietnam War piled up a very real body count, so perhaps it's not quite fair to expect the press to respond as aggressively in the case of the War on Poverty, which was never a real shooting war.
Would The New York Times bravely publish the "Poverty Papers": leaked government reports showing that Housing and Urban Development-associated entities failed to enforce the required hiring of low-income workers, costing billions of HUD tax dollars? Coverage like that might well sour Americans on opening new fronts in the War on Poverty.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/05/media-covered-war-poverty-like-vietnam/
No comments:
Post a Comment