An
Essay by David Sky
David
Halberstam now deceased maybe was best known for his book on the
Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest. Perhaps I shouldn't say best
known since he wrote also sport books and a book about the
firefighters in 9-11 called, Firehouse, later in his life. In The
Best and the Brightest, he explores in characteristic depth just how
such a collection of the best and the brightest minds America had at
the time lead by defense secretary Robert McNamara so spectacularly
failed in Vietnam. He won a Pulitzer prize for his war coverage while
reporting for The New York Times and I think I like best his
character as described by other war correspondents who wrote memoirs
of their time in Vietnam especially in Neil Sheehan's, A Bright and
Shining Lie which is I'm not alone in thinking the best non fiction
book on the Vietnam War definitely what I would recommend to anyone
wanting to read just one book on this subject instead of a hundred
although insofar as reading can convey such a thing the many memoirs
written by the soldiers themselves are profoundly insightful on the
Vietnam War if not as comprehensive individually in scoop as
Sheehan's epic masterpiece. As books on the Vietnam war go, the very
best book to me and one of the best books I've read in my life really
which seems more a book length prose poem than a work of non fiction
is Michael Herr's, Dispatches, in which Halberstam makes an
appearance as well. My favorite book by Halberstam is not about
Vietnam at all but a highly readable history called, The Fifties,
that I feel anyone would enjoy as history especially if old enough to
have lived in that period or even the sixties - as he points out, a
lot happened in the fifties in America that set the groundwork for
the last half of the century. Halberstam I think is particularly
notable in that in comparison to his colleagues he was relatively
square with his nose to the grindstone and highly professional and I
would say a real team player and in a way not a radical or subversive
in any sense at all unlike some of his colleagues so I wouldn't
think that he could be seen as controversial in this day and age by
even conservatives?
To
the point of comparing that time in journalism with today, I thought
still laying in bed this morning about news coverage recently of
America's newest disaster in the making in yet another country
thousands of miles away with so far no journalist involved at all
rather information coming in being entirely just taken from the
military and read to the public so not journalism in any sense of the
word hitting a new low I feel and being in fact I would say by
definition public relations at best and actually propaganda. So much
for the fourth estate. If God died in the sixties, then Journalism
died in the nineties. Earlier surely there was censorship at every
level and journalism was hardly pure but there was some actual
journalism also very credible investigative journalism. Now literally
a handful of corporations control all media and most newspapers are
dead and journalists are scattered in disarray like some utterly
defeated army. The corporate news at best is public relations and at
worst propaganda startlingly similar to “The Party” who
controlled all information in “Oceania”. Orwell's 1984 now seems
to me less of a work of fiction than a How-To book for governance.
What
really comes most strongly to mind from the Vietnam era was what most
all journalist called, “The Five O'clock Follies”. In Saigon
which was headquarters for our forces at five O'clock the military
conducted evening briefings on war events that day which were known
to be hopelessly biased and of little journalistic value. Most
reporters hung around Saigon attending these briefings then sending
in “reports” to their respective agency then went out for a night
of drinking and often whoring with the legions of young Vietnamese
woman available. By and large these reporters held the Five O'Clock
Follies in nearly as much disdain as did Halberstam himself only they
didn't care and if they were to make any argument in their defense,
the best one would be that it was only their job to report what they
were told and that going out and covering the war in depth was
somehow unprofessional in the way of editorializing upon the war.
Some strongly disagreed with that sentiment and for those relative
few like Halberstam who risked life in limb typically travelling by
helicopter far into the jungles where the kinds of potential deaths
awaiting were nearly endless with a few of our soldiers actually
eaten by tigers, the real information gained was often heavily edited
back home by often well meaning professionals who were obliged to
couch the truth in a pretty uniform manner according to the dictates
of the status quo. This was an endless source of resentment for them
to me recalling how many of the army's Long Range Reconnaissance
teams felt after going out into the jungle in lightly armed five or
six man teams often among regiments of hard core North Vietnamese
regular infantrymen who would then find their hard won Intel
dismissed by commanders as unbelievable with the real theme being
that their information garnered by boots on the ground did not fit
the screen play war being written by the top level brass.
Only
in their books as some mentioned above do we get the real dirt, as it
were. To be clear, if the America public had been given the dirt on
the war by their journalists in the field risking life and limb just
as did the brave soldiers of that war, perhaps the American people
would have brought it to a swift end ergo the reason why such a thing
did not occur. For the many Americans who give mouth service to our
forefathers, it should be noted that this so called Fourth Estate was
considered essential to maintaining a democracy and preventing our
government from becoming tyrannical a fate our forefathers always had
close in mind and a fate to which American has absolutely succumbed
so it seems. Today many conscientious journalists have rallied from
their defeat and are reporting via various let's say “asymmetrical”
means – to invoke that term “asymmetrical warfare” to make a
point here. For many that means blogs some of which demand a small
monthly fee since no matter how much esteem the writers may have for
journalistic integrity, they still have to eat. Books also still
provide a view unbiased by corporate media control unfortunately very
few Americans read these books and no mention of their contents will
ever be seen on network television. For those
journalists like David Halberstam who eschewed the Five O'clock
Follies, those who only attended these propaganda briefings and
parroted that information back to their bureaus as if it were
journalism were held in the lowest esteem by the real journalists who
in many cases like the over 50,000 United States Soldiers gave
everything in their commitment their calling.
Today
I seriously wonder if by some magic our vaunted evening news anchors
and those personalities on the cable news networks actually reported
the truth to us would it make any difference at all – we having
grown that apathetic, maybe? To be fair and balanced and convey a
bit of positivity, I have to admit that particularly these cable news
networks which run literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week do a
consistently flawless job at saying nothing of any real substance at
all – I mean that in itself takes real hard work, organization and
a high level of professionalism so let me give praise exactly where
it is due. I can't help but think of what was said about the Mafia - how much success they would have and how much good they might accomplish if they but choose to use all the hard work, organization and talent they possess for some legal enterprise!
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