Since the dawn of America, from that moment when we started progressing as a country, we have always had some sort of media presence. As motion pictures began and automobiles started lining the streets, through the roaring twenties and beyond, the media seems to always carry us forward into the future. It is not all sugar sweet, however. The mass media is, for the large part, ungoverned and biased. This means they can pick and choose what stories they present, and even worse, how they present them. Throughout the course of modern wars the media has been there to report very little truth and, for the most part, large sums of opinion.
A large example of this bias and deception was almost all of the early news coverage of the war in Vietnam. Obviously, we all know at least the minor details of the outcome of that war, and it was definitely not good. However, the media would have begged to differ during the early stages of the war. Every single day, news stations from around the country were reporting falsified death tallies. These tallies would heavily favor the United States, when in reality, they absolutely did not. Along with these false reports were countless numbers pictures that went unexplained and remained misunderstood. It was a treacherous war and the American public deserved to know what was going on when it was actually going on.
Through the use of milblogs and reports from news sources, such as the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc, I plan to investigate and compare the credited, biased, media against the stories from the soldiers themselves. In the technological world that we live in, it has become very possible for a college student, such as myself, to gather very incredible personal accounts from the field as well as have several major news sources at my fingertips. I hope to discover wether our news coverage is more fair and balanced than I think, or if believing the news is a thing of the past.
