1975, the Vietnam war is coming to an end. A terrible era characterized by war crimes and an estimated 3.8 million deaths is finally over[1]. This joyful news also meant the end of something else, something that helped ending the atrocities of the war. In 1975 we said goodbye to true war journalism and welcomed a new practice now known as embedded journalism.
To understand what this means we need to take a deeper look into journalism in general. Journalisms main goal is to help the public form their own opinion on certain subjects by providing them with objective, unbiased information. A crucial demand to make this possible is the deontological norm of independence.[2] This implies taking on a neutral position when collecting and reporting information to prevent a certain form of bias, which is especially crucial in times of war and conflict. American journalists reporting on the Vietnam War didn’t solely rely on governmental information, but instead also collected info from the Vietnamese civilians. Their reports revealed a vast amount of atrocities, resulting in a drastic change of the public opinion surrounding the Vietnam war.
Unfortunately the change this war journalism had instilled is the exact reason why governments have made the practice impossible and replaced it with embedded journalism. Whereas before journalists could freely report what they saw when visiting war grounds, they now must adhere to the info they get from the military, seen as they offer the journalists protection during their stay in the conflict zone. These circumstances make taking on a critical position difficult.
Embedded journalism thus makes it impossible to report in a neutral and unbiased way seen as they only collect information from one side of the conflict, which goes against the journalistic deontology. This practice produces an unbalanced information stream to the public and that unreliable info will then be used to form the public opinion. By only reporting one part of the story we can almost consider this practice as a sort of propaganda technique.
But we must acknowledge that a different approach is
rather difficult. As a journalist, it’s not safe to roam around looking for
information with the possible threat of being kidnapped or killed. Yet to ensure
not misleading the public, journalists must still remain critical when
reporting and acknowledge that the info they provide is in a sense biased and
not at all complete.
[1] https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250894486_Embedded_journalism_-_more_than_a_conflictreporting_issue
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