Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court explained that the constitutional guarantee of a free press was "to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches." Therefore, the role and responsibility of the media in politics is to expose potential governmental deception and corruption, and to create an informed public by ensuring a transparent system. Phillip Knightley, in his account of the history of war correspondence, reveals the difficulties for the press in fulfilling this duty, and the consequences of a breakdown in this fourth branch of government. Erik Barnouw focuses on the evolution of television and, in his analysis, politics becomes another branch of television, instead of the other way around.

Knightley places the reality of war correspondence against its theoretical purpose and argues that oftentimes journalists fall short of their responsibilities. War correspondents should strive to distance themselves from the political and the human and to focus on objectively reporting events.

Knightley places a great deal of blame on the poor reporting by journalists during the Vietnam war for the public's ignorance as to the truth of the politics behind the offensive. He states that the "freedom given to correspondents [in Vietnam] to go anywhere, see everything, and write what they liked is not going to be given again" (Knightley, 482), but that the incredible opportunity given was largely squandered.

Knightley condemns reporters for "not questioning the American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness" (Knightley, 417). But how much of this questioning is the responsibility of the journalist? Knightley uses the example of Peter Arnett, a Vietnam correspondent for the Associated Press, to illustrate a feeling among correspondents to avoid speculating on the morality of the conflict: "...even if he had known he was witnessing a war crime, he would not have described it as such, because that would have been making a judgment, and as a correspondent for the AP he dealt in facts, not judgments" (Knightley, 435). Therefore, the only avenue for a reporter to express his or her opinion would be through choice of topic. Which massacres were common, and which were news.

Much of the difficulty of reporting on the Vietnam War was due to this very dilemma. As correspondents spent more time on the front line, they began to see and become entangled in the complexity of the situation. There was no 'good' and 'bad.' Atrocities were committed daily. Knightley notes that many correspondents left for Vietnam supporting the United States, then were unable to reconcile what they had been told about the situation there with what they saw.

Furthermore, reporters were constantly confronted with situations that forced them to choose between their responsibilities to their readers as reporters, and their responsibilities to give aid to those who need it as those in a place to give it. These ethical dilemmas were particularly difficult for photographers whose "craft is by its nature more obviously voyeuristic and intrusive than that of a writer" (Knightley, 449). Arnett, when describing photographing a monk committing suicide by fire in protest to the South Vietnamese government’s anti-Buddhist policies, states, "I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away. As a human being I wanted to, as a reporter I couldn't" (Knightley, 446). Knightley mentions some correspondents who chose being human over reporting. It's possible that these reporters were actual hurting the victims they were trying to help by not reporting the events. By not doing their job. By not alerting the American public—the people with the power to influence the US government and, thus, the war—as to the truth about Vietnam.

I was reminded of these questions during our debate last week over filming infanticide. At what point does the cameraman, the correspondent, or the photographer stop being helpful and start being gratuitous? When does a picture or a description become ineffective through overuse? And when is the suspense of an absent image more powerful than the image itself?

Television, an even more intrusive medium, brought scenes of "real-life violence, death, and horror" (Barnouw, 451) to the American living room. Knightley states that although "it was from television that 60 per cent of Americans got most of their war news" (Barnouw, 451), there is little evidence to prove that these graphic images had any effect in changing people's attitude towards Vietnam. In fact, he argues that the images had the opposite effect. The public became more tolerant of violence and more likely to support the war.

Although Erik Barnouw's discussion of the history of television is much broader than just news broadcasts, he does talk about the role of TV in American politics. One very interesting point that Barnouw makes is, "alone among major democracies, the United States had incorporated election campaigns into its merchandising procedures" (Barnouw, 483). American candidates and their platforms were reduced to 30 second appeals sandwiched between advertisements for hair gel and mouthwash. As television became more lucrative, competition among advertisers for air space--especially during peak hours--increased. This was supplemented by the availability of hour-by-hour data on the demographics of viewers. Brief and flashy was essential to making election campaign ads competitive.

News, however, was not brief, or flashy. And news was not making money. "Programs yielding such low-revenue slots seemed to network executives an obstacle to the much higher earning that would be possible with other programming. The demographic mania produced intense efforts to jazz up news programming" (Barnouw, 472). As Knightley argues, part of the blame for the poor reporting during Vietnam falls on the heads of editors and executives back in the US. Stories needed to make money in order to be news. Facing pressure from the government to censor war reports, and from investors to keep capital flowing in, editors and executives leaned towards sensational but not inflammatory reports.

The government wanted stories that would encourage public support. During Vietnam, the US maintained a very open and helpful attitude towards correspondents hoping that they would in turn write praises of the US government. The government condemned writers who opposed the war as unpatriotic, and blamed such reporters for drops in morale. But when does maintaining morale become more important that accurate reporting? If a war is only conveyed in positive terms in the press, but then is "suddenly" lost, the media would be unable to hide behind the pretense of morale preservation to excuse propagandistic reporting. And would subsequently have failed its duty as the fourth branch of government. The media would be nothing more than a tool for deception and manipulation of the population by the government.

During our discussion with Deborah, one student asked if the news reports aired in the barracks on the front lines were censored. He proposed reverse media censorship to keep troops ignorant and morale high. He suggested that if soldiers did not know that their efforts were not supported back home, enthusiasm would be high, and troops would be more effective. His proposal assumes that troop morale is based solely on homeland public support, and that soldiers are too directly immersed in the war that they cannot come to their own conclusions about the effectiveness of their campaign, or the policies behind it.

Balancing media responsibility and media interest was made more difficult by the lack of publishing or broadcasting options. Today, with the introduction of miniaturized personal media (digital cameras and camera phones) and the Internet, more perspectives are available and, as a group, can offer a less mediated, more objective viewpoint; they can be an effective fourth branch of the government—a truer representation and tool of the people.