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Are the media's treatments of the My Lai and Hue massacres a case study in journalistic double standards?
Is the Hue massacre the best-kept secret of the Vietnam War? It is if you depend on America's mass media for history lessons. That is my conclusion after 40 years in journalism, a career spent with both United Press International and The Associated Press, which bills itself as the world's largest gatherer of news. I retired in 2000 and am now free to, as the media says so often in connection with other institutions, "blow the whistle." The possibility that the limited reporting on the slaughter at Hue was an intentional coverup has bothered me since I was a young UPI reporter who read the first brief dispatches about the massacre. A systematic slaughter of at least 2,810 civilians in Hue (and, according to Vietnam scholar Douglas Pike, possibly as many as 5,700), including foreigners, intellectuals, religious and political leaders and others, had apparently been carried out by local VC rather than PAVN regular troops. After the first of the mass graves was discovered on February 26, 1968, the day after the Battle of Hue ended, the horrendous Hue massacre seemed destined for major press coverage-and yet, over the years, I watched the story all but vanish.
This lack of coverage helped convince me that the role of the press as the guardian of history has changed drastically since I entered journalism. In those early years, a sobering edict reminded reporters that they wrote the first draft of history. One of my bosses put it this way: "Remember that years from now a tweedy professor or two might pull out your stuff and use it in a book." Today it is editors and reporters, not history teachers, who decide what does or does not become part of our national memory.
Case in point: The Associated Press Television and Radio Association held a convention in March 1998 that featured a display of great AP photographs, an exhibit that was part of the wire service's crowing over its 150th anniversary. World War II was summed up in a photo of the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima and another of a troopship containing victorious GIs on their way home....