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Press
Releases
06/27/06
AP
panel: Media in Vietnam had unprecedented level of access
By DEEPTI HAJELA
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- The news media's ability to cover the Vietnam
War without censorship was unlike anything that has been seen
since, correspondents who covered that conflict for The Associated
Press said during a reunion.
"We had relationships with officers and generals that
are totally foreign to reporters trying to cover Iraq today,
absolutely in a fantasy world," said Peter Arnett, who
spent 13 years in Vietnam for the news cooperative from 1962
to 1975.
"The military was remarkable in Vietnam -- they not only
didn't try to censor us, they made every accommodation to
us," said Richard Pyle, who was AP's bureau chief in
Saigon from 1970-1973. "There's never been a situation
quite like that anywhere."
Arnett and Pyle were joined on the panel by correspondents
Seymour Topping, George Esper, Hugh Mulligan, Edith Lederer
and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Horst Faas, who took
part from Germany.
The discussion was part of a lecture series on the AP's history,
and was timed to coincide with an exhibit of the archives
from the Saigon bureau on display at the company's headquarters.
The archive chronicles the AP's coverage of the war, including
thousands of stories and battlefield dispatches that were
marked up by editors.
The journalists recalled that soldiers in the field welcomed
reporters, would transport them around the country and respected
them for facing the hardships and dangers in battle zones.
"In Vietnam, if you had the courage and the stamina,
you could go anywhere," said Esper, who spent 10 years
in Southeast Asia and wrote more words on the war than any
other reporter. He retired from the AP in 2000.
But the media's freedom to cover the war had some lasting
harm, including journalists killed on the battlefield. There
also was resentment from the military establishment, which
didn't always appreciate what was written, the journalists
said.
"This built a sense of annoyance with the press that
has persisted through all the wars since then," said
Pyle, now a writer in the AP's New York City bureau.
The panel discussion, moderated by AP President and CEO Tom
Curley, included journalists who were in Saigon from 1950
through the after the fall of the South Vietnamese government
in 1975.
Topping, who arrived in Saigon for the AP in 1950 and went
on to become managing editor of The New York Times, plans
to teach at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia
University this fall. Arnett won a Pulitzer in 1966 in international
reporting and later became a reporter for CNN. Mulligan and
Faas are retired.
Several other Vietnam reporters and photographers attended
Monday's event, including former AP Saigon bureau chief Malcolm
Browne, who won a Pulitzer in 1964.
Lederer, now the AP's correspondent at the United Nations
and one of the few women to cover Vietnam, said every U.S.
military engagement since Vietnam has featured attempts to
control the media. In the 1991 Gulf War, she recalled, stories
had to go through U.S. military censors, and she remembered
clearly the time she interviewed a general and had his media
handler sitting behind her the entire time.
"In Vietnam, anybody that you could get hold of would
generally talk to you," she said after the panel discussion.
"I don't think that in our lifetimes we will ever see
that kind of freedom again."
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On the Net:
http://www.ap.org
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