Kansas newspapers and media have been falling all over themselves to cover the efforts by the Marion police, assisted by a search warrant signed by a magistrate judge, to confiscate files and computers and other stuff of the Marion County Record.
This was a small town newspaper and most small towns have their own unique politics, and it still isn’t clear exactly why police seized reporters’ property.
Further, there is no immediate remedy for the principals involved. A lawsuit against the police chief is filed, but to what end — his resignation? Is the Marion City Council liable for the death of the editor’s elderly mother after a police raid on her home? Some trial attorney, somewhere, might be salivating over that one. But proving cause and effect can be difficult.
Governments don’t like their secrets being exposed — whether totalitarian governments or the so-called free democracies. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers case, officially New York Times Co. v. United States, was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case involving the publication of classified government documents related to the Vietnam War by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked top-secret Defense Department documents from his employer, the Rand Corporation. The documents covered U.S. political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The government’s highest officials, including presidents, knew of the mess and did little to extricate the country from the mess, while an entire generation — my generation — was doing the fighting and dying.
The Pentagon Papers case revolved around the government’s attempt to prevent The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the information — in First Amendment parlance, a “prior restraint.”
But before there was the Pentagon Papers case, another major censorship flap occurred a year earlier, in January 1970. It involved the military and Vietnam — in fact it took place in Saigon, at the American Forces Vietnam Network.
AFVN was a radio and television network of the United States military, serving as a source of news, entertainment and information for American military personnel stationed in Vietnam. It was popularized by the Robin Williams movie, “Good Morning, Vietnam.”
Any time CBS’s Walter Cronkite led with a story involving censorship and Vietnam, you knew it was a hot story. I remember one such story from a crazy week in Saigon in 1970 because I was a Navy journalist assigned to the AFVN station where it occurred.
At the end of an 11 p.m. TV news broadcast, Army Specialist Robert Lawrence, a pre-war civilian journalist and station manager in Atlanta, set down his papers and looked into the camera, and said the Military Assistance Command Office of Information was censoring the news that AFVN tried to bring to the troops.
“As a newsman,” Lawrence said, “I am pledged to tell the truth at all times, and I will always tell the truth either in the military or as a civilian. In the military in Vietnam, I have found that a newscaster is not free to tell the truth.”
Then someone in the control room clicked off the feed and Lawrence’s camera went dark.
Lawrence had alerted the news press covering the Vietnam War from Saigon, and local major media outlets taped the allegations he made and sent the feeds back to the states.
And the military manure began to scatter on the fan blades.
Tom Sinkovitz, a U.S. Marine and AFVN’s TV sports anchor, was the next on-camera personality. The control room cut over to Sinkovitz. Sinkovitz had had no warning (we think) of what Lawrence was going to say, so he stuttered, “Uhhh, thanks, Bob.” He then looked into the camera and began broadcasting the day’s American sports events news.
But those three words incensed the USMC, who thought Sinkovitz knew of Lawrence’s plan. The Corps transferred Sinkovitz up-country and gave him an M-16. Military journalists that screw up — or are perceived to screw up — in a war zone, can find their next assignment … somewhat more exciting than TV sports newscasts. Sinkovitz was later wounded in action, but after his tour he became a well-known TV anchor in San Francisco.
Yours truly — and our morning drive-time rock and roller, Pat Sajak — and most of the guys at the station had nothing to do with encouraging Lawrence’s yawking. But we were all treated like we were. MACOI didn’t know how many of us knew what Lawrence was going to say. So in the best of military traditions, it was assumed we all were guilty. The station’s jobs became, in the parlance of the times: “more Marvin Military.”
The incident spawning the censorship was a report regarding the deaths of three American soldiers scheduled to be broadcast on AFVN radio. They were killed during an attack on the Bien Hoa Air Base. However, before the broadcast, higher-ranking military officials became concerned the report was too graphic and potentially demoralizing to the soldiers in Vietnam.
Stateside news organizations could hear the story and publish or broadcast it, but not AFVN to our troops.
The incident is considered censorship because the decision to alter the news report was made in order for the military — our government — to control the narrative and maintain morale among the soldiers by withholding certain details.
None of that made sense. The working press in Vietnam — the Dan Rathers and the Peter Arnetts of the world — got their stories immediately over the Associated Press and United Press International wires. The wire services sent their stories to teletypes around the world in minutes. Hanoi could purchase a subscription to UPI and have the Bien Hoa Air Base story, but U.S. personnel at Bien Hoa heard nothing. Hence, Lawrence’s allegation of censorship.
Withholding news from troops to maintain morale was a weak excuse. Look at what news gets to the militaries of Russia and Ukraine by modern media. It wasn’t that way in Vietnam.
As Specialist Robert Hodierne reported later for the Stars and Stripes, “You are on pretty shaky ground when you can’t tell your troops the truth about the war for fear they wouldn’t fight it if you did.”
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As originally published on KansasReflector.com.
Republished with permission under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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