Our relationship with the past-whether judgment, celebration, commemoration or denial—has become an important part of public culture. This book explores the relationship between televisual communication and memory—focusing on the conflicts that have disrupted and changed our world over the past 50 years—with particular reference to the current war in Iraq. Case studies cover the Holocaust, Vietnam, both Gulf Wars and Kosovo. Though the Vietnam War was extensively televised, it was framed within a domestic U.S. context. By the time of the latest Gulf War and Kosovo the coverage of warfare was both more immediate and more global. Hoskins illustrates this with a comparative critique of individual countries' national media framing of war (including Middle Eastern perspectives) in contrast to the so-called "global" viewpoint of satellite news networks such as CNN. Televising War examines the intertwining of self, society and media that influences our understanding of both past and present.

“The eyewitness accounts of the many phases of the war in this memoir bring events to life as if they had happened yesterday” (Vietnam Veterans of America Book Reviews). On the Frontlines of the Television War is the story of Yasutsune “Tony” Hirashiki’s ten years in Vietnam—beginning when he arrived in 1966 as a young freelancer with a 16mm camera, but without a job or the slightest grasp of English, and ending in the hectic fall of Saigon in 1975, when he was literally thrown on one of the last flights out. His memoir has all the exciting tales of peril, hardship, and close calls of the best battle memoirs, but it is primarily a story of very real and yet remarkable people: the soldiers who fought, bled, and died, and the reporters and photographers who went right to the frontlines to record their stories and memorialize their sacrifice. If this was truly the first “television war,” then it is time to hear the story of the cameramen who shot the pictures and the reporters who wrote the stories that the average American witnessed daily in their living rooms. An award-winning sensation when it was released in Japan in 2008, this book has been completely recreated for an international audience. “Tony Hirashiki is an essential piece of the foundation on which ABC was built . . . Tony reported the news with his camera and in doing so, he brought the truth about the important events of our day to millions of Americans.” —David Westin, former President of ABC News

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.

The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.

Television has come to play an ever more decisive role in the preparation and planning of war, as well as in its execution. In War and Television Bruce Cumings carefully explores the history of television's relationship to US warmaking since World War II, up to and including its presentation of the carnage in Kuwait and Iraq. Cumings examines Vietnam, long thought to have been the first television war, but finds that characterization more apt for the Gulf conflict which was fought through, packaged by, and sold to the public on television. At the centre of the book is the extraordinary tale of Cumings's own experience as historical consultant to a Thames Television production, Korea: The Unknown War, and his subsequent trials with the Public Broadcasting System when the film was released for North American distribution.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, Martin Luther University (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Vietnam War and American Society, language: English, abstract: The Vietnam War was and still is a decisive chapter in U.S. history. It was the longest military conflict, which on top of everything ended in defeat for the Americans. This war had an enormous impact on various spheres both in private and public life. Above all, it drastically shaped the relationship between politics and public opinion and raised questions on the role the media played during the military conflict. The Vietnam War and its perception were unprecedented in their entire dimension. In general this was due to the climate of social and political change taking place during the 1960’s and, more specifically, because of a totally new institution being embedded in this situation– television. During this decade television expanded and became the most important source of information for the people. This medium offered totally new perspectives and dimensions both of war coverage and its perception, which is clearly expressed in the following statement: “Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room”.1 The fact that there was no experience with regard to the mechanisms, methods and effects of TV war coverage made a rather experimental reporting possible. Both journalists and politicians were facing a new situation, concerning the intertwining between television, politics and the Vietnam War issue. This paper aims at examining this interrelation by analysing the way the Vietnam War was covered by U.S. television and by looking at the consequences of this coverage. This examination shall provide answers to questions asking for the impact of television on public opinion, U.S. politics and the course of war. The focus is put on television, because studies and surveys have shown that more than half of the American population received their information from television newscasts, which they considered to be more reliable than the press or other media.2 In addition, there is comprehensive material on television reporting as well as profound analyses of it, which is a rather pragmatic reason for concentrating on the role of U.S. TV during the Vietnam War. This paper is concerned with the contents and characteristics of war coverage and the effect it had on the role of the media during the Vietnam War. [...]

"One doesn't have to be a panjandrum of Communications to realize that television does something to us," Michael Arlen (former TV critic of The New Yorker) writes in the Introduction to Living-Room War. He continues, "Television has a transforming effect on events. It has a transforming effect on the people who watch the transformed events-it's just hard to know what that is." Living-Room War is Arlen's valiant-and entertaining-attempt to figure out exactly what exactly television does to us. This timeless collection of essays provides a poetic look at 1960s television culture, ranging from the Vietnam war to Captain Kangaroo, from the 1968 Democratic convention to televised sports.