ABSTRACT
The post-war world witnessed a fundamental shift in war reporting driven in part by the rise of television. By the mid-1950s, not only could people read about and listen to war, they could also now see it on their television screens. Previously, viewing war was a matter of looking at news photographs in the press and news magazines such as Life, Paris Match and Picture Post or going to the cinema to watch the newsreels. In the early 1950s, television began to spread its tentacles across the world and people could now consume war in the confines of their own homes. The Korean War was the first major conflict that television was able to report but the opportunity to see and hear the war was not matched by the commitment to communicate it through the new medium. The capacity to broadcast from the battlefield was technically restricted and the reach of the medium was limited; as a result, most people still turned to the print and sound broadcast media. By Vietnam, this had changed. Television was now people’s main source of information as well as most believed about the fighting in the rice fields of South East Asia. Subsequently, television strengthened its hold over public knowledge of war and warfare and even in the digital age when a war reaches a critical stage it is to television that most people turn to find out what is happening.
