Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.
It's the first war we've ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.
With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.
And we broadcast tapes sent to us from Americans against the war. These were most effective I believe.
One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.
Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side.
We've had American TV shows in Britain for years and that hasn't affected our culture at all.
Television wasn't prestigious.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.