Thread: How did the Pentagon Papers affect peoples opinions about the Vietnam war through the media?

I have a project to do for school. Its purpose is to show how the media serves as a 4th branch of government by regulation what the government can do.

I have to show this through the pentagon papers, and show how it affected people and the government.

Also through pictures, political cartoons and videos if possible. Ive been researching but its been difficult to find stuff like that.
Oops i meant: by regulating*

The resulting public uproar led to a major legal victory for press freedom when the Supreme Court upheld the right of newspapers to publish the papers. The upcoming release of the entire papers will be the complete study, unlike the version leaked by former Defense Department special assistant Daniel Ellsberg. What the Pentagon Papers did is give the public more courage about its convictions. Long before 1971 the public had figured out that the Vietnam War was a mess and the government was lying . The Pentagon Papers offered irrefutable proof of that, however, and shattered the government?s ability to claim that it knew all kinds of secret information that put the war in a different light than skeptics believed.

Check out Daniel Ellsbergs wiki page,lots of interesting points there plus two very significant quotes.
Also check out the Pentagon Papers in comparison to Wikileaks.There are numerous discussions on the net about it.
for cartoons try looking through paper archives of the time.

Very few people ever read the collection of documents known as the ?Pentagon Papers.? While versions of them were released by both the NY Times and the government, they are dry, obtuse, bureaucratic pieces of intellectual quicksand. Almost impossible to wade through. What the public read in the NY Times version was the commentary on the documents by biased, left-wing reporters who had an antiwar agenda and who ?interpreted? the documents with a strong anti-American slant. If you can isolate the actual documents from the commentary you will find they do not actually say what we have been told all these years. They show understandable progression of events and reaction to those events that led the United States deeper and deeper into the counter-insurgency that grew into the Vietnam War. They are not the incitement of late 50s and early 60s foreign policy we have been told they were.

So, how did it affect people and the government? The antiwar movement jumped on it like it was some kind of smoking gun that proved their point, which it didn?t (see above). Nixon?s administration went on with their program of Vietnamization and pulling American combat troops out of South Vietnam as quickly as they could. They more or less ignored it except to oppose the unauthorized release of classified documents, which?thankfully?didn?t disclose any operational data that might have jepodised American lives (and would have been published by the antiwar?pro-Communist victory?movement even if they had). In the 1972 election the voters rejected the antiwar dog and pony show surrounding the documents, just like they ignored the one surrounding Watergate, and reelected Richard Nixon by the largest landslide in America history up to that point.

Revisionist historians today try and tell you it was a turning point in the Vietnam War and some kind of great victory for the freedom of the press. BS?.!!!! It was proof positive the antiwar establishment and the left-wing media?s agenda was a Communist victory, not peace (with honor or any other way) and that they had a total disregard for the safety of the American servicemen fighting in SEA (or any other place in the Cold War at large).