For those francophone readers who have an hour and a half to spare watching a tiny screen (!) - and can do so in the next 7 days before it disappears - I recommend "Vietnam, la trahison des medias" by documentary director Patrick Barberis. Actually, much of the film is in English with French subtitles, since it features interviews with a number of American war correspondents (McClatchy Vietnam reporter Joe Galloway among them) and retired Army and Marine officers.
The documentary shows many familiar images from the war, and concentrates on the use of the media in war. Use, as in "achieving your objectives," which the North Vietnamese were particularly apt at doing. The footage from the war is mostly in and around the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive. For French viewers, American references to Khe Sanh as "more Verdun than Dien Bien Phu" are striking. As in deliberate, Pyhrric bloodletting to "bleed the enemy dry," as opposed to an ingenious trap - that later becomes a trap for the trappers.
I know little about Barberis, except that he appeared at the Chicago International Documentary Festival a few years ago, where the Festival blurb says: "Patrick Barberis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker who has made many works dealing with the history of Communism and Utopian movements." In "Vietnam, la trahison des medias," he brings us up to date: the latter part of the film shows how the US military evolved in its attitude toward the press.
From almost total, unfettered access to the battlefield during Vietnam (the film shows how the Tet attacks on Saigon and the American Embassy brought the war to those journalists who hadn't jumped on helicopters with the troops in the field), the Army had, by Desert Storm, adopted strict press rules limiting access. By the time of the Bush invasion of Iraq in March 2003, protests from the press - and good PsyOps work from the "information warfare" people - gave the media a golden opportunity for a look at the action under optimum (for the military) circumstances - embedding! We even see that Lyndon Johnson had his "Mission Accomplished" moment, pinning a medal on General William Westmoreland, who appears to have been pretty clueless in his media relations.
As someone who came of political age watching Walter Cronkite and other TV news legends report on, and turn against, the Vietnam War, watching this documentary hits home just how much the Iraq War is kept away from American TV audiences. Vietnam won the Vietnam War, but the US military learned at least one lesson: controlling media access may not win you a war, but it might help you from losing the support of the American people. Though with Iraq, the policy of "what Iraq War?" does not appear to have earned the war, or those who masterminded it, any lasting support from the citizenry.
Here is the link to ARTE+7: you only have seven days to catch this online. There's no indication of if or when the documentary will be shown on US TV.