Thursday, August 5, 1965: CBS report on Cam Ne, South Vietnam

CBS airs Morley Safer's report on U.S. Marines setting fire to houses in Cam Ne, a village southwest of Da Nang Air Base in South Vietnam. Reaction ranges from unease to outrage (by viewers angry at CBS, as well as by President Johnson in a blistering phone call to CBS President Frank Stanton). The report is considered a milestone moment in media coverage of the Vietnam War.

     -- The incident at Cam Ne took place on August 3, while Safer's report aired on August 5. The story at top appeared August 3 in the Logansport (Indiana) Pharos-Tribune; the photo ran August 7 in The La Crosse (Wisconsin) Tribune.

* Watch the segment (CBS News): @

* Video interview with Safer (Archive of American Television, 2000): @

* Account from Safer (from "Reporting America at War," PBS, 2003): @
* "Marines Ordered to Stop Burning Viet Nam Villages" (Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1965): @

* "What Really Happened at Cam Ne" (www.historynet.com, 2006): @

* "When The World Began Watching" (The Alicia Patterson Foundation, 2011): @

* "The Power and The Profits: Part II" (David Halberstam, The Atlantic magazine, February 1976): @

* "The Powers That Be" (Halberstam, 1975): @

* Video interview with Halberstam (WGBH, 1979): @
* "The 6:00 Follies: Hegemony, Television News, and the War of Attrition" (Elizabeth J. Burnette, American Studies at the University of Virginia, 2005): @
* Excerpt from "The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam" (Daniel C. Hallin, 1986): @

* Excerpt from "The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination" (from chapter titled "Vietnam and the Press," Michael X. Delli Carpini; book edited by D. Michael Shafer, 1990): @
* Excerpt from "The Sixties: From Memory to History" (from chapter titled "And That's The Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News," Chester J. Pach Jr.; book edited by David Farber, 1994): @
* "Excerpt from "The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part IV" (William C. Gibbons, 1995): @

* Excerpt from "The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation" (Tom Engelhardt, 1995): @

* Excerpt from "Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America" (edited by Martin J. Manning and Clarence R. Wyatt, 2011): @ 

---