ere, during the 1960s, fairly supportive of the American effort. The government decided, from the outset, that general censorship would not be imposed on the press. But, there was a great deal of fear in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that some young reporters could not be controlled. The U.S. Information Agency, for example, instructed its Saigon mission to "steer the news media away from events that [were] 'likely to result in undesirable stories.'" This proved to be a reasonable fear, as a chronic credibility gap developed between Washington's perception of the war, based on bad intelligence and the military's manipulation of the facts, and what the reporters observed, or were told by Army field advisers "who mocked official optimism and supplied contrary facts for publication." For the most part, however, the American media relayed the official information "virtually unchanged and unchallenged." Reporters' "sour, recurring skepticism toward official pronouncements" only occasionally made its way into press reports, and, accordin
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