From Vietnam to Trump: The Evolution of Controlling the Story

A long read on press access, propaganda, and why this moment feels different - and more desperate than ever

Fair Warnings:

1. This is a particularly long piece that will go well with a cup of coffee and maybe a ginger hobnob.

2. This piece is particularly American, but not exclusively so - because sadly we live in a world where the things being tested across the Atlantic have a nasty habit of travelling quietly and efficiently to our shores.

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I need to start this one off with an apology - I have been far more quiet than I intended to be over the past week, largely down to the fact that, much like Orangina in the White House, I may have miscalculated my own new adventure.

The adventure in question is, of course, my new job outside of the Health Service.

Unlike General Tango, my side is actually not going badly at all, which is far more than can be said about his. Because it has been going badly - seriously so, and it’s become ever more apparent in not only his increased pleas to allies he’s spent the past 14 months slagging off, but also the incredible attempts at his administration to actively hobble reporting about what is now a full-scale regional conflict in the Arab world.

Now, before I get too self-righteous about things, a quick little caveat.

I am, for better or worse, now writing to just over 7,200 people. People who have decided that my thoughts on geopolitics, media, the appropriate number of houseplants¹ and just the general, slow collapse into dystopia we’re currently experiencing. It is, of course, flattering while being mildly alarming, and places me - however reluctantly - right into the broader ecosystem of people I will today be criticising. People whose words travel further than their immediate living room.

I do hate calling what I do “influence”, mostly because it makes me sound like I should be holding a ring-light and recommending a collagen supplements But fine. We are where we are.

All of these things make what I’m about to write about slightly awkward - because the systems that I’m about to criticise are not nebulous or far away, they’re the same systems I now operate within, just at very different scale, and with far more serious consequence.

The first place I want to throw my eyeline at today is the US - the place where the Orange Geriatric Gameshow host’s administration has not only decided that this year is the year they finally launch the assault on Iran they’ve all been gagging for, but also where their overt influence on the media will become even more blatant than it has been to date.

That the curation of public opinion is now not only necessary for people to forget that they have a conflicted felon at the helm, but to do that even more important thing of completely sanding down the sharp edges of war.

If you’ve missed it, Brendan Carr, on the 14th of March, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission², issued what I can only really describe as a regulatory eyebrow raise with a loaded gun behind it. American broadcasters - the likes of ABC, NBC, CBS - were all emphatically warned about “news distortion” and gently reminded that their licence renewals were, after all, coming up soon.

Now, as far as my understanding goes, the FCC isn’t really meant to function as a tool for the punishment of editorial decisions - the “public interest” standard isn’t supposed to mean “whatever the administration finds most convenient this week.”

That, however, is almost beside the point - because the goal with Carr’s threats isn’t to revoke licences. It’s to introduce hesitation. To make editors and publishers and producers and anchors all pause before they say something that might make life… uncomfortable for them.

This threat is implicitly made to introduce just enough uncertainty into decisions that coverage begins to self-regulate before there has to be any sort of explicit demand.

Which brings me onto Pete Hegseth - the result of what happens when you grant sentience and a drinking problem to Podcast Sponsored Protein Powder. I cannot understate just how profoundly unserious this man is, and yet, even in his utter incompetence, he has somehow managed to turn the Pentagon, probably one of the most important institutions globally in terms of the decisions made there, into something that feels like a curated content factory.

There is a timeline to this that’s pretty important, and shows a distinct level of planning and foresight that I presume is not from the ex-Saturday morning Fox News show host, which indicates that this was not reactive, but built.

Last year in October, journalists were asked to sign agreements to not publish any “non-authorised” information. This being a military body, you might think this is anything classified or sensitive, like operational detail, but no - it’s anything not cleared by the government.

In a rare show of unity, nearly every major outlet refused outright, and journalists with decades of experience walked away in the face of being turned into glorified stenographers.

The only network to agree? One America News³.

By the time the “excursion” into Iran was in full swing earlier this month, the consequences of that decision was fully in place. Photographers from the AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, Getty, AFP and the New York Times were all banned from briefings. There are, as it stands, no embedded journalists - not one - accompanying any of the active forces.

Briefings are currently being delivered almost exclusively by Hegseth, General Dan Cain, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and CENTCOM leadership - a fully closed loop creating a single, controlled narrative pipeline. Zero independent visual record and barely any proximity to this growing fiery tip of a situation.

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

That doesn’t mean, however, that briefings are completely unattended - no, no. Into the vacuum have stepped the replacements - podcasters. Bloggers. Commentators. People like… Well, me.

Now, forgive me for a brief sidetrack and indulge me while I do a brief thought experiment. Imagine me, The Bear, in that room. Not as a war correspondent or defence analyst (I am patently neither). Just as a guy who has amassed a certain type of follower.

All of a sardine, I find myself in the Pentagon, being briefed on military operations in the Arab world.

I will, inevitably, not understand half the acronyms. I will absolutely nod too much. I would likely write down things I don’t fully understand before spending the next several hours in a Google/Wikipedia/Youtube vortex trying to educate myself, and likely at some point ask a question that begins with “Sorry, this might be a stupid question, but…”

Which in that room would be both accurate and professionally fatal.

The right thing to do would be to politely but firmly escort me out of the room. Not because I’m being malicious - but because I’m not equipped. I do not have the skills, expertise, knowledge or any sort of know how to understand and interpret what is being told to me nor have the ability to turn it into something meaningful.

The people that are currently replacing the likes of Eric Schmitt, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay simply are not equipped for a situation like this. They’re great at blowing smoke up Hegseth’s arse and making him feel like the man he so desperately believes he is, but have zero to no skill to scrutinise the situation with the gravitas it deserves.

Which is, to my mind the point. They’re not there to interrogate - they’re there purely to receive. To transmit. To align.

Historically, of course, this is nothing new - it’s just been updated to fit the zeitgeist of our time.

During the Vietnam War, the US initially allowed relatively open press access. Journalists reported freely, filmed freely, and sent back images that fundamentally shifted public opinion.

The Burning of Cam Ne, as reported by Morley Safer and the Tet Offensive with its photograph by Eddie Adams of the execution of a Viet Cong officer by a South Vietnamese general, and Walter Cronkite’s reporting in particular, exposed the gap between official optimism and reality on the ground.

The result? A generation of policymakers who became deeply paranoid and wary of uncontrolled reporting, and by the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the system had changed. Press pools. Controlled access. Carefully managed briefings. The war was presented as clean, precise, almost clinical.

By Iraq in 2003, embedding journalists was introduced - a compromise. Access, but structured. Proximity, but within boundaries.

What we are seeing now is something else again.

While it all boils down to a government wanting us to see one thing and one thing alone, what is notable with the current practice the brazenness and the staggering lack of subtlety.

The toxic combination of regulatory threat, access restriction, corporate pressure and public vilification that have become hallmarks of Trump 2.0 all being deployed at once. It’s gone so well beyond the traditional massaging and sanitising truth in war, and has moved into overt control of information and the active deligitimisation of any journalist who dares to challenge the “official” version of events.

The administration in the past two weeks launched attacks on publications and broadcasters, with CNN in particular taking flack, being accused by the White House of being “the murderous Iranian Regime’s version of Pravda” for airing four minutes of the new Iranian Supreme Leader’s first address and Erin Burnett interviewing a former Iranian negotiator being dismissed as “regurgitating quotes and unverified information from Iranian terrorists” by Steven Cheung.

This has quite extraordinarily led to Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN having to issue a series of unusually direct public defences.

"Politicians have a clear motive to assert that journalism questioning their decisions is false. Our sole objective at CNN is to convey the truth to our audience, and no degree of political threats or insults will alter that."

Any reporting now on very pertinent events like the spectacular failure of planning around the potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz is met with not only commentary on Fox, but official White House Press Releases that read like they’ve been written by a particularly aggrieved manospherian.

All of this is happening while the underlying facts become harder to contain, with at least 13 US service members killed, the Strait of Hormuz mentioned above under threat, oil prices rising, and the war itself looking far less neat than initially suggested - this is not even mentioning the death of 168 people including over a hundred children in what appears to be a deadly cock up by the US itself.

It all feels pretty hopeless, doesn’t it?

I am, however, pleased to say that it isn’t - though the hope comes from a very odd and potentially uncomfortable place: Trump’s very own cheerleading squad turned loudest critics.

Tucker Carlson, one of the most unpleasant and possibly deluded personalities to be spawned from the bowels of Fox News personally visited the White House to try to dissuade Trump from launching the strikes. He failed, and he’s now aligned with Steve Bannon in open opposition to the war.

Marjorie “Space Lasers” Taylor Greene accused the administration of putting “Israel first” rather than “America First.” Megyn Kelly, stated that “no one should have to die for a foreign country… US service members died for Iran or Israel.”

Trump’s response? Dismissive:

“MAGA is Trump. MAGA is not the other two.”

Which is exactly the sort of thing you say when you’re trying to hold something together that’s actively tearing apart at its red-white-and-blue seams.

This fracture in the MAGA media-sphere is something that I do think should give us pause. Not comfort or reassurance of any sort, but pause. The main driver of Trump’s second time in office has been displays of strength - and this frantic attempt by the administration to shape, smooth, threaten and suppress the story is diametrically opposed to what actual strength looks like.

Governments that are confident and assured in their decisions don’t need to lean on regulators to “remind” broadcasters how to behave, nor do they need to lock journalists out of the room or replace scrutiny with sycophancy. They don’t need to openly berate networks or journalists for reporting. They don’t need to shout quite this loudly.

We are at the point now where the louder and more blatant the narrative control becomes, the more it tells us just how unstable the foundations are becoming.

And that’s maybe where another sliver of optimism comes in for me - because a system that has to work this hard to control reality is by its very definition struggling to contain it.

The cracks are there, and they’re widening by the day - every time a press release goes out to discredit, every time another fracture happens across the world of MAGA, every time we see the lengths that Hegseth and Co go to polish their own image is another nail in the coffin of the authoritarian monster that came into being in 2016.

If there is anything that’s going to bring down Trump and the particular brand of performative, blustering dictatorialism that has grown up around him, it won’t be a single scandal or a perfectly crafted rebuttal. It will be this.

The slow, grinding exposure of a system so insecure in its own narrative that it cannot stop trying to control it, and the moment enough people realise that - really realise it - is the moment the whole thing starts to look a lot less like strength, and a lot more like exactly what it is:

An utterly failed experiment.

1. There are now around 27 in my small two bedroom apartment. Perfectly appropriate.

2. Think OfCom, but more… American.

3. The name really does say it all.