The New Yorker:

Fifty years after its horrors, we know that the press helped to turn public opinion against the conflict. That’s because war is hell, and hell is photogenic.

By Louis Menand

It could once have been said that the Vietnam War was the most photographed war in history, but you can’t say that anymore, because today everybody has a camera. Everything, it seems, is photographed by someone. But, in 1965, the year the United States put bombers in the air and boots on the ground in Vietnam, pretty much the only people who carried cameras were professional photographers and tourists. And there were not a lot of tourists in Vietnam after 1965.
But there were a lot of professional photographers. Some six hundred of them travelled to Southeast Asia during the war, and the reason is that the U.S. military basically issued the press an open invitation to the conflict. This was far from the stupidest decision the United States made in Vietnam, but it was one more symptom of the general folly of American overconfidence.

American officials may have imagined that the images and stories that made their way out to the world through the media would be heroic, but, of course, the opposite was the case. War is not about blowing up buildings, which is the image of warfare we mainly see today. War is about killing human beings. That is literally the point. And so, allowed into the war zone, reporters and photographers witnessed the slaughter of civilians and the brutalization of prisoners, the burning of villages and the deaths of soldiers, and they brought all of that into people’s homes. The press helped to turn public opinion against the war, not because the press was antiwar or even had a politics but because war is hell, and hell is photogenic.

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