Most reporting of Western wars and conflict — as with current reporting of Palestine and early reporting of Vietnam 50 years ago — is missing context and interpretation.

One of the most horrendous acts of the Vietnam War remembered today is the My Lai massacre on 16 March 1968. US soldiers slaughtered 504 unarmed civilians — mainly women and children, and old men —  in Son My village in Vietnam. Many women and girls were gang-raped and their mutilated bodies dumped on the roadside and in the rice fields.

The cover-up began immediately. Two days after the massacre, the US military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, published an article, “US troops Surround Reds, Kill 128”.

It later emerged that on the day during the massacre, US army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr landed between the soldiers and the villagers, and threatened to fire at the troops, wrote  journalist Christine Maguire.

“After taking off again, the pilot witnessed soldiers chasing civilians and landed the helicopter between them. He evacuated the villagers and returned to the scene to search for survivors. Thompson also told his superiors about the massacre, and the order was sent back to ‘knock off the killing’.

“Despite Hugh Thompson filing a report, a military investigation found there had been no massacre. Captain Ernest Medina, who had ordered the soldiers to be aggressive in their operations, told superiors the unit had killed lots of VC fighters_.”_

A 1970 army inquiry into the My Lai cover-up whitewashed higher command, stating “at every command level from company to division, actions were taken or omitted which together effectively concealed from higher headquarters the events which transpired".

The truth buried, but for the reporting

Covered up by the US authorities for a year, charges were finally laid against 26 soldiers. Only one, Lieutenant William Calley, who was secretly charged in September 1969 with murdering 109 civilians, was later sentenced to life. He only served three years under house arrest.

The massacre was first reported in early November 1969 by independent US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for a small wire agency, Dispatch News Service. Hersh is still writing investigative articles and his journalism  can be found here on his Substack page.

Military photographer Ron Haeberle’s  photos, taken in the midst of the slaughter, were published a week later in The Plain Dealer, a regional US newspaper.

In Australia, the Melbourne Sunday Observer published a story with several of the full-colour photographs on 14 December 1969. An extract of that edition appears below.

The massacre photographs were published in Australia by arrangement with the US Life Magazine and were later shown to federal parliamentarians in an attempt to change Australian Government support for the war.

The photographs were published during a period when newspapers in Australia rarely published pictures of dead bodies, and certainly not as victims of “atrocities” by “our side”.

The paper was subsequently prosecuted for “obscenity” for reporting the atrocity and the photos, but the charge was later dropped.

The original _Sunday Observer_ was a progressive newspaper, with a circulation of more than 100,000. It campaigned against Australian involvement as a US surrogate in the Vietnam War.

Michael Cannon was founding editor, and the present author, David Robie, was chief sub-editor at the time (and later the editor). The Sunday Observer was the springboard for the launching of Nation Review in 1970.

Journalism of accountability

The problem  in recent years is that the so-called journalism of activism is most often deployed as an extension of power of the political elites, whether in Canberra or Wellington. Or the ringmasters in Washington or Whitehall.

Activism and journalistic consensus often revolves around the parliamentary press gallery and political insiders. This was devastatingly exposed by journalist Nicky Hager in his book Dirty Politics.

What is so often missing in journalism of accountability is context and interpretation.

As Jake Lynch and Johan Galtung argue  in their book, Reporting Conflict: New Directions in Peace Journalism:

“Media and journalists should be well enough organised to stand up for democracy against censorship and, in spite of censorship, try to get the story nonetheless.

“They should give a contextual background to understand the conflict. They should report the truth and suffering from all sides.”

Excerpt from Melbourne’s  _Sunday Observer__, 14 December 1969:_

Bloodbath in Vietnam

My Lai was one of nine hamlets clustered near the village of Song My, a name sometimes used also for the hamlets. GIs called the area “Pinkville” because it was coloured rose on their military maps and because the area had long been known as Viet Cong territory.

The action at My Lai received only a passing mention at the weekly Saigon briefing in March of 1968. Elements of an American division had made contact with the enemy near Quang Ngai city and had killed 128 Viet Cong. There were a few rumours of civilian deaths, but when the US Army looked into them — a month after the incident — it found nothing to warrant disciplinary measures.

The matter might have ended there, except for a former GI, Ron Ridenhour, now a Californian university student. After hearing about My Lai from former comrades, he wrote letters to Congressmen warning that “something dark and bloody” had taken place.

Now an officer, Lieutenant William Calley, has been charged with murder of “an unknown number of Oriental human beings” at My Lai, and 24 other men of C Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry, are under investigation. The world is demanding to know what happened at My Lai, who ordered it, and whether or not US troops have committed similar acts in Vietnam.

Because of the court-martial, the Army will say little. The South Vietnamese Government, which has conducted its own investigation, says that My Lai was “an act of war” and that any talk of atrocities is just Viet Cong propaganda.

This is not true.

The pictures published in this newspaper by Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer who covered the massacre, and reports in the past three weeks confirm a story of indisputable horror – the deliberate slaughter of old men, women, children and babies.

Eyewitness reports indicate that the American troops encountered little — if any — hostile fire, found virtually no enemy soldiers in the village and suffered only one casualty – a self-inflicted wound. The people of My Lai were simply gunned down.

Ethical dilemmas of truthful reporting

Hersh’s investigation to gain access to Calley’s file, and to expose the truth about the My Lai massacre, involved making a decision on the ethical dilemmas involved.

Journalism educator Edmund Lambeth has written about the choices journalists face, in his  seminal book, Committed Journalism: An Ethic for the Profession.

“The My Lai massacre represented a frightful violation of the principle of humaneness.

“To tell as much of the truth as was then available about that violation, and to make sure at the same time that the accused Lieutenant William Calley would be treated justly, required extraordinary care by a journalist. More than a mere set of court-martial papers needed to be inspected. Calley needed to be found and interviewed.

“In acting on that judgment, journalist Seymour Hersh used many standard reportorial techniques, and several ingenious ones.

“Passive deception, allowing persons on the military base [Fort Benning] to make their own most natural inference as to his identity, could be defended so long as it did no avoidable harm — that is, so long as it did not risk injustice or unfairness to innocents caught up in Hersh’s quest for Calley.

“It can be argued that Hersh allowed his key source, Jerry, to make his own decision to obtain Calley’s file. But, in fact, Hersh appears to have actively created a situation in which Jerry, already a busted private, risked further penalty to himself unless he cooperated. Having made an authoritative entrance demanding Jerry’s presence, Hersh met with Jerry outside, ‘and told him what I wanted’.”

Publication of the My Lai massacre photos and critique by the Sunday Observer at the time shocked mainstream media in Australia, which was largely echoing the US warmongering line. The ethics and courage of reporting truth to power stood the test of time and showed this short-lived newspaper was on the right side of history.

Journalism of accountability — bringing truth, context and interpretation together — is largely missing in present reporting of Western wars. It is a vital element in empowering the global community to bring those wars to an end.

This is an edited version, originally published at _Café Pacific_ blog.

Republished from Declassified Australia, 5 May 2025