Funny you should ask.
I have right here in front of me Vol. 1 of The Library Of America's "Reporting Vietnam". Vol 1 is a compilation of reporting from 1959 to 1969, and includes all the usual suspects: Karnow, Sheehan, Halberstam, Alsop, Tom Wolfe, Schell, Arnett, and Cronkite.
For the most part and right up until 1967/68 the reporting is factual, incisive, interesting, like the good embed stuff we sometimes see from Iraq.
Beginning about 1967/68 it becomes increasingly critical, but not in the cheap, seditious, and dishonest manner that see from Iraq these days. For the most part the Vietnam reporters are quite up front that they are turning against the war in VN. And they explain why. They don't try to convince anyone that they're being "objective". They describe their experiences and their prejudices.
A lot of these guys went to VN in support of the war, and several were holdouts for a very long time, e.g., surprisingly David Halberstam was a hawk who stayed a hawk long after many other reporters had turned.
The difference that I can see ios that most of the VN reporters were at least willing to be loyal to America from the beginning, whereas most of the reporters in Iraq are both against America and extremely dishonest from the get go.
Thank you. Interesting.
Thats the bottom line, at least they were loyal to America before, well put, and may I add loyal to our troops.
1968 was the date the Cultural Revolution began. Americans are most familiar with Woodstock, but there were similar movements in Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan. There were student riots in Paris that year. Charles de Gaulle fled to his home in the country at their height, because he didn't know how to deal with them. In Germany you had the rise of the Bader Meinhoff gang. In Italy there were similar terrorist groups.
Vietnam was the peg on which much of this revolutionary fervor hung. But to some degree it was just an excuse for something that was ripe to happen anyway. The Cultural Revolution was the logical outgrowth of late, decadent modernism, with it growing realization that the Age of Reason was not all that rational after all and that "progress" had led to Stalin, Hitler, and two world wars.
Later, Vietnam was blamed on Nixon, but it was Lyndon Johnson who presided over the turning point. No doubt one reason reporters turned against the war was their perception that Johnson had no intention of winning it. He micromanaged and tied the military's hands. The rot came from the head down.
Maybe that's why today's reporters are so obsessed with attacking the leadership. But the truth is that Bush has been an excellent leader. Cheney as been an excellent leader. Rumsfeld has been an excellent leader. Unlike Johnson they have been determined to do things right and to win. The Vietnam generation of reporters went overboard in the end, but they had genuine issues to object to. The Iraq generation of reporters have nothing but bad faith.