"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies" - Winston Churchill. Ideally, the media has a responsibility of making sure that it doesn't happen. The media plays a crucial role in covering the war in the most objective, bias-free and truthful manner, even if negative stories have to be reported. The media also plays the role of a "watchdog" in observing the government closely and reporting their actions. In this essay, I shall compare the media coverage between the Vietnam War and Gulf War II. There are four areas to cover, which are the freedom of correspondents, embedding, the reliability and quality of the coverage.

In the Vietnam War, the U.S. government gave war correspondents great freedom to move freely in combat zones, to report whatever they wanted and they didn't require any military vetting (Evans 2003). This freedom resulted...