american government and military had fully taken on board the simplify narrative that the media lost them the vietnam war. it create a new body the - department news media pool - that was put in place to effectively control and manage the news media's access to the battlefield. structurally,this involved organizing reporters into official pools with military escorts,giving official news briefings about military operation, restricting the travel and movement of journalists,and subjecting all copy written by journalist to a formal security review(tumber and palmer,2004:3). unsurprisingly, this situation very unpopular with the news media who argued that they could not do their jobs properly -as watch dogs-if they were not given direct access to the battlefield. as war correspondent p.j.o ' rourke explained at the time