Film screening of Dateline – Saigon, followed by Q&A with Thomas D. Herman, film director; Bob Schieffer, Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow, former CBS News anchor and host of “Face the Nation”, and first reporter from a Texas newspaper to visit Vietnam; and Tom Patterson, Acting Director of the Shorenstein Center and a Vietnam Veteran.

• 5:30 p.m. – informal reception in Fisher Family Rotunda, Ground Floor, Taubman Building
• 6:00 p.m. – film screening in Wiener Auditorium, Ground Floor, Taubman Building

Dateline – Saigon is a documentary film directed by Thomas D. Herman and narrated by Sam Waterston. The film profiles five Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – The New York Times’s David Halberstam; The Associated Press’s Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and the legendary photojournalist Horst Faas; and United Press International’s Neil Sheehan. With all the high-stakes drama of All the President’s Men, the film chronicles their controversial and groundbreaking reporting during the early years of the Vietnam War as President Kennedy is secretly committing US troops to what is dismissed by some as a “nice little war in a land of tigers and elephants.” Five young reporters took on a superpower – and who won?

Dateline – Saigon illuminates the difficulties of reporting war by focusing on America’s most important and controversial case study: Vietnam, the war that established many of the ground rules for coverage of wars that followed and ignited an antagonism between the media and the military that unfortunately endures. The parallels to the challenges journalists face in reporting today’s conflicts – and the consequences of not getting the story out – will become disturbingly obvious to the viewer.