Who Were the Saigon Correspondents and Does It Matter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Who were the Saigon correspondents? Until now, everyone has had their own opinion, and much has depended upon each individual’s view of the Vietnam War. The former U.S. commander in South Vietnam and the subject of much criticism in the press of that day, General William C. Westmoreland, has had little good to say about them. “Fifty-one percent were under twenty-nine,” he asserted in 1972. “For the most part, they had little or no experience as war correspondents.” Peter Braestrup, a former bureau chief for the Washington Post in Saigon, disagreed with Westmoreland, but he had his own point of view. According to him, many so-called war correspondents in South Vietnam were anything but reporters. Instead, a high percentage of them were messengers, translators, technicians and cameramen, and back up staff members of all sorts, not journalists. Braestrup added that many legitimate reporters were on the scene for only short periods of time, often less than a week. This was just long enough to give their work at home some semblance of cachet but hardly enough for them to learn much about the war. Many other so called correspondents, Braestrup added, were not reporters at all but the spouses of correspondents. They took accreditation as journalists to gain access to the Saigon PX, which was open only to the military and to fully accredited members of the press. In the end, Braestrup said, fewer than one quarter of all the reporters present in South Vietnam were really working journalists.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".