Television Wars

Michael Maclear, the dogged foreign correspondent whose pioneering television news reports and documentaries brought the Vietnam War into homes around the world in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, has just published a memoir. Guerrilla Nation: My Wars In and Out of Vietnam feels like an exorcism of long-held resentments against a Canadian news industry management structure that was more interested in ratings and appeasing the American administration in Washington than in broadcasting the truth about an immoral, failing, futile war. Perhaps it is because Maclear—who in the last decade has been honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation and an Outstanding Achievement Award from Hot Docs, the Canadian Documentary Film Festival, as well as membership in the Order of Canada—is now in his eighties, that his account is so refreshingly un-mealy-mouthed. A younger journalist at the ascendancy of his or her career might be worried about...