(Pictured above: Safer reporting from inside of Vietnam during the famous Cam Ne incident.)

Morley Safer was born in 1931, in Toronto, Canada. He attended the University of Western Ontario for a short time before getting his first gig in 1951 at the age of 20 with the Sentinel-Review in Woodstock, Ontario (Safer 2017).

He soon moved to the Canadian Broadcasting Company and covered the Suez Crisis in November of 1956, and was the only Western correspondent in East Berlin when construction of the Berlin Wall began in August 1961 (Safer 2017).

He then moved to CBS in 1964 and was quickly dispatched to Saigon, South Vietnam to help establish the network’s ability to cover the war. In 1965 Safer filed the infamous Cam Ne report, a piece of journalism so incendiary it may have been the lynch pin for American public sentiment turning against the war. Rarely does a single piece of journalism prompt  the president of the United States to call the president of CBS and tell him that, “You shat on the American flag (Safer 2017).”

The Cam Ne report is actually the piece of reporting that made Safer my go-to pick for this position. It was so real, and so insanely out of character for how the average American felt that their G.I.’s should be acting on foreign soil, that it shocked America into paying attention. It was the journalistic equivalent of throwing a bucket of cold water onto a sleeping person.

However, it wasn’t just the report that made Safer my pick, but the manner in which he defended it.

Safer recalled the reactions to his report in an oral history provided by PBS. “[Officials claimed] I had gone on a practice operation in a model village — a village the Marines had built to train guys how to move into a village. Or the whole thing was a kind of ‘Potemkin’ story that I had concocted. There are still people who believe that (Safer 2017).”

Later in the piece, Safer provides some insight as to the effect his Cam Ne report had on the relationship between the press and the military. “Of course, this wouldn’t have happened in World War II, or if it had happened, it wouldn’t have been photographed. Or had it been photographed, the photographs would have been censored. I think what makes the story most significant was that it was happening on television, uncensored, either in picture or commentary. There was a realization — perhaps least of all by the press, but certainly by the military and maybe by the public — that the rules have all changed. It’s perhaps another reason why the military did not want people covering the Gulf War (Safer 2017).”

Safer, Morley. 2017. “Reporting America At War . Morley Safer . The Burning Of Cam Ne | PBS”. Pbs.Org. http://www.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/reporters/safer/camne.html.