Defined:
The Five o'clock Follies is a derogatory term from the Vietnam War for the daily official military press briefings held for reporters in Saigon.
The "Five o'clock Follies," became the baseline reporting on the war. Military officials provided news releases and verbal accounts of battlefield and air activity. They became infamous for their rosy scenarios about the war ...
But the best reporters and news organizations only used these official pronouncements as an on-the-record, official version of events to compare with information from field reporters and other sources. They would take the official word, run it by soldiers actually fighting the war, and combine and contrast the official military view with what was really happening across Vietnam.
During the Gulf War, the military changed the time of the press briefings to disassociate themselves from the Vietnam era. So, during Desert Storm they were known as the "Four o'clock Follies."
Find it here ...
The Current Perspective:
In Vietnam, infamously, foreign journalists trudged through Saigon to attend daily US military briefings that were quickly dubbed 'Five O'Clock Follies.'
They are no longer at Five O'Clock. They are no longer military. And you don't even have to trudge.
The era of digital telecommunications has introduced: the Dial-a-Folly.
To get the US Embassy's daily take on Iraq, journalists in Baghdad can now pick up the phone and get briefed by conference call from an official a mile away across the River Tigris.
This means that a scribbler already sitting in the 'Red Zone' dials from Iraq back to the USA (it is a 001 number) to ask a civil servant sitting in the 'Green Zone' what he thinks is happening out in the 'Red Zone'.
More of that here ...
Ain't technology grand.
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