The Press at War

Excerpt’s from James Q Wilson’s op-ed, “The Press at War,” in today's WSJ:

Thankfully, though, the press did not cover World War II the way it covered Vietnam and has covered Iraq. What caused this profound change?

Like many liberals and conservatives, I believe that our Vietnam experience created new media attitudes that have continued down to the present.

During that war, some reporters began their coverage supportive of the struggle, but that view did not last long. Many people will recall the CBS television program, narrated by Morley Safer, about U.S. Marines using cigarette lighters to torch huts in Cam Ne in 1965. Many will remember the picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured Viet Cong through the head. Hardly anyone can forget the My Lai story that ran for about a year after a journalist reported that American troops had killed many residents of that village.

Undoubtedly, similar events occurred in World War II, but the press didn't cover them. In Vietnam, however, key reporters thought that the Cam Ne story was splendid. David Halberstam said that it "legitimized pessimistic reporting" and would show that "there was something terribly wrong going on out there." The film, he wrote, shattered American "innocence" and raised questions about "who we were."

The changes came to a head in January 1968, when Communist forces during the Tet holiday launched a major attack on South Vietnamese cities. According to virtually every competent observer, these forces met a sharp defeat, but American press accounts described Tet instead as a major communist victory.

Washington Post reporter Peter Braestrup later published a book in which he explained the failure of the press to report the Tet offensive accurately. His summary: "Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality."

Even as the facts became clearer, the press did not correct its false report that the North Vietnamese had won.

When NBC News producer Robert Northshield was asked at the end of 1968 whether the network should put on a news show indicating that American and South Vietnamese troops had won, he rejected the idea, because Tet was already "established in the public's mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat."

A blog friend who read Wilson’s column emailed:

”Tet was already established in the public's mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat.”

Just substitute Iraq

From reading mil blogs quoting troops in Iraq and from conversations I’ve had with troops who’ve returned from there, I’ve become convinced that most of MSM are giving us a replay of their “America’s losing” Vietnam-era kind of “reporting.”

What do you think?

Hat tip: Mike Williams.