When you're on the news, they think you really know

Aberdeen American News ^ | June 13, 2003 | Art Marmorstein

[ancientart]

On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese military and its Viet Cong allies launched their Tet offensive, a massive military assault on South Vietnam.

They met with some initial successes, but, in short order, the American and South Vietnamese forces were able to turn back the assault. Of the 80,000 communist troops committed to the attack, at least 45,000 were killed. The North Vietnamese were so shaken that, for the first time since the war had begun, they agreed to go to Paris for peace talks.

Astonishingly, within a few weeks of the Tet offensive, President Johnson's approval rating dropped from 40 percent to 22 percent and, as one U.S. history text notes, "victory seemed as distant as ever."

Now how could this be? How could victory seem as distant as ever after a major victory in which we decimated the enemy while suffering only relatively minor losses of our own?

The reason is that the American media chose to report Tet, not as an American military victory (which all military historians agree that it was), but as a loss or (at best) a stalemate.

Walter Cronkite pronounced the war an unwinnable quagmire. Other media figures followed up with a blitz of defeatist, anti-war, pro-Viet Cong propaganda. Americans saw over and over again the picture of a Viet Cong officer executed by a South Vietnamese general with a shot to the head. Fair enough: but where were the images of the thousands of Vietnamese tortured to death by the VC? Where were the images of the nearly 3,000 mutilated corpses of doctors, teachers and political leaders discovered when we retook Hue? And were we ever told that the executed Viet Cong officer had murdered a Saigon police officer and his entire family? Kind of an important detail, yes?

Unfortunately, the elite media's bias against the American military has only grown since the Vietnam era. In the first Gulf War, in Afghanistan and during Operation Enduring Freedom, national news coverage was skeptical from the outset, defeatist and gloomy during the war, and hesitant to accept the idea of American victory.

Now why is so much of the American media so ready to magnify every negative and to hedge every victory with doubts? Part of the problem is that our elite reporters are almost all infected with a particularly severe case of professorial disease.

Billie, the Vegas bimbo in "Born Yesterday," comments on a moment when everyone at a Washington party looked at her as if she really knew what she was talking about. "I liked it," she says. Well, professors and media pundits get this pleasure all the time. People look at us as if we really know what we're talking about - and we like it. We get addicted to it. And we begin to think that we really are infallible experts on - well, on virtually everything.

Unfortunately, this inflated view of our own opinions often blinds us to the truth. Iraqis rejoicing in the streets after Hussein's fall? If we said it wasn't going to happen, it didn't. It wasn't real. And if evidence piles up showing that Saddam Hussein was one of the cruelest, bloodiest tyrants in history and that removing him was absolutely the right thing to do? Just repeat the mantra again and again: "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?"

It would be refreshing to hear a different tune: "We were wrong. Bush was right. The 70 percent of Americans who supported him were wiser than we were."

That's not going to happen. Being a media pundit, like holding a Ph.D., means never having to say you're sorry.

[moneyrunner]

bttt

[martin_fierro]

. When you're on the news, they think you really know

I can honestly say that Eleanor Clift has never given me the impression that she had Clue One.

[Freedom4US]

And were we ever told that the executed Viet Cong officer had murdered a Saigon police officer and his entire family? Kind of an important detail, yes?

Not until now, no. Thanks! That image has been burned into my brain since the 70's, thanks to LIFE magazine, I guess.

[monocle]

This is why celebrities spouting about matters on which they have, at best, nodding acquaintance is so dangerous whether they be liberal or conservative.

[Mr. K]

The most brilliant thing W did was to 'embed' reporters with the military. With soldiers saving their butt they were less likely to lie, and with eyewitness to the front lines they did not have to make up (biased) stories.

Some of them were scared to death and finally realized what war means.

And the best thing is they are still so proud of themselves they don't even realize W trumped them (again)