I don’t know what news to which you were exposed, but the My Lai incident didn’t come to public knowledge until a year and half (November, 1969) after Cronkite’s lies and the rest of the press’s echoeing chorus. In the northeast editorial pages were filled with experts espousing how the Dominoe Effect didn’t hold water and that we were wasting lives because of it (ask Cambodia, Laos, and Burma that worked out for them). Yes, we wasted lives but it was because we let politicians and journalists dictate ROE.
The news papers and networks gave huge coverage to anti-war protests starting in 1965 (bringing the cameras in close to make it look like even small gatherings were immense) giving little coverage to the successes in VietNam (yes, there were some).
The powers behind the news were uniformly run by companies that were pro-Vietnam War. The protests were covered and they were anything but very small, other than in their infancy.
The protests took a while to get started precisely because the press was pro-Vietnam War. The American people were presented zero coverage that was anti-war for a long time before negative coverage started slipping through.
Here is Newsweek’s coverage: http://clickamericana.com/eras/1960s/the-vietnam-war-as-seen-on-newsweek-magazine-covers-1965-1973
During a bombing halt in September 1967, Harrison E. Salisbury of the New York Times became the first correspondent from a major U.S. newspaper to go to North Vietnam.
His reporting of the bombing damage to civilian targets forced the Pentagon to admit that accidents and “collateral damage” had occurred during the bombing campaign.
For his effort, Salisbury received heavy condemnation and criticism from his peers, the administration, and the Pentagon.