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Vietnam- PBS
PBS ^ | 9-28-17

Posted on 09/28/2017 8:09:56 PM PDT by Sleeping Freeper

Finished showing tonight. Interested in your thoughts.


TOPICS: Military/Veterans
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To: edzo4
It was interesting to see the leftist media up to thier old tricks and thier smarmy behaviour. I noticed protestors with signs replacing the X in Nixon with a swastika and a flag with swastikas instead of stars. I wonder how it would have played out if there was a right wing media like there is now to counter Cronkite saying it was lost. And I took away that the Communists kept thier promises to thier allies and we did not.

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, in which America was the victor in military battles, is perhaps the most manifest modern example of how propaganda affected the outcome of a war, with much of the mainstream media being an all too willing instrument of such, especially CBS News with Walter Cronkite.

In an exchange during one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. told his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."[28]

The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[29] British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,

For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondent's own side.[30]

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,

What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."[31] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[32]

CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was that he had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group.[33] Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called "the living room war."

The single most explicit example of such biased reporting is typically seen to be the portrayal of the Tet offensive, as mentioned above, in which Western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to Cronkite's biased reporting, FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Yahoo! News offer evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[34] http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_bias#Vietnam_War

41 posted on 09/29/2017 6:37:17 AM PDT by daniel1212 (rust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + folllow Him)
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To: Sleeping Freeper

Lived it. Don’t want to watch it.


42 posted on 09/29/2017 8:29:28 AM PDT by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped)
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To: Sleeping Freeper
bit left leaning

LOL, it was on its side.

43 posted on 09/29/2017 9:07:29 AM PDT by xone
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To: Ben Ficklin

I don’t have a PBS passport. After 9-24 the rest of the episodes were available at the PBS web site. at least on my computer. i finished the series tuesday night.


44 posted on 09/29/2017 9:48:05 AM PDT by morphing libertarian (Imprison Obama, Clintons, Holder, lynch now.)
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To: clintonh8r
I could hardly relate to the veterans they interviewed. They all seemed to be filled with regret, which I never have been

I make it a point to never watch PBS propaganda documentaries. The lefts view that US troops should have guilt for their service in RVN has been in existence since troops started arriving back from that war. This series is the typical US military bad, communism good pablum the commie left pushes. Like you, I have absolutely no regret for offing as many commies I could in combat either then or today.
45 posted on 09/29/2017 9:58:04 AM PDT by redcatcherb412
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To: morphing libertarian
I don't have the dates set in my mind, but am certain of the fact that the second day of viewing on YouTube everything had been deleted.

That same day I tried to stream it at PBS and they said it was available only to those with passport.

Yesterday, on YouTube, I stumbled upon the prequel to sequel of BBC's Blue Planet.

Blue Planet 2

46 posted on 09/29/2017 11:25:41 AM PDT by Ben Ficklin
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To: Ben Ficklin

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/

I don’t have a PBS passport. Typically PBS leaves a show up for 30 days and they sell it as aDVD or sell to a streaming service.

This is the link I sued with no passport nothing.


47 posted on 09/29/2017 11:42:43 AM PDT by morphing libertarian (Imprison Obama, Clintons, Holder, lynch now.)
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