Posted on 09/19/2006 10:04:04 PM PDT by WayneLusvardi
How Journalistic Falsehoods Set In Motion the Eventual "Loss" of the Vietnam War
An excerpt from Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).
"In 1963, the American journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan played pivotal roles in turning influential Americans and South Vietnamese against the Diem regime. Their reporting on military events was inaccurate at times, and it regularly overemphasized the South Vietnamese government's shortcomings. Colonel John Paul Vann, a U.S. Army adviser and the central figure in Sheehan's book A Bright Shining Lie, was more dishonest in dealing with the press than Sheehan ever acknowledged. Vann fed the journalists an extremely misleading version of the Battle of Ap Bac, one that the journalists transformed into the accepted version of the battle. Halberstam and Sheehan presented grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of which they unwittingly received from secret Communist agents. Ignorant of cultural differences between the United States and Vietnam, they criticized the Diem government for refusing to act like an American government when, in fact, Diem's political methods were far more effective than American methods in treating South Vietnam's problems. South Vietnam's elites, who regularly read Vietnamese translations of American press articles, viewed the New York Times and other U.S. newspapers as mouthpieces of the U.S. administration, with the result that negative articles on the Diem government undermined South Vietnamese confidence in Diem and encouraged rebellion. Although the American journalists hoped that their reporting would bring about the installation of a better South Vietnamese government, it actually caused enormous damage to South Vietnam and to American interests there. Once the coup that they had promoted led to a succession of ineffective governments, exposing them to blame for the crippling of South Vietnam, Halberstam and Sheehan, and fellow journalist Stanley Karnow disparaged Diem with falsehoods so as to claim that South Vietnam was already weak beyond hope before the coup. This turn of events would distort much of the subsequent analysis of the Diem government.....
.....Supporting the coup of November 1963 was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War. Contrary to later assertions by the coup's advocates, the South Vietnamese war effort had not entered into a period of decline during the last months of Diem's rule. Proof that the war was proceeding satisfactorily until the coup comes from North Vietnamese as well as American sources - disproving the thesis that American officials were mindlessly optimistic at the time - and also from the 1963 articles of the journalists who would subsequently propagate the myth of a pre-coup collapse. The deterioration did not begin until the period immediately following Diem's overthrow, when the new leaders failed to lead, feuded with each other, and arrested untold numbers of former Diem supporters. Within a few months of the coup, the pacification effort would collapse in most parts of the countryside, and the regular armed forces would be in the first stages of a lengthy period of decline. These changes would help propel Hanoi toward a strategy of seeking a decisive victory through the destruction of South Vietnam's armed forces, which in turn would eventually force the Americans to decide either to introduce U.S. ground troops or to abandon South Vietnam."
Hm....
ping
bump.
The press was particularly greatful to one John F'n (Le Poodle) Kerry for the encouragement and help with their outragious lies and fabrications about the war. And the able assistance he recived from Jane Fonda also helped them lie about the war, destroy the men who went to fight it, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
There isn't a place in Hell that is bad enough for the likes of Kerry, Fonda, or their MSM enablers. I'm one of the walking wounded from their lies (please DON'T thank me for my service - I have been too Kerry'ed to care or appreciate it) and that period is one of the darkest of my life, thanks to all of them.
At root the problem is the conceit that journalists are, and of right ought to be, important.Which we were taught in school, when we should have been learning that
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . . It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
Why is "lost" in scare quotes? Did we win the war?
Mark for later.
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