The Tet Offensive showed the American public that any reports they’d heard about the progress of the war weren’t true. That such an attack could be launched, and only stopped by massive American intervention (as opposed to being quelled by the ARVN) made it clear the South couldn’t stand on its own. The lesson for the communists from Tet was that there would be no South Vietnamese uprising to support the communists - not that the communists couldn’t beat the ARVN.
The fact that four years later, the communists could launch the Easter Offensive demonstrated their losses from Tet could be absorbed, and the ARVN still couldn’t stand on its own. Three years after that, North Vietnamese tanks rolled onto the presidential palace in Saigon. It is true that failure to supply South Vietnam after our withdrawal doomed them, but it would seem that was inevitable.
How would you define “victory” to say Nixon “won”? The war was fought with the same rationale as Korea, but in the end South Korea remained an independent state.
Yeah, well, tell that to General Giap, the North Vietnamese general who pretty much commanded the Vietcong de facto. After the VC were decimated as a fighting force during the Tet Offensive (and for the record, there were plenty of places that wiped out the VC without our even being involved, anyhow, which the news reports DIDN’T report. What we directly were involved in was our fighting off the VC within the area nearing the embassy.), he, from his recollection, outright stated that had it not been for Walter Cronkite’s broadcast, they actually WOULD have surrendered.
And in any case, again, Prager University defined it as a victory not just under our view, but even by our ENEMIES’ view, meaning it wasn’t even CLOSE to inevitable that they would have fallen. It’s like saying the USSR was inevitable to succeed during the Cold War, which quite frankly it wasn’t.
And the funny thing about news reports is... they can be faked, specifically to communicate the wrong impression deliberately. You ought to know with the burning monk, as described from the Politically Incorrect Guide, or how about the Killian Documents controversy. Even back then, the mainstream media reports were NEVER our friend, or even our ally.