George's Information and Comments

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Lest we Let History Repeat Itself

    -- from A History of the American People by Paul Johnson, page 884/885:

"The second reason why America turned against the war was not so much editorial criticism as tendentious presentation of the news. . . .

"Once the TV presentation of the war became daily and intense, it worked on the whole against American interests. It generated the idea that America was fighting a 'hopeless' war. Not only did the media underplay or ignore any US successes, it tended to turn Vietcong and North Vietnamese reverses into victories.

"Media misrepresentation came to a decisive head in the handling of the Vietcong 'Tet Offensive' on January 30, 1968. . . . In military terms, the Tet Offensive was the worst reverse the Vietcong suffered throughout the war: They lost over 40,000 of their best troops and a great number of heavy weapons. But the media, especially TV, presented it as a decisive American defeat, a Vietcong victory on the scale of Dien Bien Phu. An elaborate study of the coverage, conducted in 1977, showed exactly how this reversal of the truth, which was not on the whole deliberate, came about."

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