The AP Rewrites History (Updated X2)
MichaelW on Feb 12 2007 at 11:32 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, History, Media, MichaelW's Page
According to the Associated Press, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John McCain (R-AZ) is worried that Iraq may experience the equivalent of a “Tet offensive” such as happened in Vietnam in 1968. Sen. McCain is quoted as saying:
“By the way, a lot of us are also very concerned about the possibility of a, quote, ‘Tet Offensive.’ You know, some large-scale tact that could then switch American public opinion the way that the Tet Offensive did,” the Arizona senator said.
McCain made his comment in explaining why he did not believe the Bush administration should set a date by which it should deem Bush’s troop increase a success or a failure.
“I think that it should be publicly open-ended because I think that if you set a date, that there’s every possibility that the insurgents would just lay back and wait until we leave,” McCain said.
However, the AP describes the Tet offensive as a military maneuver by the Viet Cong “that sent U.S. casualties soaring in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago.”
Tet, a massive invasion in 1968 of South Vietnam by Communist North Vietnamese, inflicted enormous losses on U.S. and South Vietnamese troops and is regarded as a point where public sentiment turned sharply against the war.
Not only is the AP wrong about the Tet offensive — in fact, it was a serious tactical loss for the Viet Cong, who were nearly decimated after the offensive* — the story clearly implies that McCain is worried about insurgents in Iraq inflicting massive casualties on our troops. Instead, McCain appears to worried about the public sentiment and the American voters turning completely against the war. McCain, who obviously has a better grasp of history than the AP, apparently understands how the media can turn the public against a military mission, regardless of how successful the mission is, just as it did in Vietnam when the press reported the Tet offensive as a victory for the VC.
So much for those layers of fact-checkers that the MSM is so proud of.
UPDATE: Predictably, the falsehood that the U.S. was on the losing end of the Tet offensive has spread without question. The following news outlets ran with the AP story written by Bob Lewis (who was apparently the only reporter around for this speech) and the headline “McCain Fears ‘Tet Offensive’ in Iraq”: CBS News, ABC News, TIME, San Jose Mercury News, et al.
Unbelievably, only one news agency refrained from printing the historically revised version of the Tet offensive: All Headline News.
Moreover, if I understand what McCain actually said, he is concerned about how the media will report any Iraqi offensive similar to the Tet offensive, and how the public will react to that coverage. As if to prove his point, the media mistakes McCain’s concern for how such an offensive will be reported for “fear” (he never said “fear” BTW) at the onslaught of resulting casualties. The media then unquestioningly prints a verifiably false fact about the Tet offensive. If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.
UPDATE 2: Cronkite’s report less than a month following the Tet offensive:
Also see this, which distills the aftermath of Tet pretty well:
* “The NLF and the NVA lost around 35,000 men killed, 60,000 wounded and 6,000 POWs for no military success. The US and ARVN dead totalled around 3,900 (1,100 US). But this was not the conflict as the US public saw it. Without there being an active conspiracy the US media reports were extremely damaging and shocked the American public and politicians. Apparently the depth of the US reaction even surprised the North Vietnamese leadership, as well as delighting them.”
Technorati Tags: media bias, Associated Press, Vietnam War, Tet offensive, casualties, John McCain, historical revisionism
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I was not alive to see the Tet Offensive coverage on TV. I’d be interested to hear an account of it.
I would guess that its the invasion of the Embassy that was so shocking. Have the insurgents in Iraq overrun any US bases at all?
I may be wrong, but you may be thinking of when we pulled the last of our troops from Vietnam in 1975, and we airlifted them from the roof of the Embassy in Saigon. I don’t think our Embassy was taken during the Tet offensive. In fact, nothing was really taken (although, I think we vacated Khe Sanh not long thereafter).
Keeping in mind how lopsided was our victory in the Tet offensive, just view giving his assessment of the war.
The American Embassy was assaulted at the beginning of Tet. 5 Americans and 2 Vietnamese civilians were killed, as well as all 19 of the attackers (who were held off long enough for the 101st to reinforce the embassy by helicopter).
This is probably a pretty good account of Tet:
http://www.vwam.com/vets/tet/tet.html
Ahh … thanks, Jeff. I’ll bet that’s what Aaron was thinking of. And thanks for the link, although I would encourage people to read past the hagiography presented as the lead-in there.
Aaron,
Also consider Walter Cronkite’s broadcast, where he indicated he thought we were loosing. In ‘68 his opinion carried a lot of weight.
It is also worth considering that the military’s claims set it up for embarresment when the Tet offensive occured.
The fact that the VC essentially died as a fighting force in Tet is not well known. After Tet, the NVA had to pick up the slack.
Don,
I would go even further, the VC essentially died, and the NVA had to wait pretty much for five years for a new generation of fighters to come of age before they could launch another major offensive push.
[...] An even more important point, who says “real journalists” are not allowed to give their opinion? He mentions the case of Michael Gordon, who as we discussed here and here, was rather unfairly singled out. That however is the New York Times. Other journalists and anchors, including ones that the Unraveling Sock himself likes to use as grist for his mill, give their opinions on a regular basis. They do this all the time, but the most famous anchor of them all, Walter Cronkite, did it and Michael has the video here. Dan Rather did it on a regular basis as well. Do they not make their opinions known on “60 Minutes.” I say, so what? The real problem of bias isn’t the clearly marked commentary of Cronkite, Rather, Brit Hume or the investigative advocacy of “60 Minutes,” it is the bias hidden within supposedly objective reporting. It is the actual manufacturing of stories and evidence. Rather’s career was ended by his willingness to play with falsified evidence. [...]