Imagine if shortly after the start of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, an American newsman had announced on TV that perhaps we needed to seek a negotiated end to WWII because the Germans had launched a massive attack that no one thought possible?
This is not too drastically different from what Walter Cronkite did on February 27, 1968, less than four weeks after the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong subordinates launched their disastrous Tet Offensive on January 30. Here are the two most often-quoted statements from Cronkite's commentary:
To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.
You would never guess from Cronkite's spin that the Communists had suffered a horrendous military defeat, suffering staggering losses while failing to seize nearly all of the towns and cities they had targeted (and the few places they did manage to seize were retaken in a matter of weeks).
We now know from North Vietnamese sources that the Tet Offensive was a desperate gamble that Hanoi's leaders took because they realized they were losing the war. Also, the North Vietnamese had assumed that once the offensive began, the majority of South Vietnamese would rise up and help them overthrow the Saigon government, but the vast majority of South Vietnamese remained loyal to their government.
Walter Cronkite and most of the rest of the news media turned the Communists' crushing military defeat into a key propaganda victory for the Communist war effort.
The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media's Big Lie
This is not too drastically different from what Walter Cronkite did on February 27, 1968, less than four weeks after the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong subordinates launched their disastrous Tet Offensive on January 30. Here are the two most often-quoted statements from Cronkite's commentary:
To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.
You would never guess from Cronkite's spin that the Communists had suffered a horrendous military defeat, suffering staggering losses while failing to seize nearly all of the towns and cities they had targeted (and the few places they did manage to seize were retaken in a matter of weeks).
We now know from North Vietnamese sources that the Tet Offensive was a desperate gamble that Hanoi's leaders took because they realized they were losing the war. Also, the North Vietnamese had assumed that once the offensive began, the majority of South Vietnamese would rise up and help them overthrow the Saigon government, but the vast majority of South Vietnamese remained loyal to their government.
Walter Cronkite and most of the rest of the news media turned the Communists' crushing military defeat into a key propaganda victory for the Communist war effort.
The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media's Big Lie