Great article, question where is the "journalists" of the past to challenge the power structure of today. The Chuck Todd problem is pointing out that the Journalists have turned into propagandists.

The Editors have turned into YES people, where is the journalists????

The GWB administration tried to avoid bad press from the field by embedding reporters with deployed units, in order to "let the American public see it from the soldier's point of view."

This is a letter by someone I went to graduate school who wrote in response to a column by Tom Friedman which appeared in the NYT's:

I served with the Army in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, so I appreciate the faith that Mr. Friedman has in the average foot soldier. Unfortunately, his expectation that the troops will tell America when it's time to leave is misplaced for two reasons: the civilian leadership tells us when to stay and when to go, directing policy that we carry out, and war is intensely personal to the G.I. -- we don't want to leave thinking our service has been in vain.

We have to believe that we can contribute to a good outcome by simply crawling out of our sleeping bags each morning. While heartfelt, such optimism might be misplaced. If the White House is not able to define an end-state in Iraq, then Americans must demand that it do so.

Questioning authority does us no disservice. Grunts will fight as long as there's someone to fight. It's up to the public to decide when to call the game.

No. Even if I misworded it, I think what I mean is fairly clear. There is the evidence and there is what the various factions claim. The journalist's job is to evaluate what the various factions say compared to the evidence.

What Cronkite was saying is that the evidence contradicts those who say we're winning the war in Vietnam. Emphasizing that would make clear what the reporter's function is.

The sentence that GG chose to emphasize : "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . ." instead points to the time when reporters did what they do today - have faith in the statements of American leaders; and Cronkite seems to be saying, "only reluctantly have we abandoned that faith". Which Chuck Todd may have this apostasy six months from now - so what? Many reporters have concluded the Iraq war was founded on untruths six years after the war started - so what? "We have faith no longer...." points to an initial abdication of duty.

The job of the reporter is not to have faith in the first place. The reporter's duty is to the evidence.

the North Vietnamese, committed Marxists, assumed the offensive would provide the window of opportunity for their southern comrades to rise up and overthrow the puppet Saigon regime. Yet there was no such effort among southerners who instead largely tried to dodge the bullets.

But from the point of view of the American TV viewing public, who learned of suicide bomber penetration of the US Embassy in Saigon, it must have been like, "If this is winning, well then what would losing look like?"

The Tet offensive is regarded as a strategic military blunder but a great public relations coup for Hanoi.

Flaw: In their commentary on events in Vietnam, reporters "projected" to the American public their own opinions and fears based on incomplete data and their own inclinations. This tendency is best described by the author in comparing the television clips on Khe Sanh and a comprehensive photo essay by Life photographer David Douglas Duncan.

One looks at the pictures by Duncan and remembers Khe Sanh. One views most of the film footage, especially those nervous standups, and remembers one's own fears, those of a civilian suddenly thrust into an isolated, unfamiliar battleground amid strangers and unpredictable dangers, The Khe Sanh garrison comes through on TV film as an assemblage of apprehensive, unorganized, even hapless, individuals--like the exhausted reporters--not as a group of trained soldiers, organized into fighting units. . . (Vol. 1, p. 384)

The problem was that the reporters often had very little to go on, and events were confusing. But facing the need to give impact to their products, reporters--usually by inference--projected their own concerns even if facts were cloudy.

Two particular journalistic tendencies obscured this defect. One was the tendency to quote the opinions of "officials" or "observers." "Observers" seems to have referred to media people themselves, and many of the "observations" communicated to the American public were little more than Caravelle Hotel speculation. Braestrup remarked of this tendency: "... the reader is left in the dark as to the relative importance, knowledge, or authority of the 'officials' or 'certain officers' quoted. None is identified as 'senior,' `junior'--or' drinking companions.'"

A second tendency was the skill with which reporters chose their words to give impact. Ordinary events could be given undue emphasis with a well-chosen phrase or comparison. Marines fought "foot by blood-soaked foot." Saigon was in "rubble" and appeared "like the flattened German city of Dresden." Hue was described as "Monte Cassino" and "Iwo Jima" both. NV A troops were "suicidal" or "diehard." Standoff attacks were "devastating." Pacification was "torn to shreds." Events were "ominous." Even without explicit commentary, the choice of such words and phrases contributed to the dominant media theme that Tet was a "disaster" for the United States.

Flaw: Stateside editors and gatekeepers manipulated the inputs from their Vietnam reporters to support preconceptions or to emphasize the dramatic. Thus, journalism managers far from the scene altered the tone of the news.

Flaw: The press corps in Vietnam was ill-fitted for the immensity of the task. At the time of Tet, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, had 179 American media representatives on its press roster, Perhaps only sixty, however, were active newsmen; the others were TV crews, relatives of reporters, stringers, free-lancers, and representatives of obscure publications. On the shoulders of these sixty, then, fell the necessity to report and interpret the most complex campaign in American history. They often lacked military experience, they were generally ignorant of the Vietnamese language and culture, and they deployed in and out of Vietnam on short tours, which gave them insufficient time to develop real expertise. Because of the competitive nature of news organizations, these sixty were not spread throughout Vietnam. Rather, they clustered in certain areas--Saigon, Da Nang, Hue, and Khe Sanh--duplicating each others' coverage and failing to report diverse stories from different areas. To get their stories into print, they had to ensure that they had "impact" and "significance." In addition, they had to beat deadlines and work on stories chosen by stateside editors. TV reporters had their own special pressures dictated by the need for visual drama, a quick story, and the economics of cable and satellite transmission. Some TV men recorded commentary to match film they never even saw.

SUMMING up the impact of the press, Braestrup argues that the Tet reporting was an extreme case of crisis-journalism. The result was a "portrait of defeat" for the allies because "the special circumstances of Tet impacted to a rare degree on modern American journalism's special susceptibilities and limitations." Braestrup's final chapter is a discussion of how the susceptibilities and limitations are unchanged, with a warning that a similar crisis could repeat the errors of Tet.

For that reason Big Story should be read, taught, and used at the Defense Information School and at all courses and schools for commanders. Significant portions could be developed into case studies and gamed, to avoid plowing through 792 pages of text. It seems in retrospect that more awareness of the press's limitations and techniques might have enabled military spokesmen to counter the misinterpretations. Careful reading of the book Suggests ways that the military might have helped the press in its work, with the result of better reporting.

I suspect that a number of readers of this essay are now saying "Dammit! We knew the press was giving us the shaft even then, but no one would believe us because we were military!" This opinion, once widespread among military professionals, is a variant of another theme: that the politicians, press, and peace advocates stabbed us in the back m Vietnam.

This reminds me of an earthy analysis of military critics by one of my old commanders. "Whenever I hear someone say 'those guys are really screwed up,'" he would comment, "I can always expect to discount whatever he has to say. He's up to his own ass in alligators, can't solve his own problems, and he expects to be able to set someone else straight!"

Any thoughtful military reader of Big Story must sympathize with the problems imposed on the press by its organization and institutional procedures. The problems of the media should stimulate in military professionals the parallel need of the armed forces to examine internal flaws that impede mission performance. Who can criticize the press for short rotations and ignorance of Vietnamese culture when the same flaws characterized our military effort? What writer of officer efficiency reports can carp about the abuse of words by reporters? What military officer has not formed opinions and advocated programs based on incomplete facts, or facts interpreted to support a predetermined solution?