Spin Then, Spin Now
Alicia Colon wonders about a recent Pace University study that ranks the New York Times as having the most credibility among print sources in New York. Perhaps they polled only Democrats?She goes on to talk about the horrible injustice that the press is doing to our troops:
I met Jerry when the visiting Vietnam Wall came to South Beach last year. He and several other vets wore Operation Iraqi Freedom patches on their leather jackets and did not hide their disdain for journalists.“Did you know we won the Tet offensive in 1968? Bet you thought Vietnam was a lost cause after you saw all those dead soldiers on Channel 2? We beat them, but you’d never know it from TV.”
That was a long time ago, I told him. Wasn’t it time to move on? He looked at me as if I was crazy.
“Why? They’re trying to do it all over again. Look at what you read in the papers about Iraq and on the network news. They’re only reporting the bad, not the good. They’re encouraging the enemy all over again. If it weren’t for Fox News and the Internet, we’d probably lose this one, too.”
I remember 1968 and Jerry’s right. For the longest time I was under the impression that we had lost the Tet offensive and I will never forget watching Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in the U.S.A., give an impassioned broadcast in which he said we were mired in a stalemate.
He said “Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Viet Cong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we.The referees of history may make it a draw.”
A draw? The final statistic tallied the Tet U.S. dead as 1,864.That was a terrible toll, but it should have been put in the context of the 45,000 enemy killed. The Cronkite broadcast did a great disservice to the valiant soldiers who repelled the enemy forces.
In his “Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel,” Bui Tin confirms that the North Vietnamese suffered a devastating defeat in the Tet offensive in 1968. But they had an ally in journalists who opposed the war and knew they could win on the home front.
When David Letterman asked Michael Moore where he got his information for his “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he answered the New York Times. The audience burst into laughter and Letterman couldn't keep a straight face. Moore asked, “What's so funny?”
Bet he answered the Pace poll.
Blog post #3046 in category
Media Spin
posted 25 June 04