Presswatch/Mediazation

...At the start of the Yale University Press, $25/$9.95 paper...

...On the larger matter of blaming the press for the defeat, Braestrup also demurred...

...Among the most egregious media offenders was Walter Cronkite of CBS, who concluded after one week in South Vietnam that the "real meaning" of the Tet attack was that discord would deepen in Saigon and the war would be prolonged...

...continued on page 37...

...Essentially, the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam (re-broadcast in commentary, editorials, and much political rhetoric at home) added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies...

...Braestrup characterizes the message conveyed by American reporters during the Tet attack as "Disaster in Vietnam...

...Political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimum material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance," he wrote...

...Next, reporters decided incorrectly that the offensive was a psychological downer for the Vietnamese citizenry and had given the Vietcong the "initiative" on the battlefield...

...Then, "American newsmen were quick to award Hanoi a major 'psychological' triumph here, if only because they— the newsmen—and Lyndon B. Johnson had been taken by surprise...

...But there is good news: if not for Reasoner, at least for others, the fog is lifting on Vietnam .mediazation...

...I would not [disagree] for a minute that the United States armed forces responded very effectively in terrible circumstances in the Tet offensive...

...Elegant touched off the argument with his 1981 article in Encounter that unhesitatingly blamed the press for the American and South Vietnamese defeat...

...In short, "for the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen...

...Braestrup, now the editor of the Wilson Quarterly, conceded that there were "gaping holes and changing fads" in the coverage of the war...

...Yet, there is no empirical evidence that shows any firm link between media coverage and trends in public opinion . . . In my view, much of the confusion in the press at home stemmed from chronic confusion in Washington...

...But to say that this was somehow an American cum South Vietnamese victory that the press concealed, I think is arrant nonsense...

...While characterizing as some 'new theory' the strikingly similar findings *Houghton-Mifflin, $13.95...

...This ambiguity led to 'credibility gaps,' policy contradictions, and easy opportunities for LBJ's foes...

...To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other—in a major crisis abroad— cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism...

...Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...

...Peace, not victory, became his goal...

...As Elegant states, many of the American newsmen in Vietnam—and their bosses at home—were singularly unprepared to cope with the complexities of the long, ever-changing Indo-China experience," Braestrup wrote...

...It echoes the past claims of some champions of network television, who argue that CBS, NBC and ABC brought the realities of the war into the living room, and thereby turned America against it...

...Rarely, he writes, "has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospective, to have veered so widely from reality...

...The American press, he said, "somehow felt obliged to be less objective than partisan, to take sides, for it was inspired by the engage 'investigative' reporting that burgeoned in the U.S...

...And for those like Reasoner, there may be no cure...

...in these impassioned years...

...More than anyone else, he is responsible for the reassessment of the performance by the press in Vietnam...

...This is a strong claim," he wrote...

...The press was instinctively 'agin the Government'—and, at least reflexively, for Saigon's enemies.'' And press hostility endured after American troops began to withdraw...

...I went to Vietnam first in 1953...

...In 1978, Big Story was published in two volumes, a rigorous and irrefutable examination of how the American press— newspapers, wires, newsmagazines, TV networks—misreported the Tet offensive...

...on Tet by a diverse group of historians, Reasoner ascribes unassailable truth to contemporary reportage of those events," Lesher says...

...Statements to the contrary by American officials were ignored or downplayed...

...It takes Braestrup 600 pages, in the abridged version, to recount all the press blunders, inaccuracies, and distortions...

...Lyndon Johnson refused to design or support a decisive strategy for winning the war...

...But "there was no consistent bias in the Saigon reporting . . . During my years in Vietnam, I found few reporters who, even as they criticized allied performance (or, more often, quarrelled with U.S...

...Since then, it has assumed a place as one of the most celebrated critiques of the press ever, and now it has been published in a one volume, abridged edition...

...offensive, he notes, it was wrongly reported that the supposedly impregnable American embassy in Saigon had been penetrated by Vietcong: it hadn't been, but the correction was slow to catch up with the story...

...It was a portent of journalistic reactions to come...

...Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi in the South...

...Poor Reasoner, concludes Lesher in his trenchant new book, Media Unbound.* Reasoner suffers from "a classic case of mediazation," which Lesher defines as "the disturbing process by which journalism befogs memory and truth...

...I am aware of this new theory that Tet was a disaster for the Communists...

...Mediazation began, Lesher insists, with the American press coverage of the Tet attack in 1968 by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese...

...Rather, the quality of the coverage of the entire war itself has now become a matter of intense debate...

...Don't get Braestrup's role in this debate wrong, though...

...Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media—no less stringent term will serve— sought by graphic and unremitting distortion the victory of the enemies of the correspondents' own side," Elegant wrote...

...The discussion, in fact, has already come so far that often the issue is not whether the American coverage was good or bad, but just how bad it really was and what resulted from it...

...officialdom), saw the Vietnamese Communists, however impressive as fighters, as the 'good guys.' Such sentiments were strong only among Western pundits and academics far from the scene...

...That, for instance, was the crux of the argument recently between Robert Elegant, the novelist and former Asian correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and Peter Braestrup, who reported from Vietnam for the New York Times and Washington Post and has written a devastating critique, Big Story, of the press treatment of the Tet offensive...

...Two weeks after that, Cronkite declared the offensive a victory for the Vietcong and concluded that "the only rational way out" was negotiations...

...I know Asia extremely well...

...And not just on the subject of the Tet offensive, which is now generally regarded as having been reported with breathtaking inaccuracy and misplaced emphasis...