A Case Study of Distortion
VREE, DALE
A Case Study of Distortion Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington By Peter Braestrup Westview. 1,483 pp. (2...
...That message had a stunning impact on elite opinion in the United States,, to the point of probably altering subsequent political events...
...In addition, the Johnstone study supplies evidence that newsmen believe they ought to promote their Leftist values...
...Only 23-27 per cent of the public, by contrast, adhered to the dove stance...
...The News People also found that journalists have two fundamental conceptions of their responsibility-"neutral" and "participant...
...Johnson was not given the benefit of the doubt, as most Presidents are...
...That debate pitted doves (those who wanted "to reduce our military effort in Vietnam") against the Administration (the status quo position...
...The major role is given to "subjective reactions"-queasiness at the sight of bloody fighting, resentment, suspicion, and vengeance directed at the Administration-cast against a backdrop of built-in handicaps...
...One wonders what he might have done had the media amplified the rising swell of hawk opinion, thereby completely redefining the terms of the debate...
...When the attack came, the Administration finally spoke with "caution and relative candor...
...In a review of McGee's show, Variety enthused: "With methodical precision, anchorman McGee and correspondents Dean Brelis, Howard Tuckner, and Paul Cunningham set up Administration leaders, then bowled them over like so many tenpins...
...Johnson did not respond to this sentiment and temporized until March 31, when he announced a partial bombing pause, his offer to negotiate with Hanoi and his decision not to seek reelection...
...For too often the accusers have less intimate knowledge of the events in question than the reporter under fire...
...mindless readiness to seek out conflict, to believe the worst of the government or authority in general, and on that basis to divide up the actors on any issue into the 'good' and the 'bad.' It was a predilection shared by much of academia...
...In the fall of 1971, the three authors surveyed 1,313 print and electronic journalists...
...Nevertheless, Johnstone, Slawski and Bowman found that of their total sample ("nonprominent" as well as "prominent" newsmen), participation received more support than neutral reporting, with over three-quarters regarding the media's "watchdog role in investigating governmental activities" as "extremely important...
...But a chapter on public opinion compiled and written by Burns W. Roper (a member of the Freedom House Board of Trustees) reveals that in January and February of 1968 56-61 per cent of all Americans considered themselves hawks, and of that group 40-55 per cent disapproved of LBJ's handling of the war...
...Academic Leftism has been statistically documented in a recent, little-noticed book entitled The News People, by J. W. C. Johnstone, E. J. Slawski and W. W. Bowman (University of Illinois Press, 1976...
...Frank McGee, in an NBC special, concluded that "the war, as the Administration has defined it, is being lost...
...It was financed by Freedom House, an organization of moderate internationalists and civil libertarians whose Board of Trustees includes such prominent political figures as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Senators Daniel P. Moynihan, Edward Brooke and Jacob Javits...
...All of the organizations examined by Braestrup are in this category, and it is quite clear that when he takes the media to task for psychologizing and speculating, he is criticizing participant journalism...
...At times he even speaks of "self-projection," meaning projection of the journalist's outlook-the equivalent of the "imposition" Johnstone refers to...
...Indeed, Braestrup criticizes his own past performance (although in favoring a non-Communist South Vietnam, he apparently sided with neither the hawks nor the doves) as well as his colleagues...
...The author, currently editor of publications at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian, was the Washington Post's Saigon bureau chief at the time of Tet...
...In the first weeks of Tet, as the journalists swung into opposition, hawk opinion jumped from 53 per cent just before the Communist offensive to 61 per cent in early February...
...With the chaos during Tet intensifying their ignorance, newsmen fell back on their preconceptions...
...Walter Cronkite, in a CBS special on Vietnam, declared the war would end in a "stalemate" and the "only rational way out" would be "to negotiate," albeit "not as victors...
...Members of "prominent" news organizations were likelier to endorse participation than those belonging to "nonprominent" ones...
...But the by now "suspicious and resentful" journalists "vengefully" declared, in effect, that Tet was proving LBJ wrong and his critics right: We couldn't win...
...But we find here none of the defensive self-righteousness that we have come to expect from journalistic self-examinations...
...The hawk position (those who wanted "to step up our military effort") went unarticulated...
...What journalists and academics actually share is participation in an upper-middle-class "verbalist" culture that, in the aggregate, apparently is well to the Left of the population at large...
...Reviewed by Dale Vree Member, National Advisory Board of the Media Institute It is easy enough to charge the news media with distortion...
...In fact, next to possessing a high level of education, the surest guarantee of a journalist's holding a participant philosophy was his employment in a large, prestigious news outfit located in a big city...
...Roper's data supports Braestrup's contention that the media's impact was initially felt at the policy-making, not at the popular, level...
...those espousing the latter believe that "the most significant news of the day will come to light only as a result of the journalist's imposition of his point of view...
...2 volumes) $50.00...
...Still, 1 suspect Braestrup is aware that there was an ideological context (as in Left, Right and Center) to these "subjective reactions...
...In this sense, the media shaped the 'climate' of public debate...
...Big Story is essentially a content analysis of the Tet reporting done by the AP, UPI, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the weekday evening news programs of CBS, NBC and ABC...
...Here, summarized by the author, is what was transmitted back home and, more important, the result it had: "The enemy was omnipresent, the South Vietnamese lacked the will to fight, American firepower was obliterating Vietnam, the allies had ceded the 'initiative' to the 'wily Giap'-these vivid themes...
...Peter Braestrup's massive study of the coverage of the 1968 Tet offensive suffers no such burdens...
...Those subscribing to the former see themselves as "an impartial transmission link dispensing information to the public...
...It may not be inherently evil, but the Big Story offers convincing evidence that it is elitist, antidemocratic, and consequently of dubious value...
...Of those working for the "prominent" news services, newspapers, news magazines and three TV networks, 62.9 per cent of the executives and 52.8 per cent of the staffers defined themselves as Left of center, while a scant 10.1 per cent of the executives and 17.3 per cent of the staffers viewed themselves as Right of center...
...The two orientations are not always mutually exclusive in practice...
...And while it was admittedly an "extreme case" of distortion, it underscores many of the larger problems and temptations news organizations face...
...More specifically, it was expecting a major Communist offensive, yet gave little indication of what was coming, either to the public or the press...
...making the charges stick is another matter...
...Uninformed of the real military situation, ignorant of the native language, lacking any sort of public opinion poll, unable to rebut the Administration directly, the "overwhelmed" media resorted to "analysis" (a euphemism for speculation) of which side had gained the psychological advantage-a cheap substitute for fact-gathering...
...As Braestrup sees it, the road that led to the press' Orwellian inversion ("defeat is victory") originated at the Johnson White House, which had managed to create a very real credibility gap by being disingenuously optimistic and overselling the war...
...He never comes out and says it but he does note: "We saw at Tet the first show of the more volatile journalistic style...
...provided a context for Congressional rhetoric and Administration reaction...
...The press had made up its mind, and many of its members dropped any pretense to objectivity...
...Although I had no use for the Vietnam war and believed it should be ended rather than expanded, I do not find participant journalism palatable...
...Braestrup shows, however, that most media personnel in Vietnam did not know the country or the military situation well, and did not remain there long enough to improve their knowledge...
...Curiously, Braestrup softpedals the issue of ideological bias, claiming "ideology" (a concept never defined) "played a relatively minor role" in media distortion...
...The seven-year labor abounds with what perhaps adds up to a thousand pages of tables, transcripts, texts, maps, and photos that demonstrate independently how the media reported what was in fact a Communist military and political defeat at Tet as a Communist "psychological" victory...
...Or worse, their complaints are grounded in their own biases, not in objectivity...
...that has become so popular...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
