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the nature of the war, or to display an interest in reports of similar events in nearby areas that suggested its unexceptional character. This particular massacre was made exceptional by an arbitrary cutoff of attention and refusal to investigate beyond narrowly circumscribed limits. The limited but dramatized attention to My Lai was even used to demonstrate the conscience of America, in the face of enemy provocations. Thus a 1973 New York Times report from My Lai describes the “battered Batangan peninsula,” an area where the inhabitants were “generally supporters of the Vietcong,” now demolished by U.S. bombardment and ground operations: “big guns fire into the peninsula as they have again and again over the eight years that American, South Korean and South Vietnamese forces have been trying to make it safe.” The report quotes villagers who accuse the Americans of having killed many people here: “They are in no position to appreciate what the name My Lai means to Americans,” the reporter adds thoughtfully.84

The standard critique of the media for having “lost the war” identifies television as the major culprit. Television analyst Edward Jay Epstein formulates the standard view as follows:

Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, Americans have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television. Never before in history has a nation allowed its citizens to view uncensored scenes of combat, destruction and atrocities in their living rooms, in living color. Since television has become the principal—and most believed—source of news for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war on television was instrumental in shaping public opinion. It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric of television executives, to say that television, by showing the terrible truth of the war, caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war . . . This has also been the dominant view of those governing the Nation during the war years . . . Depending on whether the appraisal has come from hawk or dove, television has thus been either blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the American public with the war.85

There have been several studies of the matter, suggesting a rather different picture. We will return to some of these issues in discussing the coverage of the Tet offensive, but we should observe that there are some rather serious questions about the standard formulations. Suppose that some Soviet investigators were to conduct an inquiry into coverage of the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Pravda should be blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the Soviet public with the war? Would we consider such an inquiry to be meaningful without consideration of both the costs and the justice of the venture?

Epstein notes an obvious “logical problem” with the standard view: for the first six years of television coverage, from 1962 and increasingly through 1967, “the American public did approve of the war in Vietnam” according to polls. Furthermore, in a 1967 Harris poll for Newsweek, “64 per cent of the nation wide sample said that television’s coverage made them more supportive of the American effort, and only 26 per cent said that it had intensified their opposition,” leading the journal to conclude that “TV has encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war.”

Epstein’s review of his and other surveys of television newscasts and commentary during this period explains why this should have been the case. “Up until 1965,” he writes, “the network anchor men seemed unanimous in support of American objectives in Vietnam,” and most described themselves as “hawks” until the end, while the most notable “dove,” Walter Cronkite, applauded “the courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia” in 1965 and later endorsed the initial U.S. commitment “to stop Communist aggression wherever it raises its head.” In fact, at no time during the war or since has there been any detectable departure from unqualified acceptance of the U.S. government propaganda framework; as