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authority. The authoritative “proof” of this contention was provided in the two-volume Freedom House study by Peter Braestrup. Conducted over a six-year period with a wide range of distinguished participants and consultants, and support acknowledged from some two dozen corporations and labor unions, this study was hailed as a “monumental” work by Don Oberdorfer in a Washington Post magazine cover story on the tenth anniversary of the offensive, with the title: “Tet: The Turning Point: How a ‘Big Event’ on Television Can Change Our Minds.” Professor John P. Roche, of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, “intellectual-in-residence” for the Johnson administration, described the Freedom House study as “one of the major pieces of investigative reporting and first-rate scholarship of the past quarter century,” a “meticulous case-study of media incompetence, if not malevolence.” In a relatively critical discussion in the Times’s Sunday book review, Edwin Diamond praises this “painstakingly thorough study of how the Vietnam war was presented to the American public by its leading image makers,” a “highfalutin” epistemological quest” by a “conscientious . . . reporter-analyst” that raises profound questions about ‘how “we know what we know,” revealing “the biases introduced by standard journalistic assumptions and organizational practices” that contributed to undermining the U.S. position in Vietnam among the general public and Congress. Similarly, Charles Mohr reports that in a conference of “aging hawks and doves” on the tenth anniversary of the Tet offensive at the University of North Carolina, “Journalism came in for some strong criticism and only a rather muted defense.” The criticism was by Braestrup, who “expounded gently the theme of his recent book,” Big Story, and the hawks in attendance, “while some of the reporters there demurred only softly.” The study is regularly cited by historians, without qualification, as the standard work on media reporting of the Tet offensive, “in some respects as important as the battle itself,” here “analysed in depth” (R. B. Smith).106

Oberdorfer too accepts the conclusions of the study as proven: it was the “‘Big Event’ on television” that changed our minds about the war. The only commentary he cites, even obliquely, accepts this judgment (Roche and others unnamed). Within the mainstream more generally, it is assumed with little question that this remarkable scholarly contribution made its case, though one may debate whether it revealed “malevolence” or deeper problems of “standard journalistic assumptions and organizational practices,” reflecting perhaps the “adversarial stance” of the media with regard to established power.

Braestrup claims to have shown that the reporting of the Tet offensive is “an extreme case” of the “unsatisfactory” performance of the media: “Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality” by presenting “a portrait of defeat for the allies”—“allies” being the term regularly used to refer to the U.S. invaders, the local forces they organized, and the largely mercenary forces they introduced to support U.S. military operations in Indochina, and a term chosen to exploit the favorable connotations provided by World War II, when “the allies” fought “the Axis.” “To have portrayed such a setback for one side [them] as a defeat for the other [us]—in a major crisis abroad—cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism,” which “shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering—whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domestic reaction to the initial shouts,” with television the worst offender. The whispers began “about late February,” he asserts. These journalistic failures, Braestrup concludes, reflect “the more volatile journalistic style—spurred by managerial exhortation or complaisance—that has become so popular since the late 1960s,” accompanied with “an often mindless readiness to seek out conflict, to believe