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By Root 2812 0

the media adopt an “adversarial stance” with regard to established power—coverage of the Tet offensive—and the Freedom House study on which this charge is based. As we saw, in this case too the behavior of the media conforms to the expectations of the propaganda model, and the major theses advanced in the Freedom House study are refuted even by their own evidence. What remains of their charge is the possibility that media coverage of the Tet offensive was technically incompetent, although subordinated to elite requirements. Turning to a closer examination of this charge, we find that the shoe is on the other foot: when “Freedom House exclusives” are corrected, the performance of the media appears quite creditable, while the incompetence of the Freedom House study is seen to transcend even the level already demonstrated. That this study has been taken seriously, and permitted to set much of the agenda for subsequent discussion, is a most intriguing fact.

According to Freedom House, television commentary and Newsweek are the worst offenders in this “extreme case” of journalistic incompetence, so let us begin by reviewing some of their sins. One example to which Braestrup reverts several times is Walter Cronkite’s “much publicized half-hour CBS ‘special’ on the war” on February 27 (Big Story, I, 158). According to Braestrup, Cronkite’s “assessment” here is “that U.S. troops would have to garrison the countryside” (I, 645). In his foreword, Leonard Sussman properly observes that “We do not expect the reader to accept on faith our various analyses or judgments,” and so “the complete texts of many of the reports discussed” are presented, primarily in volume II (I, x). Following his advice, we turn to volume II, where we find the complete text of Cronkite’s “special” (18off.). There is not even a remote hint of the “assessment” that Braestrup attributes to him.

In this important “special,” Braestrup claims, “In effect, Cronkite seemed to say, the ruins, the refugees, the disruption of pacification that came at Tet added up to a defeat for the allies that would force President Johnson to the negotiating table” (I, 158). Cronkite says nothing of the kind. He reports that “there are doubts about the measure of success or setback,” noting accurately that “the experts do not agree on the objectives or on the amount of success the communists had in achieving them.” They “failed” in many of their aims, but in a third phase the enemy might “recoup there what he lost in the first two phases.” In what he calls a “speculative, personal, subjective” judgment, Cronkite states that he is “not sure . . . who won and who lost,” or to what extent. He concludes that the United States is probably “mired in stalemate,” and that historians may conclude that the Tet battle was “a draw”; “To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.” He does not say that Johnson will be “forced” to the negotiating table by a “defeat,” but rather that if indeed there is a “stalemate,” then “the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Note the typical reiteration of government propaganda concerning American aims, unsullied by the factual record—enormous in scale, by this time—of U.S. government efforts to undermine democracy and to destroy all popular forces—the NLF, the Buddhist “third force,” etc.—in South Vietnam, on the assumption, openly admitted, that the forces placed in power by U.S. violence could not survive political competition. Recall also that in these comments that Freedom House derides, Cronkite reaches essentially the same conclusion as did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wheeler, in his summary to the president on the same day as Cronkite’s broadcast, and the president’s advisers a month later.

We may note also that two weeks earlier, Cronkite had “assessed” the impact of the Communist offensive, on the basis of U.S. and Vietnamese sources, reporting that “first, and