How the press manipulated Tet

Rick Simonson’s Psychological blog

Members of the US press distorted and/or misread the results of the 1968 Tet offensive. They changed an overwhelming Allied victory into a magical communist “psychological” victory.

The media combined principles of Psychology and Communication Theory (which for the most part at that time, had not yet been codified into “Communication Theory”) to psychologically direct a 74% pro-war U.S. population into believing the mighty United States Armed Forces that chased Hitler’s armies across Western Europe and Tojo’s Armies and Navy a thousand miles through the south and western Pacific, as well as driving a couple million Chinese and North Koreans up the entire length of the Korean peninsula, could not defeat a bunch of Vietnamese farmers surviving on cold rice and rat meat[i].

What methods of persuasion did the U.S. media use to perpetrate the illusion of a psychological victory? Notice in this statement I did not state, “create the illusion” which is exactly what the media did. That is, the media themselves created the “psychological victory”. James Robbins explained that the Tet Offensive would not have been a psychological victory if the press had not made it so, and that the VC was granted power and recognition they did not deserve. “The United States [media] lowered the bar, and defined the level of victory so low that the enemy actually met it”[ii].

The possibility of a so-called psychological victory never was incorporated into the planning of the Tet Offensive. Although General Westmoreland thought the idea was not beyond the realm of possibility and included it in his end of year 1967 report[iii], which may have ironically given the media the idea in the first place.

Lt. General Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnamese Politburo member and architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, exhibited shock at the US media portrayal of the Tet Offensive[iv].

My use of the word ‘perpetrate’ is an example of a semantic method the press employ to subtly persuade the viewer/reader to its own point of view. Kuypers calls this Directive Language: “Language that leads your audience in the direction you want them to think … directs their attention toward one point of view over, or away from, an alternative”[v] point of view. In my use of the word ‘perpetrate’ I directed you, the reader, to view the media action in a negative light as a deliberate example of how the press does the same thing.

Tom Buckley in his daily “special” reports to the New York Times provides a fine example of Directive Language when he states, “The attack … left 19 South Vietnamese marines dead and 47 wounded. Thirty of the enemy were reported to have been killed” [vi]. Notice the subtlety that Buckley uses to direct the reader to doubt the enemy deaths. The South Vietnamese casualties are stated as facts in active voice, while the enemy casualties are “reported to have been killed”. The implication is that it may or may not be a fact. Also, note the use of passive voice, which does not carry as much weight. This example is not an isolated incident. The same type of reporting is found in most, but not all, of Buckley’s articles on Vietnam that I have read.

The beauty of this technique is that it seems so insignificant that you, my reader, probably say, “that’s ridiculous, he is knit picking”. And that is exactly why the technique works. We, as consumers of the media, tend to discount or overlook these subtle intrusions on our psyche while the perpetrators are constantly bombarding our subconscious with seemingly insignificant ‘doubt’ messages. It is Psychology 101. Repeat something often enough it begins to sound like the truth.

Kuypers defines Exclusion of Oppositional Information as a “failure to report information that would contradict the press’s own point of view”[vii], describing this as “far from trivial, often intentional, strategically used”[viii].

Let us consider a report by Walter Cronkite: “… I found very few people out there who really believe Khe Sanh could be held if the North Vietnamese are determined to take it”[ix].

One huge hole is overwhelmingly evident in Cronkite’s report. The North Vietnamese are not going to commit 40,000 troops, drag batteries of artillery and hundreds of tons of supplies and munitions a hundred miles or so down the Ho Chi Minh trail and spend months digging trenches and tunnels if they were not determined to take Khe Sanh.

Was the fact that he ignored this obvious inference deliberate or just incompetence? With a rookie reporter, we may give him the benefit of the doubt and chock it up to incompetence, but Walter Cronkite?

So now we are left asking the next obvious question, ‘how many people did he actually interview on the subject’? Hypothetically speaking he may have been able to reword the same observation to read, “I interviewed five people and all five believe they can hold out indefinitely against the enemy”.

We are left with the historical fact that 40,000 NVA regulars, after 77 days of siege against 5600 U.S. Marines pulled out and went home with their proverbial tails between their legs.

AP Staffer Peter Arnett stated: “I am still not sure in my own mind whether what we did as reporters in Vietnam was enough or too much, whether we were neophytes or prophets… whether we performed the classic American press role of censuring government policy or whether we botched the whole job and aided and abetted the enemy”[x].

Additionally, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor complained that the U.S. media was unfair in their coverage of pacification programs in the countryside. He stated, “The magnitude of the nonmilitary programs never got through to the American public … primarily because of the difficulty in interesting the press in anything but the violent aspects of the conflict”[xi].

“Major General James C. Smith recalls, a reporter that followed him around for several days” did not get “his series … printed because it was too complimentary. That’s when I learned that editors, not reporters, cause the trouble and the bad press’”[xii].

We have seen from Cronkite and Buckley that reporters do cause trouble and bad press, but Smith does enlighten us as to the depth of the problem. Positively framed stories, such as the one by Smith’s shadow, go unprinted and/or unaired, while stories that support the anti-war agenda of the mainstream media gatekeepers of the 1960’s and 70’s are the stories that were printed/aired.

This discussion on the methods and techniques that the media used to perpetrate the frame of failure on the U.S. effort in Vietnam (of which the converting an Allied victory into a magical communist “psychological” victory is only a small part) can be continued to the length of a book and this author intends to do so in a different venue.

We Vietnam Veterans have been duped into believing that our efforts were worthless and that our sacrifice was a crime. The visual media concentrated the attention of the American public on the worst point of view of the worst events of the War. The everyday trudging task of taking away the enemy’s strongholds, capturing his equipment, reducing his numbers and showing the ARVN how to do the same thing for themselves, is boring footage. The constantly repeated objective for putting American troops in Vietnam was consistently ignored by the television news corps and other media to be replaced by terms such as “no clear strategy” and “useless war”. American troops went to Vietnam to keep the Saigon government alive until their own forces could be trained and equipped to fight the war for themselves. Yet, progress toward that goal was overlooked while our faults were over emphasized and discussed ad nauseoum.

---

[i] The NVA & VC were actually well equipped with hundreds of millions of dollars of military supplies each from the USSR and Communist China; see Qaing Zhai, (2000), China and The Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press & Pike, D. (1969). War, Peace and the Viet Cong. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press among a myriad of others.

[ii] Robbins, J. S. (2010). This time we win: Revisiting the Tet offensive. New York: Encounter Books, p. 177.

[iii] Robbins, J. S. (2010). This time we win: Revisiting the Tet offensive. New York: Encounter Books, p. 177.

[iv] Central Committee, () Vietnam: The Anti-US Resistance War for National Salvation 1954-75: Military Events. Hanoi:

[v] Kuypers, J. A., (2006), Bush’s war: Media bias and justifications for war in a terrorist age. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

[vi] Buckley, T. (1 January 1968) New York Times, Late City Ed., sec. 1, p. 1.

[vii] Kuypers, J. A., (2006), Bush’s war: Media bias and justifications for war in a terrorist age. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, p. 159.

[viii] Kuypers, J. A., (2006), Bush’s war: Media bias and justifications for war in a terrorist age. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, p. 160.

[ix] Robbins, J. S. (2010). This time we win: Revisiting the Tet offensive. New York: Encounter Books, p. 233.

[x] Arnett, P. (March, 1972)(2000). 1970-1979 International News: Reflections on Vietnam, the Press and America. Nieman Reports, Winter 1999—Spring 2000.

[xi] Kinnard, D. (2001). Vietnam Reconsidered: An attitudinal survey of US Army General Officers. Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 75-Winter 76, Vol. 39 Issue 4, p. 451.

[xii] Kinnard, D. (2001). Vietnam Reconsidered: An attitudinal survey of US Army General Officers. Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 75-Winter 76, Vol. 39 Issue 4p. 451.