By attacking London with residents and citizens of Great Britain, Al Qaeda proved, once and for all, that Iraq is not Vietnam. The Islamists said in effect to the people of England: you toe our line or we will kill you — with your own people. (None of the attackers wer among the 250,000 Iraqis living in England, by the way.) It hardly matters that today’s issue is Iraq; tomorrow’s could be Kashmir or the trial of some Imam — in any event: where is there to retreat to? The proliferation of “root causes” pieces in the Mainstream Media appears to us to be a decisive shift away from the Vietnam template.

We think it might be useful to take a moment to review the rather obvious inappropriateness of the Iraq-Vietnam analogy in the reality of the two situations, in order to understand the strange grip that the template has had on the Mainstream Media. We will use several examples from CBS to illustrate the point.

By any statistical measurement, Iraq is not Vietnam. Vietnam was a decade long war in which over 2.5 million Americans served, many by conscription, and 58,000 Americans died. Comparing that to the two year insurgency in which 1800 American volunteers have died dishonors both groups of war dead. (The Vietnam anti-war movement, by the way, was in large measure grounded in self-interest. It became intense only after President Johnson cancelled graduate school deferments for 1968. As contemporaneous reporting in the Harvard Crimson demonstrates, the end of the deferments threw elite university students and professors into the frenzy of sit-ins, takeovers, and demostrations that began in 1968.)

On February 27, 1968 Walter Cronkite gave his famous verdict on Vietnam because of the Tet Offensive, which as we now know, was a North Vietnamese Battle of the Bulge and an American victory:

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that 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.

President Johnson said in response: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” (Ronald Reagan said that Cronkite or CBS should have been indicted for what he said.) At least Cronkite offered his view openly as only an opinion: “an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective.” This stands in distinction to CBS’s subsequent acts, because, unlike a newspaper, CBS does not have an editorial page in its news presentations. It represents the Evening News, CBS Reports, and 60 Minutes as news programs, presenting objective journalistic truth, not editorial opinion.

The anti-war bias at CBS has flourished and remained virtually unchecked from 1968 until Rathergate. Consider a few examples. There was the Selling of the Pentagon in 1971, as dissected by John Podhoretz. The broadcast used dishonest editing and other techniques to make the Pentagon “sound inept, stupid, wrong, vicious.” It also included this chestnut, recycled most recently in Rathergate:

A Democratic congressman from Louisiana named F. Edward Hebert, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, supplied some footage to Davis and his team of an interview he had filmed with a former Vietnam POW. Davis told Hebert’s press secretary “the videotape would be used for a POW special on CBS.” Outraged to have been used by CBS to aid its case that the Pentagon was improperly marketing itself, Hebert went on the attack. CBS re-aired the show a few days later with 20 minutes of responses after the airing by Hebert and others–followed by a rebuttal by CBS News president Richard S. Salant, who said pointedly on the air that “no one has refuted the essential accuracy” of the show.

There was the The Defense of the United States series in 1981, about which Lt. Colonel Evan Parrott wrote three years ago:

The anchorman for the series was Dan Rather, who stated that he hoped the “Defense” series would “start the debate rolling in every town and city in America”1 about defense spending in general and the Reagan buildup in particular. Special antipathy was directed toward the nuclear aspects of defense. That this program caused the current debate over nuclear weapons is questionable. There is no question, however, that, very much like “The Selling of the Pentagon,” it was awash in hyperbole and distortion, inadequately supported by a parade of so-called experts.

There was the 1982 The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, in which:

In the spring of 1982, a CBS News employee disclosed to TV Guide that producer George Crile had violated network standards in making the program. The 24 May story by Sally Bedell and Don Kowet, “Anatomy of a Smear: How CBS News Broke the Rules and ‘Got’ Gen. Westmoreland,” stipulated how the production strayed from accepted practices. Significantly, TV Guide never disputed the premise of the program. The writers attacked the journalistic process, pointing out, for instance, that Crile screened interviews of other participants for one witness and then shot a second interview, that he avoided interviewing witnesses who would counter his thesis, and that answers to various questions were edited into a single response.

General Westmoreland mistakenly settled his libel suit against CBS. Finally, we had Rathergate, discussed at length in this space and notable, not for its uniqueness, but for its being only the latest in such behavior at CBS. This outlook of CBS is similar to that the other elite media outlets — they all thought and acted alike on Vietnam, as they mostly do on Iraq. As Lyndon Johnson said in 1969 (quoted in Podhoretz), and continues to be true of their thought today:

[W]e have in this country two big television networks, NBC and CBS. We have two news magazines, Newsweek and Time. We have two wire services, AP and UPI. We have two pollsters, Gallup and Harris. We have two big newspapers–the Washington Post and the New York Times. They’re all so damned big they think they own the country.

Abu Ghraib, Club Gitmo, al Qa Qaa: it’s all been the same anti-war, anti-military story that was born and fourished in the MSM’s coverage of Vietnam.

As things stand today, a drawdown of US troops is being discussed — to about 80,000 by mid-2006 — the Al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq have decided to switch tactics to targets in the West and elsewhere, and the London bombings have largely backfired as the people of Great Britain see that there is nowhere to retreat to, even if they wanted to. Meanwhile, during the long period that the Vietnam template governed the American media’s coverage of all matters military, the MSM’s power and reach have atrophied.

Here are our two questions: if the Vietnam template is finally buried, what will replace it in the Mainstream Media? And given the decline in influence of the MSM, do we care what their new template is?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2005 at 8:13 am and is filed under EU, General, MSM, Religion, War, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.