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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Walter Cronkite, Vietnam, and the Decline of Media Credibility |
| 2008-02-28 |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #1 As I've posted before - "Tet was the wakeup for a very young man, myself that what today is called the Main Stream Media [MSM] had become as much a threat as a defender of the republic. That is when Walter Cronkite who up till then I had admired pronounced the effort in Vietnam futile. For I understood Cronkite had been there in Europe in December 1944 when the 'defeated' Germans launched a surprise offensive in the Ardennes of Belgium. The war was about to be over. The Germans were on the run. Or so our political and military leaders let the American public believe. Our intelligence services detected no action upon the enemy’s part to commit itself to this massive assault. The Germans had resorted to hand carried communications in preparation, thus nullifying Ultra, the Allied decryption efforts. The bitter woods of southern Belgium would see the virtual destruction of the 106th US Infantry Division and the largest surrender of American forces since the Philippines in 1942 . It would result in 81,000 KIA casualties, greater than the entire Vietnam War. The fighting went on for nearly two months on the ground the Germans would contest. In the end, the enemy gained no ground and suffered crippling destruction of manpower and equipment. No where in the record of those events have I found where Mr. Cronkite, as a reporter in theater, make the same evaluation of the American effort there as he would concerning Tet and the work in Vietnam. Yet the military results of both offensives upon the enemy were the same. However, the military loses to the Americans and its allies in both battles were substantially less in the second. Here was a man who was an 'authoritative' observers to both acts, yet his reporting was without question compromised by personal bias over facts. As more time passes and more historians of the classical school with far less bias and far more critical analytical skill come to write the history of the 20th Century, the judgment upon the popular chroniclers of contemporary news will be adjudged and that judgment is likely not one they will be proud of. ." |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-02-28 16:01 |