Why So Glum, MSM?
By Michael Reynolds | Related entries in Media, The War On Terrorism, WarThere has been quite a bit of talk lately centering on the media’s tendency to report only the bad news from Iraq. My usual response to this has been to point out that the media has always done so, not only in this country and in this time, but throughout the world and forever.
But recently I decided to check the historical record on this point. And I am prepared now to admit that I was wrong. Careful research has shown that in many cases the media have offered a more balanced picture.
The earliest known example of media balancing bad news stories with more upbeat perspectives came early on:
EDEN. January 1, 6000 BC. The Lord God of Hosts has announced that Adam and Eve have been served eviction papers from the Garden of Eden. “I told them: eat what you want, just stay away from the apples. But no. They don’t listen to me. Me they ignore, and get their lifestyle advice from a snake. Well, screw ‘em, they’re outta here. Sorry for the language, but they pissed me off.”
Adam and Eve both declined comment and are said to be in seclusion, planning for a lifetime of making a living by the sweat of their brows.
But Achmed the Tailor, who owns and operates a small haberdashery just beyond the gates of Eden, is thrilled at the action taken by the Lord. “I’m sorry for Adam and Eve, they seem like nice people. But this is great news for me. I’ve been at this location for two years and business, quite frankly, has been poor. Now that people realize they’re naked the men are going to want a nice pair of trousers, a couple of golf shirts. And the ladies, well, forget about it! So from where I sit, things are looking up.”
A later example is already perhaps familiar to lovers of literature:
AGINCOURT. October 25, 1415 AD. Today a relatively small force under the command of King Henry the Fifth of England, shattered the flower of the French nobility in a one-sided battle that cost France more than 5,000 men as against an estimated 113 British casualties. It is thought that this victory by the enemy will seal the fate of Normandy. This defeat, and the cowardly attack by our forces on Henry’s unprotected baggage train has humiliated our country, blackened our honor, and severely distressed our regrettably insane King Charles. It seems likely that the victory will be dramatized by the English and rubbed in our faces for at least the next 600 years.
But not all Frenchmen spent the day moping. Just three kilometers from the battlefield the peasant Guy (no last name) was finally able to finish re-thatching the roof on the hut he shares with his wife, Simone, their four children, a pig, eight chickens, a goat, three sheep and seventy-eight rats. Said Guy, “I used this dead guy’s shield. I found him all cut up, down by the creek. he must have crawled there. Well, he wasn’t going to be needing the shield, was he? And his shield was the perfect size for the hole in my roof. And, with a little tarragon, some garlic, and a soupcon of Cognac, my wife was able to make a delicious stew of his organs.”
In some notable cases, only fragments of stories remain, but they still tell a tale that should be taken to heart by modern media:
PERSIA. 12– AD. (Date obliterated.) . . . the Mongols are coming, the Mongols are coming! Finally, we’ll get some decent Chinese food. I am so sick of the couscous all . . .
Or this, from a dispatch sent by a precursor of Stern Magazine:
WURZBURG, GERMANY. 1349 AD. The Black Plague may have killed eighty percent of the people in the surrounding countryside, but many are focused on the upcoming Apple Blossom and Goat Balls Festival. Organizers say that while the crowd may be smaller this year, “There should be plenty of parking. So come on down! Unless you have buboes.”
And this fragment recently discovered on a hurriedly chiseled stone slab:
POMPEII. 79 AD. Aaargh, aargh, the ash falling around me, choking me . . . oh, various gods, no! Aieee! With the lava and the falling stones, oy! Aaargh! But you know what? The chamber of commerce will finally be able to point to something that sets us apart from Ravenna and Siena. Aieee! Could I be any more volcanoed?”
Even as recently as World War 2 the mainstream media continued to balance bad news with the more positive.
PEARL HARBOR HAWAII. December 7, 1941. Planes from an undetected Japanese carrier force today attacked the US Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The Japanese achieved complete surprise. American forces were unnable to mount more than token resistance as wave after wave of Japanese planes bombed and strafed at will, sinking numerous capital ships and crippling the American battleship force.
Despite the dastardly nature of the Japanese attack, not all was gloom and doom on these lovely islands. Luther McRae, fisherman and rummy, owns a small bait shack that sits on an acre of waterfront property just a few hundred yards beyond the anchorage of the USS Arizona. He sees nothing but good coming from today’s sneak attack. “This is huge. I mean, this is huge. First of all, now I get my view back. You see how big those battlewagons are? Were? They totally blocked my view. And the bells going off on those ships, oh my God, a man can’t sleep with the ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding. And if you look where the Arizona is now, hey, people are going to want to see that. Tourism is going to change everything. I’ll sell this bait shack for ten times what I paid for it.”
Why can’t today’s media show the same degree of balance when reporting news from Iraq? I challenge the mainstream media to do a better job. Remember, even on a day when IED’s blow up a Hummer full of young American soldiers, leaving widows and orphans and bereaved parents behind, there’s almost always a school opening in Basra, or a mini-mall being built in Fallujah, or a colorful street festival in Ramadi.
(cross-posted from The Mighty Middle.)
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 and is filed under Media, The War On Terrorism, War. 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.
March 22nd, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Not quite true. Once the war was underway, FDR demanded positive media coverage in WW II on pain of gov’t takeover, and got it. And 6000 people were jailed as “war resistors.”
Few people realize what a colossal failure the WW II campaigns were in many respects compared to modern day actions, even allowing for technological advantages currently enjoyed. In Okinawa, unimaginative Pacific commanders continually ordered frontal assaults against dug-in Japanese positions, resulting in horrific casualties. We would drop tons of bombs on cave complexes that didn’t even scratch the enemies inside. With the exception of Patton, our European commanders were largely ineffectual and did not understand the nature of the war they were fighting. I could go on. Very little of this ever made the news.
The major issues the media has today are Bush Derangement Syndrome (see the AP’s Jennifer Loven), a generally antiwar, anti-American bent, a reliance on stringers, and an eagerness to report bad news even irrespective of their other biases. Put all those together, and you have a recipe for an extremely one-sided victory being painted as a defeat.
Thus we get insurgent actions consistently described as “daring,” while the remarkable achievements of the ISF get short shrift.
The biggest gripe I have, though, is the disgusting inability to take any moral stand against the obvious evil we are fighting in Iraq. The press seems to regard everything out military or President says or does as suspect and subject to editorial qualification, but rarely extend the same indignity to the people chopping off heads.
March 22nd, 2006 at 2:57 pm
For instance, enemy victories are described as evidence the enemy is winning, while enemy defeats are described as evidence the country is unstable. It’s “lose-lose” reporting.
I would like to see, just once, an article with phrase like “In a blow to insurgents…” or “Insurgents suffered yet another defeat when…” I mean, they lose 99% of engagements, but I bet if you asked Americans they would tell you they think the insurgents were winning most battles.
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:37 pm
MSM interpretation:
Newsflash! Nazi’s defeated, but US still evil.
Even though we defeated the Nazi’s America is still an evil, imperialistic state with tons of problems. Before Hitler relunctantly stepped down from his position of clear superiority over the incompetent rapists of the American military, we were still a country of evil imperialists out for our own gain, a member of the evil empire that can do no good. Our incredibly incomeptent thug militarythat was stuck in an inescapable quagmire somehow managed to beat the mighty and sacred Nazis who were only freedom fighters against American domination, but hopefully we will relaspe and allow the culture of the Nazis to wash over us. Who are we to tell the Nazis are wrong when we have poor urban schoolchildren at home. Who are we to reprimand concentration camps when we don’t recycle enough?
I tell you, this is a dark day for America.
/MSM interpretation.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:10 pm
What a load, from all three of you, frankly.
The media always report the negative. Civil War, Korea, Vietnam and yes, in some cases, even in WW2. You recall a little dust-up over Patton slapping a private? And Ernie Pyle, who was perhaps the single most prominent reporter in the war, regularly reported on the hardships of the GI’s. But it goes beyond wars: Watergate, Iran Contra, Whitewater, Travelgate? And it goes beyond scandal: bad economic news gets more ink than positive. And gosh, the media covered Grandpa Munster’s death but entirely ignored his work with dinner theater.
You’re treating as a conspiracy something which is a constant.
And there’s an awful lot of negative war news that does not get reported. The media have had very little coverage of the Taliban-style regime being imposed in Southern Iraq, for example.
In any event, blaming the media for the fiasco of Mr. Bush’s occupation is simply absurd. It was not the media who sent too few troops to guard weapons caches, or stop what ended up being billions of dollars worth of looting, or close the main roads into and out of Syria, Iran and Jordan. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld are actually far more criminally incompetent than has been widely reported. They actively ignored rational plans and intelligent advice that conflicted with their ideological bent and pet theories.
It was not the MSM that refused additional forces. Not the MSM that called an insurgency now in its fourth year a collection of dead-enders and predicted their imminent demise again and again and again. It was not the MSM that managed tol convince itself it could control Iraq with 30,000 men. Not the MSM that refused to up-armor vehicles or send tanks.
If no one believes Mr. Bush today — and no one but a diminishing fragment of his base does — it is because Mr. Bush and his people have been wrong and wrong and wrong again. Mr. Bush earned his current low standing in the polls. He is an incompetent, pure and simple.
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Michael, thank you for this post. Sometimes humor can do heavy lifting that the simple truth can’t.
And yes people, if you REALLY think the media bears the responsibility for this war going south, I suggest you take a really hard look at why and how you’re coming to that conclusion.
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Something to add . . .
As I was driving home from work this afternoon I heard a piece on NPR about a program for former army commanders in Afghanistan, which will help them reintegrate themselves into civillian society. I was reminded that I have actually heard many “positive” news stories about goings-on in the Middle East and elsewhere. Of course, I don’t know if NPR is considered to be part of the MSM, and it’s true that the story following the Afghanistan piece was about wild ginseng poachers, but anyway . . . .
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Who said it was a conspiracy? Nice strawman you’ve knocked down there, but it’s crap, as is your assumption Iraq is a fiasco.
By any historical measure, Iraq is an incredible success. All the Monday-morning quarterbacking about more troops, less troops, guarding weapons caches, keeping the Iraqi Army, ad nauseam, doesn’t change that. You’re the incompetent here, not Bush.
If Bush cured cancer, you’d complain he didn’t also cure the flu and the cold.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:16 pm
My God Michael, your stupidity here is near-criminal. You act as though Saddam was not removed, democracy was not established, there were millions of casualties, there was no ISF gradually taking over… it’s just incredible how you wilfully gnore all the successes and focus on things that you can’t even prove were mistake.
What happened to “surprisingly reasonable?”
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:27 pm
They actively ignored rational plans and intelligent advice that conflicted with their ideological bent and pet theories.
Sheesh. Project much?
The Pentagon did most of the actual planning. What did they plan for? Massive refugee crises. Massive water shortages. Massive disease outbreaks. Massive food shortages. All the usual incidents to war, in other words. None of those things happened, and that is due to INCREDIBLY brilliant invasion plans.
Lots of armies have been criticized for looting, but this is the first invading army in history to be criticized for not preventing looting by the invaded people.
If there was a mistake, it was underestimating the irrationaility of the fascist Sunni minority that ruled Iraq. To this day, even after 3 nationwide votes, those evil idiots think if they just kill a few more people, they’ll be back in charge soon.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:33 pm
You recall a little dust-up over Patton slapping a private?
You recall a little thing called the Dachau Massacre? Surrendering German guards shot dead in cold blood? Makes Abu Ghraib look like a picnic.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:48 pm
TallDave:
I’m supposed to be pleasant to commentors, or at least civil. So let’s pretend you’re a rartional human being. Just for the fun of it.
A) I supported the war.
B) Yes, the invasion was brilliant.
C) I wasn’t talking about the invasion, that’s been over for three years.
D) The fact that Saddam was evil does not translate to mean that the occupation was competent. That’s simply bizarre reasoning.
E) “If there was a mistake?” Even the president admits there have been mistakes. You’re the only guy around still in any doubt on that score.
F) If we don’t learn from our mistakes — which we can’t do if we pretend they didn’t happen — we can’t fix them. Professional soldiers analyze errors honestly. Idiots pretend they never happened.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Well, you spent a whole paragraph summarizing a point I made — the press favors bad news over good. No one’s arguing that.
The problem is that the media is misrepresenting the war, as any milblogger can tell you. The problem isn’t that bad news is favored, the problem is even good news is spun as bad news. That has real consequences. Go back and read the North Vietnamese general Giap’s memoirs: he knows he won on the battlefield of American media, and our journalists were his good little foot-soldiers. Thus Tet, a decisive military victory that decimated the VC, got spun into a defeat. Support for the war plummeted, air power was withdrawn, and single NVA armored column crushed the helpless SV and ensured 70 million people would live in Communist dictatorship to this day.
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Well, I’ll do you the same favor and pretend you’re rational as well.
A) Good for you.
B) How did such an incompetent admin have such a brilliant plan?
C) OK, stipulated.
D) No one made that argument, but again excellent beatdown of a strawman.
E) There are always mistakes in war. Doesn’t mean anyone’s incompetent, just that war is difficult.
F) Professionals learn from mistakes by doing better the next time. Idiots sit around second-guessing and calling everyone incompetent.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm
In furtherance of my pretending you’re rational, let me give you historican Victor Hanson’s answer to the “my perfect war, but your disastrous peace” syndrome.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson030206.html
The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of Yorktown � or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa.
…
If many are determined to see the Iraqi war as lost without a plan, it hardly seems so to 130,000 U.S. soldiers still over there. They explain to visitors that they have always had a design: defeat the Islamic terrorists; train a competent Iraqi military; and provide requisite time for a democratic Iraqi government to garner public support away from the Islamists.
We point fingers at each other; soldiers under fire point to their achievements: Largely because they fight jihadists over there, there has not been another 9/11 here. Because Saddam is gone, reform is not just confined to Iraq, but taking hold in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. We hear the military is nearly ruined after conducting two wars and staying on to birth two democracies; its soldiers feel that they are more experienced and lethal, and on the verge of pulling off the nearly impossible: offering a people terrorized from nightmarish oppression something other than the false choice of dictatorship or theocracy � and making the U.S. safer for the effort.
…
In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our planners in Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war � not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the field, the more we are losing it at home.
Somewhere, Giap is smiling and nodding.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:23 pm
TallDave:
We got beat in Vietnam because it was life and death for them, and it wasn’t for us. It didn’t matter to us, it did to them. And we fought a limited war because we didn’t want to bring China into it as had happened in Korea. (That, it turns out, was largely ignorance on our part.) And, incidentally, we got beat because we had stupid tactics.
The media just reflected all of that, they didn’t cause it. The media didn’t locate Vietnam 10,000 miles away and next door to China, they didn’t cover it in jungle, they didn’t give the Vietnamese 20 years’ worth of experience in guerriila warfare, they didn’t force us to ignore what we had learned fighting a guerrilla war in the Philippines.
We were never going to win in Vietnam. Never. Because we had no intention of doing what we had to do. Sherman on war: “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over.” We were not prepared to fight that kind of war in Vietnam, and we weren’t prepared for all-out war because the war did not really matter to us. That wasn’t the fault of the media. We win wars by overpowering and obliterating our enemies: Hiroshima, Tokyo, Dresden, or by having allies who will do same: the Russian advance on Berlin. We won WW2 by being savage and utterly ruthless. We burned cities full of civilians to death. That’s how wars get won. We weren’t ever going to do that in Vietnam.
The Vietnam war lasted longer than ANY OTHER American war. Twice as long as WW2, how long was it supposed to go on? 10 years? 20 years? That’s how the media “lost” the war? By cutting it off at almost nine years?
This is baloney. As is the pitiful, absurd, dishonest, self-defeating effort to pin this mess on the media. The Media didn’t overrule the Army Chief of Staff. The Media didn’t ignore everything we knew about occupation. The Media didn’t spend two years pretending we weren’t facing a real fight.
So, sorry, but don’t try and serve me that bs. I know there are all kinds of websites run by pro-war writers who cannot face facts. I’m a pro-war writer who will.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Read some Ernie Pyle. He tried to make the battlefield and the cruel realities of war as real as he could make it for home readers, without making them throw up. Read a lot of him. Do you ever doubt which side he was on? Do you ever doubt which side he thought ought to win, no matter how ugly the war was?
I don’t. I read a lot of the coverage from Iraq today, and I can’t answer those questions the same way.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Cal:
WW2 was a relatively clean, up or down fight. At least as the people saw it. (Reality being rather more ambiguous.) Us vs. Nazis. Us vs. Japs. Conventional war with a conventional goal. I think one has a much easier time remaining united behind a goal when one has some clear idea what the goal is.
Is the media skeptical, even cynical about US motives? Yes. They swallowed the logic of this war almost entirely at the beginning. Embedded reporters went along as cheerleaders on the trip to Baghdad. And no one in the military or the White House seemed to have much problem with the reporting when it replayed the toppling of the Saddam statue twenty thousand times. Rumsfeld’s press conferences were utterly servile. Soldiers and Marines were universally saints.
As the initial logic of the war frayed, coverage became more skeptical. As administration mistakes become more obvious, coverage grew skeptical. After Abu Ghraib, and the miserable, gutless, dishonest administration response, things really started going south. How they not? As voices within the political class, the punditocracy and even within the military became more critical so did media coverage.
And the problem is that we aren’t fighting Saddam in Iraq, so propping him up as the bugaboo, as TallDave does, is beside the point. We beat him three years ago. Saddam’s been in jail for two years. His sons are dead. Most of the Baathist card deck is captured. Now we are fighting who, exactly? Some leftover Baathists, some Al Qaeda, some Shi’ites maneuvering for position, some crimninal gangs looking for a profit, some militias. And fighting for what, exactly? A Taliban state in Basra? For a free Kurdistan? For a decentralized federation in Iraq? Of course the coverage turns gray rather than black and white, the situation is gray.
I won’t defend everything the press does. I wouldn’t try. They are lazy, they have a pack mentality, they lack a degree of rigorousness I’d like to see. But they aren’t the reason things are a mess in Iraq.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Tall Dave,
The MSM did attempt to accomodate Bush with good news about the war. the MSM agreed to Bush’s request (insistance) of imbedding reporters because Bush (who didn’t want war) WANTED us all to see “Shock and Awe” while we ate our TV dinners. The MSM accomodated Bush when he wanted to land from a jet (an act that was rash and unsafe as a President) and stand in front of a banner saying MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. (He truly thought that was the end of the fight) and here we are NOW with his comments yesterday .. that was Bush at the podium, was it not? He called the conference, did he not? He chose the questioners, did he not? And he is the one who said in so many words … MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED … did he not?
Perhaps you are frustrated that things haven’t gone wuite as well as promised or expected, or perhaps you believe that there should be only one opinion in the country …. perhaps anyone who doesn’t follow the script 100% shouldn’t be allowed a voice …. but I don’t think that our founding fathers had that in mind. I was for a rigid, brutal, and overwhelming response to 9/11 …. I was never in favor of a corporate war, mimimzing assets and fighting on the cheap. War should be a total comittment by the whole country. It should be fought and won with finality. It should be fought with full time soldiers even if it means a draft …. It should not be fought with the bulk of the National Guard (they should be supplemental to the forces) when they are all too often the mainstreamers (I know someone who has been there for three tours and is happy that they can’t send him back for 24 months)
The MSM has a function here … point out the truth(even if it is ugly) and I will say this for sure …. if we didn’t have the MSM we would know NOTHING about this war and behaviors of our administration because even though I support the efforts this is most secretive administration that I have experienced.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I don’t have the time to really get into this right now, but I think TallDave is making some decent points that need to be addressed. On a basic level, I can accept the argument that our struggles in Iraq right now is to a significant degree a matter of public perception. The whole thing is too big, and too complex, to be easily described as either a success or a failure.
It suffers by comparison to the recent, relatively bloodless interventions in the 90’s, and to the invasion of Afghanistan. But it also looks pretty good in comparison to the world wars, Korea, and Vietnam.
Of course, the question at hand is how much responsibility the media - and by contrast, the Bush Administration - respectively bear for this public perception. I’m not sure what to say about that at the moment, but maybe I’ll chime in again tomorrow.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Please never, never use Erinie Pyle’s name in comparison with the MSM coverage of Iraq. Thanks.
Do I really have to specualte how the BDS media would describe the same action today? The argument has nothing to do with censoring bad news or human drama coming out of Iraq.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:45 pm
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060323/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_060322103347;_ylt=Ap.Fq8qM6.0_bhLlmX3zKr9X6GMA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Emboldened a day after a successful jailbreak, insurgents laid siege to another prison Wednesday. This time, U.S. troops and a special Iraqi unit thwarted the pre-dawn attack south of Baghdad, overwhelming the gunmen and capturing 50 of them, police said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Although the raid failed, the insurgents’ ability to put together such large and well-armed bands of fighters underlined concerns about the ability of Iraqi police and military to take over the fight from U.S. troops. Sixty militants participated in the assault, which attempted to free more jailed Sunni insurgents, police said.
See? You thought capturing 50 of the enemy in a failed raid was a victory, but in reality, it just “raises questions.”
There is no conceivable outcome to any action in Iraq that is not some kind of defeat in journalists’ eyes.
And as Tony Blair pointed out today, that gives insurgents total control in the propaganda war: if they blow something up, it’s our fault. The media doesn’t talk about how evil they are for wantonly killing people, they talk about how the ISF and Coalition have failed to provide security.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:51 pm
We got beat in Vietnam because it was life and death for them, and it wasn’t for us. It didn’t matter to us, it did to them. And we fought a limited war because we didn’t want to bring China into it as had happened in Korea. (That, it turns out, was largely ignorance on our part.) And, incidentally, we got beat because we had stupid tactics.
No offense, but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. We won every tactical situation. Never lost one major battle.
We lost for one reason, and one reason only: Americans were convinced to give up.
Giap knew it. He WROTE it. To deny it is the same kind of idiocy you claim to be critcizing. Did we learn anything from Vietnam?
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:54 pm
But they aren’t the reason things are a mess in Iraq.
No, they’re the reason gullible people believe things are a mess in Iraq.
Again, did we learn anything from Vietnam? Apparently many of us did not, or learned the wrong lesson. READ GIAP’S MEMOIRS. For Christ’s sake, even the enemy military commander says the press won the war for him.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:01 pm
The media’s self-definition as a counterweight and adversary to the U.S. government is not the reason America’s having a hard time keeping Iraq from falling apart. It’s the reason the media is having a hard time keeping its circulation base from falling apart.
However, it is attested in dozens of captured documents and intercepted conversations that the Islamist groups regard the Western media s a battlefield, if not a weapon in their hands, and as a place they can fight and win in ways they never can in an open fight with our military. Ought we to ignore that entirely?
You know it was anything but clean. You know what we did to the Japs in the Pacific islands, and what they did to us. But how did the “people” at home “see it”? Through the eyes and ears of the media.
In 1941, Japan bombed and torpedoed American military bases in Hawaii. The first large-scale military response of America to that was … an invasion of French colonies in North Africa.
What was the goal in World War II? Insure survival of America and accomplish the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and Japan. Even if it leads you through Tunisia. What is the goal now? Insure survival of America and defeat Islamist terrorism. Some say that road leads through Iraq.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Here, try the wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
Vietnamization received a severe test in the spring of 1972 when the North Vietnamese launched a massive offensive across the DMZ using conventional forces. Beginning March 30, the “Eastertide Offensive” quickly overran much of Military Region 1, formerly known as I Corps, including Quang Tri, and threatened the city of Hue. Early in April the North Vietnamese opened three additional fronts in the offensive in the Central Highlands and Binh Dinh province of Military Region 2, and against An Loc in Military Region 3, threatening to overrun the entire country.
The United States countered with a buildup of American airpower to support ARVN defensive operations and to conduct Operation Linebacker against North Vietnam, but continued the withdrawal of American troops, now numbering less than 100,000, as scheduled. By June only six infantry battalions remained in South Vietnam, and in August the last combat troops left the country. The ARVN eventually stopped the North Vietnamese offensive on all fronts, recapturing Quang Tri in September.
Nixon had promised South Vietnam that he would provide military support to them in the event of a crumbling military situation, or a military offensive from North Vietnam, to convince the Thieu regime to sign the ‘peace agreement’. But Nixon was fighting for his political life in the growing Watergate Scandal at the time, facing an increasingly hostile Congress, which held the power of appropriations, and a hostile public, sick of the Vietnam War. Thus, Nixon broke his promises to South Vietnam. Economic aid to South Vietnam continued (after being cut nearly in half), but most of it was siphoned off by corrupt elements in the South Vietnamese government, and little of it actually went to the war effort. At the same time, aid to North Vietnam from the USSR and China began to increase, and with the U.S. out, the two countries no longer saw the war as significant to their U.S. relations. The balance of power had clearly shifted to the North, and North Vietnam subsequently launched a major military offensive against the south.
………………………
South Vietnam could easily have been held with American airpower; they chew up armor like it’s nothing, as 1972 proved. In fact, keeping them there as deterrent probably have been sufficient. It was the greatest military blunder, the most shameful betrayal of an ally, and the worst failure of will in our history.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:03 pm
WW2 was a relatively clean, up or down fight. At least as the people saw it.
Exactly, the people didn’t see the Dachau Massacre. They didn’t see the horrors of Okinawa.
Today, they would get nothing but.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:58 pm
TallDave,
I think you attribute to the media far too much influence over Americans. While I’m in no position to discuss the media’s portrayal of Vietnam (having been born in ‘74 and thus having no firsthand knowledge) I know that throughout the Iraq war there have been endless media sources available. Some of the MSM has been overly critical, but they are far from the only game in town. For instance, Fox News has been relentlessly pro-war and a LOT of people tune in.
Give the American people some credit. We are not slaves to the news media.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:07 am
I’d also like to add that few nations have the stamina for prolonged war. Even if the media had been nothing but positive during Vietnam, I suspect that a lot of Americans would have been very tired of the war after 9 years. It’s just human nature.
We are seeing the same kind of war fatigue now. It’s not so much that things have gone wrong or that things having gone brilliantly, it’s just that things have gone on and on. The media may be feeding into the negative perceptions but they didn’t create the hunger.
That said, I do think there is some truth that many in the traditional media have been hostile towards our mission and have tended to portray our nation poorly even in cases where the specific outcome was nuetral or positive.
March 23rd, 2006 at 3:59 am
Forgive my quoting at length, but there’s more than just a narrative in there. There’s a presumed structure that I find interesting. It amounts to this: The U.S. media has veto power over every U.S. war. And I’m not sure we want to enshrine that without thinking about it a little more.
The mass media has known it had the ability to whip up the people into a war frenzy since 1898. Only since Vietnam has it discovered this power to throw sand in the cogs of war.
We both point to Ernie Pyle. Ernie Pyle died the day in 1965 or ‘66 the New York Times discovered the military had been lying to its reporters about body counts in Vietnam or the Tonkin incident. The media turned against Johnson, against Vietnam, and it helped disempower the presidency and end the war.
If you think that’s a good thing, you celebrate it; if you think it’s a bad thing, you don’t. But nobody seems to have considered this new, unelected force which has claimed and proven its ability to direct American history.
You say, “yes, but WWII was a good war and these are bad wars.” But who decides that? The media. World War II was not so good at all, of course. We fought in the name of democracy — with the biggest totalitarian of all on our side. We fought for people’s right to determine their national destinies — by the side of colonial empires. We machine-gunned surrendering Japanese, rounded up dissidents and foreigners, committed colossal military blunders killing thousands of American boys, nuked cities. Was Tarawa necessary? Was the Italian campaign a quagmire? How many French women were raped by American servicemen? Who knew what about Pearl Harbor and when?
As for the New York Times, it may well feel that lying to the New York Times is an impeachable offense, but I’m not sure it is.
Should the media’s coverage of a war — any war — be driven by its perception of the U.S. administration?
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:30 am
Cal:
I think you’re reaching way too far. When people lie to reporters, reporters start reporting that they’ve been lied to. That’s what happened in Vietnam coverage.
The media in this war have been scrupulously pro-soldier. The blame-the-media line of attack in Vietnam was thet they derogated not just the command but the soldiers. This time they’ve been very positive in their reporting on soldiers but, once again, it’s the media’s fault. How, exactly? Did the media torturte prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or did American soldiers? Are you suggesting it should not have been reported? Did the media put too few troops in Iraq or did the administration?
We can either have a news media that tells us the truth as well as it can, or we can have a news media that operates as a house organ for whatever administration is in power. The former risks “helping the enemy” and perhaps causes a cycle of disillusion, but the latter makes disillusion inevitable and that ends up helping the enemy.
This is not 1944. We don’t sit around waiting for a newspaper to land on the front porch and learn only the news produced by a handful of reporters. If ABC doesn’t tell us, Al Jazeera, or Agence France Presse, or the Guardian or some other of the endless number of sources will.
It seems strange to me that we have this chorus of attacks on an increasingly small segment of the overall news business. Anyone with a computer or cable has a hundred different newspapers, TV networks, podcasts, blogs, and official sites available. This blame-the-media campaign is the Right’s version of Vietnam syndrome. You’re fighting the last war, just like the Left.
For every overly negative story you quote there are negative stories not being covered. Shia thugs are in Basra right now forcing women off campuses and into burqas, censoring music, beating up barbers for shaving men’s beards, and in general turning southern Iraq into Afghanistan circa 2002. We aren’t seeing much of that story.
We aren’t seeing much of stories that ayatollah ali al-Sistani issues fatwas urging his followers to hunt homosexuals down like animals.
We aren’t reading about the fact that after three years Iraq has less electricity and lower oil production than it had at the beginning of the war.
We aren’t reading much about the fact that at least some Iraqi police are acting as sectarian hit squads and are deeply distrusted by Iraqis.
We aren’t getting daily updates reminding us that the Iraqis still don’t have a government.
A lot of stories don’t get reported, some good, some bad. What gets reported are the explosions and the deaths and little else.
But even if the MSM acted like Pravda do you honestly imagine this thing would turn around for the American people? Today we lost ten guys but hey, we built a school and Marines handed out lollipops in Ramadi? Believe me, the administration does not want honest reporting on its rebuilding efforts.
The facts are what’s killing support for this war: no WMD, looting, Abu Ghraib, lagging reconstruction, Iraqi failure to set up a government, the on-again, off-again nature of the Iraqi forces, IED’s. The American people are not going to rally behind, “As they stand up, we’ll stand down, and then hooray, we’ll have a repressive theocracy.”
Sorry, but you guys are kidding yourselves. It isn’t the media, it’s the facts, and it’s the lies, and it’s the mistakes, and it’s the confusion of mission. “On to Berlin?” Yes. “They stand up, we stand down?” Not so much.
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:36 am
[...] Michael Reynolds of The Mighty Middle mocks the complaints about the media’s lack of balance in covering the situation in Iraq, giving a series of hypothetical and silly examples of news coverage of good news in incidents from history and scripture (the Garden of Eden, Agincourt, the invasion of Persia by the Mongols, the bubonic plague in medieval Europe, the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, the attack on Pearl Harbor). Michael’s post was cross-posted here at Donklephant. [...]
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:55 am
In 1941, Japan bombed and torpedoed American military bases in Hawaii. The first large-scale military response of America to that was … an invasion of French colonies in North Africa.
Depends on how you slice it, I guess, but I always figured the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea to have been somewhat major, and I’m pretty certain that, token though it was, we bombed Tokyo well before Operation Torch.