Quote:
Originally posted by Hell Puppy@Sep 23 2004, 02:35 AM
I think I was having my diaper changed when it aired live if i was even born then. But based on what I remember reading, Cronkite's wording was that he pronounced the war "unwin-able" after the Tet offensive.
Plenty of journalists doing the same thing right now in regards to Iraq.
TV and real time war reporting along with the fact that most Americans obtain their views and opinions about the world from television quite frankly makes it tough to run a war. The average American has no clue about geopolitics and has no stomach for the harsh reality that people die in war.
Can you imagine if there had been live coverage of the carnage of D-Day during World War 2?
Or better still.... Let the average idiot on the street try to understand why we took 26,000 casualties including almost 7000 deaths over the course of 4 weeks just to take a tiny little island called Iwo Jima. They would be calling for the President's head.
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Cronkite's editorial was in early (February, I think) 1968.
Cronkite didn't make his statement in a vacuum - long before the mainstream media began doing more than parrotting the Administration line, more and more people from all walks of life were questioning the war in Vietnam. Trying to compare Vietnam or Iraq to D-Day or Iwo Jima is way off base, btw ... WWII is unique in American history in that there was not substantial opposition to the war once it began. There were questions about the WMD, er, incident(s) in the Tonken Gulf almost from the time they happened, and the charges of being "unprovoked" were bigger lies than anything Bush has told so far (that we know about).
What Cronkite FINALLY said in public was what the real journalists in the field had been TELLING HIM for two years ... that the public was being lied to about Vietnam, the alleged progress we were making, etc. Journalists (television, radio, print) would return from the field to the 5-o'clock-follies (daily Pentagon briefing) and be completely unable to recognize operations they had just returned from - and the dispatches they sent to their organizations were routinely ignored and reformatted to fit the Administration line.