Tet tut

City Lights comments on Rob Natelson's assessment in this week's Outpost of media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam. Interesting he should bring that up, since Rob and I have had a fairly long exchange of e-mails on that very topic this week.

To sum up, Rob essentially argues that Tet was a huge setback for North Vietnam. Tactically, the North attained some of its geographic objectives but was unable to hold them. Strategically, the offensive nearly destroyed the guerrilla forces in the South and failed to ignite a revolution against the Americans. U.S. media deliberately distorted the results of the offensive because they had their own cynical agenda and were tired of the war.

I agree with him that coverage at the time wasn't all it could have been, but there were understandable reasons for that. It's pretty hard to hit the ground running covering a massive, wide-ranging assault when you've mostly been following small guerrilla operations and the occasional Khe Sanh siege. It's also true, I think, that the coverage never caught up with the reality of the battle, but there also were good reasons for that. For one thing, the Pentagon's credibility had been pretty well spent earlier in the war. For another, so much began happening on the home front -- mass protests, assassinations, LBJ's withdrawal -- that the followup to Tet got eclipsed.

To me it seems, although I admit I don't have the data to prove it, that media coverage was generally more conservative than public attitudes, and that rather than shape public opinion the media largely lagged behind in reacting to it. Furthermore, while Tet may have failed in conventional military terms, there was nothing conventional about that war. Of all the hard lessons that war taught us, Tet taught us the hardest: No matter how much of an edge one side in a war may have in wealth, logistics and military technology, the side that is willing to pay the heaviest price usually wins. North Vietnam could lose tens of thousands of soldiers and just keep coming. We lost our stomach for it.

But my biggest disagreement with Rob was over his notion that media coverage is much better now than then. This morning, I wrote this response: I wish I could be as sanguine about the breakup of the [media] oligarchy as you are. During the Vietnam War we had three major networks, all of which had greater news resources then than now. I think their reporters would tell you that all those news operations were more independent of corporate concerns then than now, too.

Now we have four networks, but Fox doesn't do news outside of its all-news channel. Of the three all-news channels, one is owned by Rupert Murdoch, one of the biggest oligarchs of them all; one is owned by Time Warner; and one by Microsoft and NBC. This is hardly the burgeoning of independent media.

The situation among newspapers is even worse. Almost across the board, newspapers have scaled back coverage, especially foreign coverage, since Vietnam. While a few new players have arisen -- USA Today, most prominently -- others have died off, including major dailies in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. Where multiple dailies survive in the same city, they mostly do so through joint operating agreements.

Of course, there's the internet, but it still provides little original reporting. It does provide access to major foreign news outlets, and that has been extremely valuable. This isn't coverage that didn't exist before, but it is coverage that few Americans got to see.

For my money, talk radio adds almost nothing to the debate. Limbaugh hasn't had a fresh idea in 10 years. Hannity parrots the Republican line. O'Reilly is articulate and nonpartisan, but he's also a bit of a bully and tends to obsess on social issues. Michael Reagan can't get over his childhood. Savage is a wacko. Roth is unlistenable. I would trade the whole batch for one good episode of "Firing Line."

At the same time, the Pentagon has become far more effective at controlling war coverage. While there was good stuff about the Iraq War in newspapers, TV coverage struck me as almost universally prettified. Even the easiest wars are ugly affairs, but very little of that made its way to American viewers.