If you look at the facts, and at this report, you'll see one hell of a piece of sophisticated propaganda, and it's no wonder that America lost this war not on the ground, but in domestic politics. Every enemy advance is presented in an ominous light that suggests a more general superiority, but any American/South Vietnamese advance is presented as just holding on, merely a small battle won. You'd never know from this report that the Tet Offensive ended with a substantial military victory for the Americans and South Vietnamese. Or that the commmunists killed civilians in droves, that the communists were the ones who caused of the misery fo the population by attacking. Instead, what's presented is the innuendo that most of the civilians were killed by the Americans.You can bet that the reporting in North Vietnam was very different in the light it shone on its own troops.
- Near the end, regarding the battle of Khe Sanh: "The hidden forces of the communists are considered so formidable that the marines don't send out patrols." Well, this is what happens during a heavy siege. "The only effective American force is firepower." What else would it be, in this context? But the point is to present the Americans as weak, vulnerable, and inneffective. Little twists, a sentence at a time.
- I'll give these reporters one thing-- they certainly knew how to manipulate metaphors, connotations, and innuendoes. These were the days when far more reporters were English majors than communications majors, and they knew their literary devices. Their mastery is almost too good, too showy, and by today's standards of reporting, it seems transparent. In those days, reporting was still expected to be objective, but today we've become inured to blatant bias, and in the 2003 reporting of the invasion of Iraq, it was more subtle, evident less in grand and sweeping anti-war spoken paragraphs than in half-constrained expressions of glee when the battle went badly for Americans, except for Fox, which went to the other extreme. The novelty of the biased reporting probably had something to do with its effectiveness as propaganda, just as the novelty of the romantic novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" led to a spate of copycat suicides in Europe when it was published in the late 18th century. Today, we wouldn't expect to see this effect from a novel. We need video.
- This is a great historical document. The future wll have a field day with it.

Wow, this is really intense.