The Tet Offensive By Arthur J. Dommen

January 31, 1968 North Vietnamese attacked over 100 cities throughout South Vietnam on thirty-five of forty-four province capitals, thirty-six district towns, and many villages and hamlets. Dubbed the “Tet Offensive” because it coincided with the Vietnamese New Year’s holiday, Tet, was a turning point in the Vietnam War. Most historians agree that the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the Vietnam War as events shifted the role of United States involvement in Southeast Asia as the shock it produced was the catalyst that led to the reevaluation of U.S. policy. While intelligence failure contributed to the shift in the Vietnam War, most historians have disagreed on the role of the media in aiding the American public’s views against the war.

Whilst, towards the beginning of the war, the media being released was largely in support of the war efforts, later years of the conflict exhibited a more negative press, where more negative portrayals of troops were being sent home and featured on the news. Bias of the media played a large part in moulding public opinion of the conflict going on in Vietnam, exemplified in media reports of the Tet Offensive which, “was actually a U.S victory because the North suffered enormous casualties. Television, however, portrayed the attack as a brutal defeat for the U.S” (McLaughlin 2015, The Turning Point, para. 2). As hypothesised by David Halberstam, Vietnam was, “the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchor man,” (Hallin n.d., para. 9) when Walter Cronkite, “[expressed] his view that the war was unwinnable, and that the United States would have to find a way out.” (Hallin n.d., para. 9) Many speculations about the media defining public opinion about the war are made largely due to the fact that civilian opinion changed as media reports began to become more negative, which then lead to many anti-war protests and the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Due to the negative effects the lack of censorship had on the public during Vietnam, the government recognised the power of the media and changed censorship practices for following

During this time period, the use of television boomed, and for the first time was depended on and trusted significantly more than newspapers. “[Even though] the coverage of the war was significant, a relatively small portion of the coverage was actually combat footage (Anderson). Although producers captured thousands of hours worth of combat footage, they could not push out all of the coverage they captured, “The purpose being not to avoid showing the ugly side of war, but rather to avoid offending families of war victims" (Hallin). The media did not intentionally try to turn america against the war, to the contrary the media saw the war necessary to national security. However, as the war continued on in vietnam and watched daily in living rooms across the country, both the american soldiers and the public became disillusioned as they did not see an end to the war

There are only two comprehensive inferences that can be drawn upon when assessing the impact and legacy of the reporting of the Vietnam War on America and its media; the impact was enormous and its legacy unending. More than thirty years have passed since the American military withdrew from Vietnam, and in that time, the war has continued to permeate the cultural, and political landscape of America, impacting all subsequent war

The ‘Tet Offensive’ showed the first signs of the effect the media had in Vietnam, which led to the the question of “why did the audience see what they saw?” Firstly, unlike previous wars journalists had “extraordinary” freedom to cover Vietnam without any direct government intervention. Overtime this noticeably created a problem where the harsh brutal accounts from journalists differed from the positive optimism that United States Officials portrayed. The media was simply the messenger to the American people. But this was the first instance where technological advances had allowed a war to be played out on your own television screen every night of the week. The journalists reacted in the same way as the American public; they too were shocked beyond belief at the constant scenes of burning villages, bloody soldiers and lifeless bodies. These feelings came across in the broadcasts and like the ‘media effects theory’ explains, naturally Americans took up that same belief. This was the first time that the American public showed collective beliefs opposing to the war. To further push public opinion against the war, Hallin suggested that there was a “…declining morale among American troops in the field…”. The thirty-minute nightly

By 1968, more than half of the American people relied on television as their principal source of news. What they saw informed, engrossed, and unsettled them. CBS Evening News anchor Harry Reasoner referred to it as “horrors and failures.” The Vietnam War dominated the network newscast as it never had before. Suddenly the war was everywhere. The impact on the American public would indeed be great. It set off a critical reaction to the war within the American media and gave greater credence to arguments against the war that a vocal protest movement had been voicing for some time. The media coverage of the Tet Offensive had a great influence on the eventual outcome of the fighting and its aftermath. Clarence Wyatt, author of Paper

The 1960s was a period of immense change in America. The decade brought about various social changes such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement. These movements would forever change the landscape of America. However, the discussion of the Vietnam War was never far from people’s minds. This war would serve as an introduction to what war was to the home front. It was in the homes of America where so many had been previously sheltered from the realities of war. During previous conflicts, there had been a military censorship on all media that pertained to war. This would not be the case in Vietnam, it would be completely uncensored. The ability for reporters to provide a commentary on the war without censorship would change the all-American, Captain America view that Americans had in previous wars. The lack of censorship would be a major factor in the overall soldier experience in the Vietnam war.

Regarded as one of the most controversial and polarizing military conflicts in U.S. history, the Vietnam War has left a deep and lasting impact on American culture, politics, and foreign policy. From 1964 to the present day, the Vietnam War redefined the scope of U.S. influence both at home and abroad, and caused a fundamental shift in American society that dramatically changed the way in which Americans viewed their government and the role of the United States as a world power. For an entire generation of Americans, who watched as the horrors of the war in Vietnam unfold before the spotlight of the national media, the Vietnam War directly challenged the superiority of the American way and the infallibility of U.S military dominance. In truth, the U.S government, U.S. military, and the American people as a whole struggled to accept the lessons of America’s greatest military failure and the sobering reality of the war’s consequences. To this day, the legacy of this so-called “American War” continues to resonate throughout the fabric of American society as a cautionary tale of U.S foreign intervention and blind acceptance of open-ended conflict.

The Vietnam War was a long, expensive war between the communist regime of North Vietnam and Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its ally the United States of America. The war began in 1954 after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, and continued against the image of the previous Cold War between two global superpowers; the US and The Soviet Union. In this essay I will investigate the changing role and attitudes of the media in the United States, and the impact, if any, it had on the United States Government.

After early 1968 it was evident that the United States would not soon or successfully conclude its involvement in Indochina. The size and breadth of the attack were stunning enough, but the images coming out of South Vietnam in the early days added to the shock and impact of the Tet Offensive. Television reports showed the fighting on the embassy grounds, chaos in the streets of Saigon, the assassination of an NLF prisoner by a South Vietnamese general on a Saigon street, and pitched battles in other cities such as Hue, while the Associated Press reported an American officer in the village of Ben Tre stating that, “we had to destroy it in order to save it.” As Kathleen Turner, author of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Dual War, writes, “With Tet…the fighting was suddenly, inescapably, terrifyingly close to the Saigon-based news teams. The proximity of the battle guaranteed extensive coverage by media institutions: it was easily accessible, and it was for many the first extended view of the enemy.” Walter Cronkite on the first reports of Tet asking, “What the hell is going? I thought we were winning the war!” Tet dominated the news coverage on television, newspapers, and magazines as people followed the fighting in Saigon, Hue, and Khe Sanh and saw the destruction and dislocation that was occurring throughout

Although the Tet offensive was one of America’s greatest tactical victories, however it was a great political loss for the Americans. America saw a victory and a loss, tactically America won while politically America suffered a drastic loss. The attack intensified the anti-war movement in America, it also discredited U.S. president Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. military officials. The Tet offensive was a great representation of a major turning point politically and socially against the Americans. When asked on the involvement of American troops in the Vietnam War, Charles De Gaulle stated “I predict… that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire”

The 1968 Tet Offensive was an event that changed history, an event that led to another event that no country thought would ever happen. A United States defeat, what every country in the world after World War II saw as impossible, was made possible by the “failed” mission of the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was an attack conducted by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) on the South Vietnamese government in an attempt to defeat the South, which were being supported by the United States for being anti-communist. The Tet Offensive was launched on the Vietnamese new year of Tet on January 30 and 31. The Tet Offensive was a strategy developed by North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap during the Vietnam War.

When analyzing the Vietnam war it is clear that the press had a significant role in helping bring the conflict to an end. Largely, this was the result of the gruesome reports and images that the networks chose to air and the public’s corresponding opposition to the war. To understand this relationship, and hence helping to end the war, it is necessary to look at three distinct areas. These include the reason that the press chose to air gruesome reports, specific reports that outraged the public, and examples of the corresponding changes in public opinion.

The Tet offensive is touched in both “The Doves Ascendant: The American Antiwar Movement in 1968” and “1968: The End and the Beginning in the United States and Western Europe”. As we learned in class the Tet offensive was a military strategy that caught the United States’ forced off guard on a Vietnamese holiday.

In times of War, the media plays a crucial role both in reporting, monitoring and giving updates. During the Vietnam War of 1955-1975, the American press played crucial roles of reporting until it ended up shifting its tone under the influence of occurrence of some events like the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, the bombing of Cambodia and leaking of Pentagon papers resulting into lack of trust in the press (Knightly 1975). From the beginning of the war up to present times there have been undying debates over the role of media in the war. The have been various criticisms over the American News Media’s actions and influences on the outcome of the war. The debate is embedded on the particular political assumptions perceived across the