In case you missed your chance Monday to order my new collection of book reviews and cultural commentary After Further Review, there’s still time!
But today I want to make another book announcement.
Next month, Bombardier Books will be publishing Against the Corporate Media: Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You, edited by our friend Michael Walsh. I am one of the 42 contributors, with a chapter on “The Russia Hoax and the High Cost of Fake Media Narratives.”
Sample from my chapter:
The media herd mentality is most pernicious when it is congruent with a narrative a government entity or powerful politically-preferred interest has formulated to serve its own political interests. The media amplify every claim of an environmental “crisis” from the Environmental Protection Agency or Consumer Product Safety Commission with complete credulity. The coverage of the George Floyd’s death while in police custody and the coverage of the riots in its aftermath were derelict distortions of reality because no one in the media had the courage to express any doubt about the claims of Black Lives Matter. Perhaps the most grotesque media sycophancy of the last fifty years was the McMartin Preschool scandal in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, when a wholly fabricated “child molestation” epidemic was week after week breathlessly reported without a scintilla of skepticism or diligence by the media, all of which buttressed the ambitions of headline-seeking prosecutors and “recovered memory” quacks who were treated as though they had the credibility of Nobel Prize winners in physics. (This episode was repeated in several other cities around the country until it was belatedly recognized as a fabrication in every instance.)
This kind of media malpractice can have serious political consequences beyond elections or criminal prosecutions. Perhaps the most significant example is the media coverage of the January 1968 “Tet” offensive during the Vietnam War. By 1968 the media was already hostile to the war and was reporting the Johnson Administration’s prosecution of it with deep skepticism and cynicism. When the attack of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army caught U.S. and South Vietnamese forces by surprise, the media ran with the story line that the attack was a major defeat for the U.S. and South Vietnam, arguably the greatest military disaster America had ever suffered, including Pearl Harbor. The decisive media blow came from CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite, then called “the most trusted man in America,” who closed a gloomy news special in late February with what he labeled as his subjective opinion (though this qualification was lost on the public): “[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate . . . [I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
President Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” As measured in opinion polls, the American public, growing weary of the war, turned decisively against it. What North Vietnam could not win on the battlefield was won on the campuses and in the newsrooms—and finally the living rooms—of America. Two weeks later Johnson was nearly defeated in the New Hampshire primary by anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, and two weeks after that Johnson startled the nation by dropping out of the 1968 presidential contest.
Yet a closer look, which all subsequent military analyses confirmed, shows the Tet Offensive was a decisive defeat for the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. You would have looked in vain for any media coverage of the event that reflected this reality, a “malfunction” told in extensive detail in Peter Braestrup’s magisterial account published a decade later, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington. Braestrup’s book on this mis-reporting ought to be assigned in every journalism course in America, but likely it is not read anywhere.
You can preorder your copy today, and pair it up with Upon Further Review.
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