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Media misrepresentation came to a decisive head in the handling of the Vietcong ‘Tet Offensive’ on January 30, 1968. The military position at this time was that the Americans and their Vietnamese allies, having strongly established themselves in all the urban centers of the South, were winning important successes in the countryside too. That persuaded the Communists to change their tactics, and try their first major offensive in the open. On the first day of Tet, the lunar New Year holiday previously observed as a truce, their units attacked five of Vietnam’s six cities, most of its provincial and district capitals, and fifty hamlets. The Vietnam forces and units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), though taken by surprise, responded quickly. Within a week they had regained all the ground the attackers had won, exceptin one town, Hue, which was not retaken until February 24. Media coverage concentrated on the fact that the Vietcong enjoyed initial successes in attacking the Government Palace in Saigon, the airport, and the US embassy compound, and the cameras focused on the continued fighting in Hue rather than US successes elsewhere. In military terms, the Tet Offensive was the worst reverse the Vietcong suffered throughout the war: they lost over 40,000 of their best troops and a great number of heavy weapons. But the media, especially TV, presented it as a decisive American defeat, a Vietcong victory on the scale of Dien Bien Phu.
An elaborate study of the coverage, conducted in 1977, showed exactly how this reversal of the truth, which was not on the whole deliberate, came about- If media misrepresentation of the Tet Offensive was the immediate cause of LBJ’s decision to quit, both office and Vietnam, more fundamental still was its presentation of any decisive and forceful act of the Johnson White House as in some inescapable sense malevolent. The media was teaching the American people to hate their chief executive precisely because he took executive decision
