Big Story

One of the most bitter and enduring conflicts in recent American history is the fight between the news media and the military over access to U.S. combat operations in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf War. The legacy of Vietnam looms large. Among many military folk, the belief persists that adversarial newsmen, especially TV newsmen, lost the war. Veteran journalists variously contend that their reporting merely exposed deep flaws in U.S. strategy or conveyed Vietnam's realities. Still casting a long shadow over this recurring debate is the Communists' surprise 1968 Tet Offensive and how the media reported and analyzed it. Historians agree that Tet resulted in a costly battlefield setback for Communist forces. Yet its effects back home brought on a political crisis, the virtual abdication of the president, and a change in national policy that led to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 and Hanoi's conquest of the south in 1975. Peter Braestrup, a veteran journalist and Saigon-based reporter for the Washington Post during the Tet Offensive, examines how the American press and television reported and interpreted the crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington. In its first edition, Big Story won the 1978 Sigma Delta Chi Award for research in journalism. Map.