Vietnam

Nets Declare Bush's Vietnam Lesson Hypocritical and Invalid, Only ABC Shows Skulls
By Brent Baker | August 22, 2007 | 10:01 PM EDT
The broadcast network evening news shows on Wednesday night pounced on President Bush's reminder that the U.S. pullout from Vietnam led to millions being killed, as all three shows featured historians to discredit Bush's parallel to what may happen if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, and NBC portrayed Bush as hypocritical for raising Vietnam after earlier rejecting comparisons to Iraq as a Vietnam-like quagmire. Only ABC, leading into Bush recalling “killing fields,” showed a picture of stacks of skulls and ABC also uniquely featured two Vietnam vets who backed Bush's case.

NBC anchor Brian Williams asserted that “after years of rejecting any comparisons to Vietnam, today President Bush invoked the Vietnam War as a way of saying the U.S. must stay the course and not pull out.” Reporter Kelly O'Donnell noted that “after years of pushback rejecting the Vietnam-Iraq comparison, today in Kansas City, before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the President made a turn and embraced his own Vietnam analogy.” O'Donnell insisted: “Mr. Bush's comments to the VFW today contrast with what he said last year when asked if he saw an Iraq-Vietnam connection.” Viewers then got just this very short soundbite from Bush at a June 14, 2006 press conference: “I don't see the parallels.” Contrary to NBC's implication, there is no conflict between scorning of a liberal comparison of Iraq to a Vietnam-like quagmire and suggesting other lesson about Vietnam.
NYT: Iraq Isn't Like Vietnam -- Now That Bush Makes Comparison
By Clay Waters | August 22, 2007 | 2:39 PM EDT

The New York Times front-page "News Analysis" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Rutenberg delved into President Bush's dissatisfaction with Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his failure to bring Sunnis and Shiites together politically -- and strangely finds Bush "already facing skepticism" about the troop surge in Iraq (um, didn't that surge start some months ago?)

Reuters Avoided Comparing Iraq to Vietnam in Pol Pot Genocide Story--Hmmm...
By Lynn Davidson | August 1, 2007 | 11:02 PM EDT
Reuters

The media love comparing Iraq to the Vietnam War. So why didn't Reuters relate Iraq to this July 31 story about a joint Cambodian-UN tribunal that charged one of Pol Pot's top henchmen with crimes against humanity related to the deaths of 1.7 million people in that country's “Killing Fields?”

They also like to link America's actions to unpleasant world events. So why not even mention how the US pulling out of Vietnam and Congress halting aid to Vietnam and Cambodia, allowed the rise of Pol Pot's brutal and deadly communist Khmer Rouge regime that killed, tortured and displaced millions? Maybe take it a step further and connect it to what might happen if the US follows the wishes of many Democrats and withdraws from Iraq too soon?

The tribunal charged Duch with the deaths of 1.7 million people after confessing to “committing multiple atrocities during this (sic) time as head of the capital's notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 interrogation center.” (emphasis mine throughout):

CNN Reporter Admits Paying to Stage Story, Capping Nearly a Decade of Network Deception
By Tom Blumer | June 12, 2007 | 10:11 AM EDT

So, what is CNN?

THIS is CNN in 1998; the link is to a story debunking the network's Peter Arnett and April Oliver, who accused Vietnam soldiers of war crimes in Operation Tailwind.

This is from 2003. The network's Eason Jordan confessed that the network twisted the news out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, thereby giving false impressions of the regime to the world so that it could maintain its access to the country (the article is posted at the author's web host for fair use and discussion purposes).

Then there's this from 2005. Eason Jordan accused the US military in Iraq of targeting journalists, and ultimately resigned in the wake of the outcry. "Somehow" the actual video footage of Jordan's accusations, made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, never surfaced.

Next, there's this incredible episode from 2006, where the network showed videos of enemy snipers killing American soldiers in Iraq. Even more incredibly, the videos were marketed on corporate affiliate Time Warner Cable as an On Demand offering.

Now there's this -- paying to have a story staged (bolds are mine):

CBS Celebrates Cronkite Who 'Stood Up To' President in 'Another Unpopular War'
By Brad Wilmouth | May 20, 2007 | 11:57 PM EDT

Friday's CBS Evening News plugged its special on Walter Cronkite with a story, as introduced by Katie Couric, about a "journalist who stood up to the Commander-in-Chief" during a time of "another unpopular war," as Couric was transitioning from a story about the debate over Iraq War funding. Couric was referring to Cronkite's decision in February 1968 to declare on the air that America would have to negotiate without victory to end the Vietnam War.

No Sherlock: NPR Anchor Asks If Viet Cong Spy at Time Magazine Cost American Lives
By Tim Graham | April 30, 2007 | 7:55 AM EDT

Pham Xuan Am served on the staff of Time magazine during the Vietnam War – and he also served as a communist spy for the Viet Cong. This should have been the cause of great embarrassment for liberal media outlets like Time. Instead, in 1990, former Time reporter H.D.S.

'Unsubstantiated' Swift Boat Allegations Rise Again in the New York Times
By Clay Waters | April 5, 2007 | 12:49 PM EDT

It was a Vietnam flashback in Thursday's news pages, as New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg deployed 2004-era Times language to attack the veracity of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Vietnam veterans group that successfully challenged John Kerry's Vietnam war record. The story concerned Sam Fox, Bush's nominee for ambassador to Belgium, who was forced to withdraw from consideration after Sen.

Rosie Implies Captured Brits Are A Contrived 'Gulf of Tonkin' For War With Iran
By Justin McCarthy | March 26, 2007 | 1:19 PM EDT

On the March 26 edition of "The View," co-host Rosie O’Donnell discussed the Iranian seizure of British sailors. Rosie again gave out false information on national television and implied that this may be a hoax so to provide the president with an excuse to go to war.

Brian Williams Inadvertently Scolds Chris Matthews
By Geoffrey Dickens | February 23, 2007 | 4:27 PM EST

On last night's Hardball, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams unintentionally slammed Chris Matthews on his own show. Discussing Walter Cronkite's famous declaration of U.S defeat in Vietnam, Williams claimed it was a watershed moment because the former CBS anchor had earned the "credibility" of his viewers but warned today's anchors can't have the same effect because: "People do Cronkite-esque statements on topics every day now.

AP: US Troops Are Poor, Few Options and KIAs from rural Areas 'Disproportionate'
By Warner Todd Huston | February 20, 2007 | 9:29 AM EST

Talk about creating a false dichotomy geared to discrediting a policy! The AP has generated a doosie in theirs titled "Rural America bears scars from Iraq war" and subtitled "Nearly half of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq came from a small town".

Their main thrust is that small towns are somehow seeing their sons fall on the field of battle in "unfair" numbers.

Across the nation, small towns are quietly bearing a disproportionate burden of war. Nearly half of the more than 3,100 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have come from towns like McKeesport, where fewer than 25,000 people live, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. One in five hailed from hometowns of less than 5,000.
At first blush this might seem to be alarming. But, when one lets that first emotive rush fade and allows a little common sense to be applied to the situation, it doesn't seem so outrageous. The fact is, youngsters from rural areas are simply far more prone to joining the military in the first place and always have been. So it is a natural matter of strict statistics that more from those areas would fall in battle. After all, there are more of them.

So, what we are left with is a naked, emotive effort to cause some sort of outrage over the perceived unfairness of this statistic, even as there is no "fair" or "unfair" component to it. It is simply a fact.

Prof Pushing 'Spat-upon Myth' is Debunked (Twice) in the Very Same Magazine Where His Article Appeared!
By Tom Blumer | February 4, 2007 | 5:13 PM EST

Holy Cross College Professor Jerry Lembcke's 1999 column, "We Are What We Remember" (HTML link), was originally published in the April edition of Holy Cross Magazine (original PDF of the entire magazine is here; Lembcke's column is on Page 74).

Lembcke's core claim is that "the image of the spat-upon veteran is mythical ....." This is a narrative that at least two Greater Cincinnati-area bloggers appear to have fallen for hook, line, and sinker (here and here; BizzyBlog's "debunk of the debunkers" post from earlier today is here; be sure to read the Updates and the comments). Apparently others around the country have also been taken in.

Lembcke's fallback position is that:

But while I cannot prove the negative, I can prove the positive: I can show what did happen during those years and that that historical record makes it highly unlikely that the alleged acts of spitting occurred in the number and manner that is now widely believed.

There's a teeny tiny problem with Lembcke's claim. As Former Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Bill Sloat notes at his Daily Bellwether blog, Jerry Lembcke's "search for evidence" apparently overlooked a couple of contrary items that were very close by -- so close that he would not even have had to leave his easy chair after reading the article he wrote. That's because Lembcke is debunked in the VERY SAME issue of the VERY SAME Holy Cross Magazine -- not once, but twice, by two separate Holy Cross alumni who served in Vietnam!

The first alumni vet is Jim McDougald '51. The second is Steve Bowen '65. The story, along with its individual portrayals, covers Pages 18-31 of the original publication. Extracts with the two spitting stories are these:

NY Times on Incurious George in Vietnam: He's No Bill Clinton
By Clay Waters | November 20, 2006 | 3:25 PM EST

New York Times reporer David Sanger lets the snark fly in Hanoi while marking Bush's post-election trip to Communist Vietnam on Sunday.While the rest of the press played up liberal-minded comparisons between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and brought up old and unsubstantiated claims about Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, Sanger finds a different anti-Bush angle, one he’