Revisiting "Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap"

Blogging will be light this weekend, but I would like to point your attention to a post from RedState.org today in which Nick Danger (Regnad Kcin for those of you who remember who he is) asks the question, Has the Press Jumped the Shark?  Nick reports on the results of a Pew survey of attitudes toward George Bush; this poll took place prior to the President's speech yesterday in which he, at very long last, began a concerted campaign (I hope) against the lies and distortions of his mediacrat critics who have been perpetuating the "Bush lied" canard.  According to the poll:

It seems that since the last time they asked this question, there has been a rather large shift among Republicans and Independents, away from "Fair" and towards "Unfair." The percentage of Republicans who think the press is fair to Bush has dropped in half... from 50% in July 2003 to 25% today. Almost two-thirds of Republicans, 63%, now say the press is "unfair" to Bush. 64% say the press is "too critical."

Democrats, of course, would like the press to be even more critical. 45% of Democrats think the press is "not critical enough." But Independents do not share this sentiment: the percentage of Independents who think the press is fair to Bush has dropped from 67 to 55, with the changers splitting about equally between "unfair" and "don't know."

As frequently happens with Pew polls, they accidentally contacted more Democrats than either Republicans or Independents; but even at that, 59% of their respondents were not Democrats. And it is these people who are beginning to see the press as increasingly unfair to Bush.

I am reluctant to say, "I told you so," but I did predict this back on September 19, 2005, in my post, Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap, and will re-post it today since it is still so relevant, with some current annotations in italics.

Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap

The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable. This correction was made at the time of the original post-SW] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.

First some history: 

During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts".  Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel."  From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war.  When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed.  We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive.  The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along.  This lead to the "Credibility Gap".  No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible.  From this point on , the press almost universally  saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government. 

It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time.  The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare.  Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had.  We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam.  Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted. 

This is extremely relevant to our war effort today.  The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front.  [The military may have recognized this, but there has been precious little evidence that the Bush Administration has caught on to this aspect of the Information War.] The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war. 

We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time.  When the Iraqis vote on their Constitution, with significant voting from the Sunni areas, the MSM will not be able to disguise the fact. [Though they "buried the lead" and the story as quickly as possible.] Readers of the MSM will  be surprised at such success in the face of the Vietnam-like disaster that has been portrayed unceasingly in their pages.  Those of us who read Good News from Iraq (Arthur's Finale): 13 September 2005 will not be surprised.  Readers of The Belmont Club and The Fourth Rail will recognize how military victory has been approached, and will not be surprised at successful elections.  Perhaps the terrorists will be able to launch their own Tet offensive, with car bombs instead of divisions; the MSM will loudly proclaim their strength and power but the Milbloggers and the rare reporter like Michael Yon will be on the ground to tell us what is happening outside of the MSM redoubts.

That the MSM is blinded by their bias in their "reporting" on Katrina is also undeniable and will come back to haunt them. [The LSM, LameStreamMedia, have tried to make stories about their poor reporting disappear into the vapor, but the nature of eroding credibility is that it occurs slowly, one person at a time, until a critical mass is reached.] Drudge has an explosive report on line today which Paul Mirengoff at Powerline amplifies:

Michael Kinsley has blown the whistle on his former employer, CNN. As reported by Drudge, Kinsley says that the network is coaching guests to "get angry" when they go on the air to discuss Hurricane Katrina. Kinsley bases this accusation on the experience of a colleague at the Los Angeles Times who appeared on CNN.

The Washington Times notes that one CNNer, Anderson Cooper, has been getting particularly angry, to rave reviews from the New York Times. Thus, when Senator Landrieu, appearing with Cooper, thanked federal rescue workers, Cooper snapped at Landrieu for patting other politicians on the back after he had seen a dead body in the street. Elizabeth Jensen of the NYT has gushed that this interview "marked a turning point in the tone of hurricane coverage."

Cooper and his employer embody the bias, ignorance, and opportunism that is sinking the MSM.

The MSM has developed a growing "Credibility Gap".  Once upon a time, they could get away with it because there was no one to fact-check them and challenge their constructions.  They still act as if nothing has changed.  Those who forget their history tend to repeat it; this time the MSM will take the role of LBJ, Richard Nixon, and General Westmoreland.  In case they don't remember, a reminder: once you have lost your credibility, it is almost impossible to regain it.  LBJ and Nixon never did; it has taken the military almost 30 years to recapture the trust of the country (crucially not including the MSM and despite their best efforts to abu Graib and Guantanamo us to death.) [Of course, the military never lost the trust of a large percentage of the population and their will always be a hard core group of anti-military who will never trust them; the "movable" middle certainly has returned to honoring our military since Ronald Reagan was President and started the process.]

The MSM is the equivalent of the Soviet Red Army fighting in Afghanistan.  They have powerful weapons but are poorly maneuverable; they are safe in their forts and rarely venture out into the real world.  Their funding is slowly being pinched off and they have few new weapons in the pipeline [and recent events showing the accelerating decline in their readership and ad revenues substantiate this point.]  They are constrained in their tactics by their narrow ideology and long ago lost the flexibility necessary to successfully defeat an insurgency.  They face an army of bloggers which is armed with little more than digital cameras and laptops, but is incredibly mobile, has its agents literally everywhere people live and are able to leverage the truth to take down the Red Colossus.  The bloggers range from left to right, but the best share the conviction that people deserve and need to know what is going on in the world; they announce their point of view and assume their audience is smart enough to know the difference between news and opinion.  They do not "demand" trust based on their authoritative credentials but they build trust by telling people what they believe, correcting errors inside the decision cycle of the MSM, and linking to the stories they are covering whenever possible.  Furthermore, the blogosphere finds and links the first person stories of those who are there, whenever available.  These trends will only accelerate when digital video is more widespread; this is the future of news. 

The MSM as presently constituted is already extinct but it may take a few years before they realize it.

*[I will need to find a better name for the MSM; as commenter larwyn has pointed out, they are no longer "Mainstream"; perhaps Lamestream Media would work, but it doesn't lend itself to an easy acronym.  Suggestions would be welcome.]

**[Since the original post, I have settled on LameStreamMedia as the most euphonious construction.]