Right to Opine

Now that the liberal media has had its chance to fawn over Cronkite, let’s take a real look at his impact. In 1968 he made a little trip to Viet Nam in the midst of a rather nasty and controversial war. Our adversaries had initiated a major offensive around the time of the celebration of their new year—Tet. Cronkite came back and told the American people that we had lost the “Tet Offensive” and were, in effect, losing the war. In order to do that, he had to do one thing a responsible journalist never does: ignore the facts.

The truth is that, though it was costly, our valiant armed forces did in fact turn back the NV and VC attacks and by the time Cronkite returned to the US, our forces controlled *more* territory than before the offensive.

Cronkite somehow determined that his opinion of the war was more important than the facts, and millions of Americans tuned in to learn that we were losing…horribly losing…the war in Viet Nam. This report garnered him accolades from the left, which pushed ever harder for us to leave SE Asia entirely. As a result, quite literally millions of Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese were slaughtered when we withdrew our troops. If Cronkite had reported the FACTS instead of his opinions, things may have gone rather differently for those millions of people.

Cronkite faced the ultimate test of journalism…and failed miserably. His family should mourn him. Millions of Asians do not.