“For the first time in history,” Robert Elegant writes, “the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen,” leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The belief that the media, particularly television, were responsible for U.S. government failures is widely expressed. It was endorsed by the right-wing media-monitoring organization Accuracy in Media in its hour-long “Vietnam Op/Ed” aired by public television in response to its own thirteen-part series on the war.2 According to a more “moderate” expression
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