By now, most of us have been subjected to the snuff film CNN received “through intermediaries from the Islamic Army of Iraq” and dutifully broadcast to its international audience.

Making an already bad month for the war effort even worse, President Bush then surrendered a crucial piece of the rhetorical battlefield to his detractors, conceding that Iraq and Vietnam may be similar. “He could be right,” Bush said when asked about an Iraq-Vietnam-Tet comparison made by Tom Friedman. “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence.”

But the larger similarity between these wars is found not in October’s spasm of violence, but in how the American media turned against both wars, as evidenced by CNN’s decision to broadcast what amounts to enemy propaganda.

It pays to recall the media’s breathless cheerleading as US troops raced to Baghdad in 2003. Much of it was self-serving and self-laudatory, of course, but it still (happily) echoed the “we’re all in this together” attitude of World War II combat journalism. Likewise, despite revisionist histories, the media supported American involvement in Vietnam early on. As Derek Leebaert reminds us in The Fifty Year Wound, even The New York Times argued that “the cost is large, but the cost of Southeast Asia coming under the heel of Russia and communist China would be larger.” After the Tet offensive, the media bandwagon would quickly empty.

What the media failed to report after Tet—or at least failed to give equal print to—was that North Vietnam lost about half the forces it deployed to carry out the massive offensive in South Vietnam, that North Vietnamese death squads executed as many as 4,000 people during the operation, and most important, that the US and its allies won the battle. As military historian John Keegan observes in the London Telegraph, “Insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such.” Keegan details the dissimilarities between Iraq and Vietnam here, as does historian Frederick Kagan here.

Today, the media are eager to tell only the bleak side of what is happening in Iraq (and there is indeed a bleak side), to broadcast only footage of carnage and chaos (and there is plenty of both), to turn their unblinking eyes only onto the failures in Iraq and away from the successes (and again, there are plenty of both).

In other words, this is not a case of blaming the messenger for delivering bad news—it’s a case of the messenger delivering partial news. Because most Americans receive their news from media outlets that provide only that partial picture, America’s opinion is being shaped and hardened by something less than the truth. And that is worrisome. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed long before the British carved out the borders of Iraq and long before the French gave up on Indochina, “Among democratic nations, the private soldiers remain most like civilians; upon them, the habits of the nation have the firmest hold and public opinion has the most influence.”

How often do Americans hear any news about success in Iraq? It’s out there, but they won’t find it unless they go searching for it. Karl Zinsmeister did his best to spread some of the positive news during multiple visits to Iraq while he served as editor of The American Enterprise. More positive news can be found at DefendAmerica.mil, the Multinational Forces-Iraq website and the State Department. Thanks to these and other sources, there is at least enough good news from Iraq to call into question the Vietnam parallel. (Read more about what’s not reported—and what may motivate some of those doing the reporting—here.)

Yet the bad news—and the bad news alone—gushes out of the mainstream media in an unrelenting torrent. Sometimes, as the pathetic example of CNN reminds us, it even comes specially delivered in a videotape from the newsmakers themselves.

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